Apologies for the lack of romance and the overabundance of self-indulgence in this yarn. To accept this person-to-person call, please continue reading. This November, the sky has remained muddled and empty; outside, the window hung over a waned sun, and the entire month, it has felt more like an evening than a morning. All my thoughts keep reverberating through the shallow hallway of the third place I moved to this year. And they keep reminding me that some of us have no future. At my core, I am hollow. Empty. Living a faux existence. I am not virtuous, just afraid.
Every interaction between us from here on and my every excuse to touch your face
happens in a different pocket of reality where it is an eternal Halloween in a two-storied shotgun house. A non-spatiotemporal reality where there is no concept of time, and we exist as each others’ idealised recreations. The shape of this reality acquiesces us both with the propensity to reenact past memories, regardless of our presence in them. You have been staring at the ceiling for almost as long as we have been here as you shuffle through memories that replicate your pain. The earliest one you go back to happens in your parent's Spanish revival house, specifically, your mother's hibiscus-coloured dresser that had splashed Grey Goose, Bombay Sapphire, and opiates all over it.
All the stupid shit I have thought about looking at my ceiling in the dark at some point and all the bargain basement emotions I felt doing so. These are just a series of thoughts I have had over the years, staring at my ceiling in the dark every time the night came calling.
​
Nothing I write here should be regarded as literature; nothing I write here or wherever should be considered of note. This is what living alone for twelve hundred and seventy-seven days has done to me. This is my museum of youth, the last place where I have ever felt like myself and likely ever will.
Diary Entry #26
This is the only happy ending I get
and I do not get this nostalgia I feel
for a place I've never been.
Diary Entry #27
Dead people on TV look so beautiful.
Diary Entry #28
our hearts, they change so easily.
but never does it
Revert to what they once wore.
​
It feels strange to think about how 2013 was over a decade ago or to think back to a
period of my life where I did not overdo whatever sustenance I could get my hands on.
Even if the distance between us is now a couple of floors in our freshman dorm, it feels
longer than the entirety of the Pacific Ocean. And all the love I had saved up for you
inside the glove compartment of my CX-30 has waned away. Even if I am impervious to your absence now, it will overwhelm me soon. That summer, all the hours we spent listening to Phillip Glass and Hendrix records or figuring out ways to fix our blue patches just oozed up, creating bruises around our necks.
The sky has been damp for over seventy-two hours at this point, and I have been in this
tavern writing this for approximately forty-eight minutes. With Coin plodding along at the
back and feelings rising over intellect, a mental collapse is duly. I am certain the future resulting from all the vespertine hours spent in this tavern would be a long summer memory that just never dies. A summer wholly made up of days that all melt into one another, and nothing separates them. Where I am stuck vehemently looking for any fucking reason not to take the plunge from the ledge I continually find myself in.
My brother's Omega Speedmaster is now fourteen years old. The ticking sound it makes, in my head, translates to an answering machine that keeps repeating the message "Sorry, we are not here" in a vacuum. I have always feared nostalgia melded with grief and the wild sheep chases it sends people on. That over and over (again) sends numerous on these futile wild
sheep chases. Hoping for answers or anything resembling a lump of catharsis. The following is an apology//delayed record of regrets.
I love that deafening hour at any party, where everyone’s eyes are akin to driving away, to a familiar place that only holds the nostalgia of what was. You can tell from the shape of their voices they are all stuck in a pain they cannot get away from. The moment's stillness breaks as I remember how far gone and transient all my memories have become. A passing afternoon in 2005, I spent writing a dissertation on the stochastic nature of life in a fuchsia-coloured tavern. Years spent on amantadine watching my parents’ cherry wood dining table eroding.