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.

 

As soon as your mother walks into the room with her paramour, you switch to a different memory of a car crash site where the second guy you were in love with crashed his Golf GT, then, on to the journal entry you made, when you realised it hurt less not to care than to keep loving someone.

 

The first thing you tell me since we have been here is how all the Majoven XL and Zyprexa you are always on are just a mask for the impasse we are stuck in. To which I end up confessing how I almost overdosed on your meds mixed with hallucinogens just to know how you feel. You just give me a thousand-yard stare in response.

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As a rush of freshet dead leaves circumambient us, you ask me, “If you're further up the street, can you show me what I can't see?”. I lie and tell you how I see the terminus of all the roads we did not take would have led to. You again implore me about whether we are happy there. I lie and say, “Yes, happier than we have ever been”. When in reality, all I could see was myself writing drawn-out Gordian essays on our time here and a speculative piece on whether or not I ever survived the initial overdose at Freeman Alley.

 

The first memory you pick of us is in New Amsterdam. You lit in an all anti-ash white. You have just finished reading the Bardo Thodol and kept asking everyone we knew, "How could a few numbers contain all of the time?”. This was also the first instance I ever had the resolve to ask you what your perfect picture of me would look like. With both of us stoned on MDMA, you explained how. Ideally, you would want me to be a lousy comedian who is not immobilised with guilt for being in love with a different girl who is not the girl that he used to love at twenty-one.

 

Before we lived and approximately thirty minutes prior to either of us overdosing, we climbed out the bi-fold window at Freeman Alley and lay underneath the moon's dystopian ultraviolet. As the light from the moon scintillated on my eyes, I kept hoping that any minute now, you would blurt out how loving me is what keeps you well and abstain. Even if it is not entirely true. From the way your eyes scintillated, I could tell how burdened that made you feel. 

 

My first memory you pick is a re-rendering of my seventeenth birthday, where I am anonymous, and you are just waking up in my childhood bed. While in the next room, my dad completely breaks down in a fit of rumrage. You still find your way back to me beside the walnut cabinet where I stored the list of reasons why I was not enough for my mother’s love and the knives we jabbed at each other. With a faint smile, you pour me tea from a contemporary Chinese porcelain teapot.

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You caressed my hands and, to comfort me, you recounted the afternoon I first met you until it all returned back to me. I tell you how when I first met you, I was not able to stop crying to Damien Rice’s ‘Cold Water’ all afternoon and kept having dreams where you had to euthanize me. Even though you have always called me sentimental, by the time we got to the end of it, you were the one who got teary.

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When I ask you for a happier memory instead, you take me to a time before you knew the full extent of your pain or how indifferent the universe is to it. In a faraway place, inside a subdued tattoo studio, where you somehow managed to persuade an Irezumi master to make you a Princess Bubblegum and Marceline tattoo on your lower back. Through it all, you were smiling so big. When I walked into the studio, in this new re-rendition of your memory, I put my wrong hand the wrong way and on your wrong palm. Which later on ended up being my lasting memory of you.

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In the confessional of the shotgun house, I confess not wanting to be the person I am, but this is what life has made of me. If we stay here for eternity, then our lives outside are irrelevant. I break down at the confession of both of us being drug fiends and how neither of us wants to end this dying in perpetuity. And, when we finally find the absolution we both have been looking for, we will get sober and avoid turning into our parents.

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So when you ask me what happens when we exit this eternal Halloween, all I can say is, "One day, one room, and how you will be braver when you leave”. We both are asking each other what we are incapable of giving and are heading for the end in the wrong direction. We are both God-bereft people, but we desperately want to keep believing our lives did not stop at twenty-three. For all I know, you do not want to do more, and I cannot do more to keep us in time. It is impossible not to love you the way I do, and everyone I know knows you are the way to my heart.

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So, please let go of the stained glass you clench onto so steadfastly and claim to have God there. You do not have to use the shards from that glass to write me a poem just to let me know this is over. Your absence in this confessional is evidence enough.

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So, if you are at large in this world, why should I remain?

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