By Anindya Arif

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 overdose on 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. Every time I drive past there, I think about how you used to lay your sunburnt hands on mine and pretend to be trapped in a line for people after parties. Or, of those rare instances when you fancied playing Modest Mouse, and how you would always leave right around the middle of the album, every time leaving me with an identical note that read, “Our hearts are used up, cracked and dry”. 

I have been a bystander my entire life, just one of those people you always pass by on the street you do not notice because there is nothing distinctive about them. Yet you have always known that and of my disdain for language as a communication tool. I always lionised those long seasons we spent taking pictures of you trembling under a jacaranda tree, the kind of rain you think would never end.

As soon as I am three blocks away from there, the nausea of you not being there inundates me. The nausea is not within me. I am the one who is within it. I have spent all of September looking for everything you left behind, the scrapes of affection, the ache of what never will, Saturday mornings at your place, and the answer to why every split second with you terrified me.

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In early November, I found the blurry videos of you playing isolated keys on your rustic piano, the polaroids in which you are mimicking life always telling you to go, underneath my mahogany hall table. They remain static and so oblivious to change.

Our time together, all it, was just some disjointed hours; we did not want to be alone, conjured together in a mason jar perched away in your parents' walnut kitchen cabinet.

I would not be with you ever again, anywhere, not even when the world ends. Henceforth, your voice on the phone will never again say, "I adore you, I fucking adore you". Even if the distance between us can be covered within the time it takes for the metal blue flame to snuff out. With your voice not directing me anymore, the directions have now rid themselves of me.

In case these become the last things I ever get to say to you, I am trying my damnedest to get them right.