Doldrums
They say it's me that makes you do things
You might not have done if I was away. The truth of it is that at the end of the day, all we can ever do with or without each other is just a big ol' sound and fury over nothing. Barren pollution, a gossamer of fraying nylon over a roiling pit we call "oh you know, same as always". Below the shingles, we lap at the acid raindrops and jot nothingness into our ledgers, leaving the morning's tenders to relay our chicken-scratch to somebody out in nowhere, chasing whispers in an everlasting game of telephone. I might have had a point in there, but it's all been lost in the rotations; by tomorrow, none of this will be meaningful to anyone at all. Lamborghini. Capital D. Kris'ta'na with an emphasis where the 'I' isn't. Each befuddling glyph, a vigilant placeholder for the threads weaving from now into then, will dissolve in that same cerebrospinal fluid that reduces our feelings into sediments of nights long gone, when clueless enzymes rushed to hide smiles and smother covenants.
Despite the tautological promises of melancholic annihilation, these two hypotheticals still yearned to see the other side of the dumpster, where the grass clippings were the tastiest. We're no strangers to the feeling, despite the defenses - button spam is an effective strategy when you're too busy focusing on the environmental noise. For a moment they each thought that it's as if for all this time, we'd been stuck inside collisionless low-texture boulders, lining up imaginary golf balls for fleeting strangers teeing for par, as if that was all that could ever happen. Four and a half hours on the clock, like it's just another shift at the shit factory. Let's promise to never keep track of the score.
Every night, I repeat the same soft sounds to suppress the soft deaths relinquished to memory overwrite. It serves the same purpose as the drawer I scrawled Their initials into a decade ago in England. I could relegate your memory to a capital, three-pointed shape, oxidizing below the lip of a rickety cabinet, itself a minor character in the derelict play in which this aging monument rests. A glorified armrest, a makeshift respite for visitors to catch their breath before forgetting what they came to see in the first place, as if sitting down for a moment of small talk could make any of it more digestible. One day, someone of no particular renown will run their clammy palms over that indent, the sensation muffled by the logistical hum of kinesin and drowned out by dignified predilections of being a have-been. Splinter-like, the chemical signal will betray nothing of its divine inspiration, other than a faint premonition of incongruence, a dip in the road. A kind of Braille that nobody can ever read again.
But here, for your sake, no tool was dulled; no branches split, no varnish spilt (okay, maybe four Wordles spelt). Not even a scrap of 2x4 defiled to bear your memory so I can jettison it from my world all the quicker. I said I would teach you to carve, but even if I could teach, these scarred fingers conceal nothing below, certainly nothing fine, artistic, or marketable. What could have been - a Twin Peaks owl, then for a moment, a Pokeball, and finally, a cat inevitably doomed to bear the name "Miss Cellany" - these hands must now bear that pluripotent absence, spilling out tails, ears, and beaks onto every project they touch until each cell is replaced. Not that they're leaving - even the ghost stories I once defeated in that dream of a haunted attic on my 11th birthday have finally come back and put down their roots, and I'm too much of a sorry cop to bother them for the rent they owe. Maybe one day they'll have space for one more.
That divinity - the spark that refuses to be put into words when the moment calls for it - has long since been quelled by the overcrowded, mechanistic periphery we coin "real life". I thought about this when you had broken off your paper wristband before we left that night - what did you want it to tell you? What could I say that would make you overhear me eavesdropping on your interrogation? Or was it all just some elaborate ceremony, a bird dance? I think it would make me happy, if not jealous, if that wristband became part of a bird nest one day.
Stephen Potchatek probably got a kick out of reading the pseudointellectual jargon I wrote for his "literature" "class". I would like to imagine I was the target demographic for his little experiment, unformed hormonal teenagers struggling to (un?)bury their individuality below twelve-packs of Kopparbergs and an archaeological trove of Mark & Spencer's receipts behind the kitchen rubbish bin. He said that, much like the fuel station atolls preparing B-52s for their targets, the desolate nest is the hallmark of the journey. The closer you look at the cruise ship on which you alcoholically dissociate, the coarser the welds on the banisters. But you'll always buy that next ticket to nowhere. This time, surely, the contractors will grind and paint until the smoothened rust lays flush with each lost lover's initials under railings and armrests that were nothing more than means to forgetful ends. In some ways, I feel more like the boat than the passengers, although in truth, I've had a bit too much to drink tonight.
I think this is a letter, even though the day of the letter is long gone. I used to write them when I could keep track of each feather pouring out from the gash in my pillow. I've since swept them away, into the bin of 5th grade Goose Egg report cards, off the apartment porch during sandstorm holidays when Michael Jackson died. I ran out of glue to hold the big picture together on this last project of mine - you can watch my TikTok about that if you're interested. Oh, you've uninstalled the app - fair enough, I've been meaning to as well, at least we have that in common.
I speak four languages, or so I lied about when chemical insufficiencies colluded with the intangibility of what being successfully "alive" means, leading your motor neurons to swipe one way instead of another. I speak maybe 1.75 languages, and I don't expect anybody gives a fuck about any one of them. Not that it makes any difference - none of them could help me figure out a better way of saying "I don't know what I am, or why my dreams still reek of outlines that feel like you". Perhaps I shouldn't have used Google Translate to write my paper on the Syrian Socialist Ba'ath Party during my senior year of high school. I don't think Ustadha Ruth minded that much, but I'd hate, of all things, to leave that memory hanging there forever. It's like my coat rack by the door, nailed into drywall without a plan, clogged with overpriced souvenir beanies that I'll never wear again for fear of frizzing up the hair I hide behind. Always there, despite how little thought went into it, and done out of compulsion rather than intention, even if interpreted the other way around.
The truth is that we're all made of nothing that can never touch anything, and the selfish truth is that none of that matters to anyone that matters. I opened Pandora's box when they made me do indefinite contour closure problem sets under Cauchy's integral theorem, and I can say for certain that infinities and forevers often add up to chump change between the driver's seat and the center console. They don't open toll gates for anybody diligent enough to count coins. It's not like anyone could call you on it though, unless they ran away to their PhD programs like it was freeze tag when everyone decided that that one slow kid was "it". I'm not going to run after anyone anymore. Whatever the plan was, I'm sure god accounted for me having snaggly hillbilly teeth, and she probably wouldn't have made everyone scared of me grinning if she didn't want me to scare them into going away, so I'm not going to settle for being "it" anymore. Look this gift horse in the mouth, and you will see in all its fucked up glory that it just wants to go bug hunting with the handful of miscreants that occasionally call it a friend.
Like my teeth, I'm a rough-edged continuous process myself, and I don't believe in the utility of grammatical breaks - I have always run-on until I can't afford to catch my breath. You can't look back if you don't want to crash, right? My training is in sticking integration bounds on wave functions and reducing myself to observables without any consideration for simultaneity. Your experiments will always fail, I will never be what your hypothesis sought. The only certainty is my uncertainty. I am a vector translated back and forth between potential words and kinetic impulses until I can't remember where I came from or where I'm headed. That's what I wish I had told Stephen, although I'll never remember what exactly I said in the first place, as my password manager swallowed my past along with my highly disorganized high school Google Drive. Like all the other secrets I confided to amicably-worded popups, there is nothing of value that I haven't already overshared, spilling out into a sea of 1s and 0s, diluting this murky wave into distant sinkholes, harboring futures I'll never see. We will never pick apart the water from the wave - all you can do is feel the tide as the ripples move closer and further from you.
Maybe I should upgrade my graphics card so that when I can't fall asleep, I can see again what we saw in each other to stay that long that night. Among the respite of the three ASMR videos I've revisited time and time again over the years to dull these kinds of thoughts, I suspect I might one day hear you. Echoes of stifled laughter between crumbling Jenga towers, right before the start of the next R.E.M. cycle. Giant skeletons. Disco lights. Pinball machines. ':P' with a lower case p, and eventually, Kristinas with an 'I' where an 'A' ought to be.
My fingers are telling me to find the pith of a Round-Up'd scuppernong vine to sink the awl of my 8th grade pocket knife into. Even after years of neglect, the sharpest tools can still leave the deepest marks. I find it funny that we think by giving it a name, we might fashion a handle by which to extract the thorns. But the day of letters is long gone. I only hope that one day, for a moment, you find yourself hooked on this old Jagged shape again, unable to fully remember or forget the meaning of it all; back when we practiced a dance of digits on dirty screens, preparing for one final benchtop performance amid teeming dumpsters.
In other words, if you don't need me, then don't deceive me; letting my freedom turn into stone. You know how the rest goes, don't you?