Guys I Am Like 80% Sure I Am Happy And No Longer Depressed But I Don’t Actually Like It? Its. A Hollow

I sit in a a hot car in a grocery store parking lot. The car is off to save gas, so the air conditioning is off too. I sweat out every drop of bittersweet tea I’ve drunk in the past week. The tea tastes bad today; the sugar granules haven’t dissolved. I enjoy it anyway. I consume my second bagel. Today I got contrasting flavor profiles, salty then sweet. A song that begins as a lullaby and ends in screams of terror plays on a loop. I did not intend the loop, but technology has a mind of its own, and higher powers than my own feeble will have decided this music bears repeating. I stare at asymmetrical rows of palm trees and contemplate the human condition. It is July again. I think I might be healing.

Journal

And its all in my head, (our past, our future)

I can’t get you out of my head

Mind reader, you can see inside my head

Seeing you it all comes to a head

The thought comes into my head

I’ll love you until I’m dead

There’s a part of me that’ll always love you.

The part of me that’s still 13, the part of me that was the beginning of who I am now, not the child but the person. You watched the change, you changed yourself, and we survived that terrible process together, the death of the old us, the horrors of becoming, the fear and loneliness and hope and desire.

And that’s the foundation of who I am today, and you’re there too, imbedded in the cornerstone, along with all the joys and disasters, and I can’t not love you. I love you like I love summertime, or old musicals, or a favorite book. But it’s more than that. I don’t love you like a friend, or a brother, or a lover. Maybe I love you like I love myself. You’re a fragment. You’re a coin I flip, tails for a grudge and disappointment and bitterness, heads for overwhelming tenderness.

And our bodies never meet, you’re so careful to stay a few feet away, but the meeting of our minds is tangible enough for the brush of your fingers to seem irrelevant. And it’s so tragic and so romantic and then tragic again, isn’t it? You’re divorced and too young for that, I’m a virgin and too old for that, and we won’t say those words but we know it in the sidelong glances, in the shapes we draw around in our conversations.

In the scandalously intimate front seats of the car, in the dark and deserted corners on our evening walking, in the quiet of the galleries where we pick apart the art like it will tell us something about ourselves, I can’t bear to look at you for fear of what I’d do. And we’re two ships in the night, a long day together and then a long year apart, and maybe a year becomes forever, because despite our best efforts and egos we aren’t psychic, or perfect, but I think, I hope, we both want otherwise.

And I think about other things too, about your fingertips through my hair, about how we’d laugh, and it would be so strange, wouldn’t it? But if you were the last man on earth, I think we’d be grateful for the apocalypse to leave us to our own devices. And you’re nothing without an audience but I would laugh enough for a whole auditorium, just you and me and the end of the world. But these are foolish things, flights of fancy that die in the sunlight, in the statistics. So I stop thinking about them, about you. And I can go without thinking about you forever, but you’re always there anyway, in the map of my subconscious, in chess and in that christmas card, in showtunes and in shame and in shivers, in dialects and old sci-fi and always, always, in dreams. I hope I’m more than just an old face to you.

The tension between I will love you enough to stay and I will love you enough to give you my heart knowing I have to leave

Drank double strength black tea at 1 am during finals week and the Hat Man Is Here

What do you do when the person you would call about it is the one who caused this pain?

Am I being unhinged? Mishinged even? Only time and the memory of a version of me that no longer exists could tell you

July <3

Lola Ridge // Zhukovsky Stanislav // Charlotte Eriksson // my photo // Rick Bass // @burningmine // Allie Ray // @geopsych // @thepoetryofascension

Hello Void I went to the Lorde concert tonight and my life literally changed I am healed, so many bangers, divine unmatched vibes, top 10 life experience chefs kiss

Hal Borland / M. Cumulus Life, Illuminations / Mary Quant / Unknown / Take a Load Off, Joanna Franklin Bell / Unknown / The Wild Marsh Four Seasons at Home in Montana, Rick Bass / July Moon, Louise Townsend Nicholl / VSCO: vxdb / The Months, Linda Pastan / Instagram: KJP / Lot, Bryan Washington / Tumblr: nobodysflower

It is father’s day in this foreign country, and I miss my dead father, and I didn’t intend to bring him up at all, but my host mother of all things mentioned that anne hathaway is jewish because she was on the news, (I can’t understand well enough what they’re saying on tv so I couldn’t tell you why) and I said that I’m jewish, and that my grandfather came from Russia, and she asked if it was my mother or father’s father and I of course said my father’s and she said not your stepfather who lives with you right? It’s your father who doesn’t live with you anymore? Which in retrospect is a bit intrusive, and I was like yeah and she said, does he still live in America? and I just said, because I don’t know any euphemisms or nicer ways to say it in their language, he’s dead. And I feel glad to have spoken of him aloud today, to have remembered him, but I made things uncomfortable and awkward and I could have avoided it, and I feel a little shame, but I haven’t done anything shameful, so I am writing this out in my own language to process it. Thanks for listening void :/