january 27th 2024

i feel like i grew up with you. i feel like i’ve known you all my life. i picture us, eighteen, fourteen, eleven, when you were not there, but i made her familar to you, that girl i was. you gathered her from stories. i’m sure in spite of distance and canon you know her better than anyone else did then. i don’t know how else to be, and for so much time lately i haven’t known how to be, but now i can live again. but soon i will be lost again, and there will be no street to take me to you, no ninth floor common room where i can see your face under dimming overheads. and what will i do? drifting someplace in the sea, i must find another. there is no satisfaction in domestic imaginaries. i eat until i die.

as i left the building you came bursting through the staircase doors and said, we’re good. and i said, we’re good, and i said thank you, because of course you knew to reassure me before my creature brain got ahead. only now do you care, and i don’t understand what shifted in you, and i can’t guarantee that it will stay. i said you killed my chance to love and you stared up at the ceiling fan and you did not protest, but you also did not cry. i wonder which identical odd-floored rooms you have cried in. there are so many days: the one with the secret, you cried there; the fuck alex day, where the baseball guys came in and we messed with them, a rare casual outing; a few fights following, and the one where i told you you couldn’t have both of us. and there’s the faucet—no tears, i imagine, or a few spared from rage. tonight you did not cry and i wish that you did. i wish that you mourned it. but you are selflessly stoic between six round lamps. you will say, okay, i hear you. at least for that i am content. 

to be joyless is inappropriate to the human condition. we are not equipped to go this way for so long, and eventually, we tear ourselves to pieces. in anger we could take you down with us, but we cannot manage that now: i let the cave in my abdomen grow rotten because there is no other way. i am lonely fated. i cannot reach what is done. what is will be. what is will be.