I am 4
and you are 87 and we trade in crisp citrus air and wild west cartoons for
crisp winter air, reminiscing about WWII, and strawberry whistle lollipops. We
mindlessly walk in the pattern of infinity symbols in the snow before going
back and tracing 8’s in a workbook on learning numbers until I fall asleep in
my cot in the hallway.
I am 8
and you are 91 and I hate that my mom moved me half a world away from you.
I am 14
and you are 96 and you only leave the hospital for two hours once every two
weeks to get a haircut that will remind grandma of the man she fell in love
with if she ever wakes up. You are alone.
I
am 22 and you have been gone for years and I’m still waking up to two dimes
pressed into my thighs making the imprint of an infinity symbol or an 8 and I’m
still writing you letters because I haven’t been able to say goodbye yet.
We loaded up the car with our stuff and a
case of beer and drove south never having looked at the directions and we kept
driving and eventually ended up at a trailer next to a graveyard in the middle
of nowhere and 40 minutes from the beach and it was great.
June 2010: You didn’t kill me in the woods that
night, but I killed us.
July 2010: Abandoned houses left nothing but scars
on our legs from when we fell through the floorboards.
August
2010: Only miles on my
car racked up from 3ams of 80’s synthpop, existential crises, wendy’s chocolate
frosties, and the soft summer air hitting my lungs at 70 mph.
I’ve
run so far, but if you look closely, you can observe the impact.
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At sunset
in a meadow one summer, my friend told me to never stare directly at the sun
because it would hurt my eyes but I told her that I wasn’t scared
But then
three months later, she moved to Switzerland and I could feel the stinging pain
that she had mentioned
I
wonder if it’s safer to stare at a sunrise or sunset with someone you love
I’ve kept our world alive inside my snow
globe heart for years, but one day, someone will hug me so hard, applying so
much pressure to my chest, that the glass will shatter and the contents will be
released and you and I will both be free.
Her personality was the feeling of dice
rolling in a palm before being thrown. Her
days were like quarters being inserted into the slot in the dryer at the
laundromat.
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My personal brink of extinction at the
last milestone in this perpetual motion machine causes the slight, but
insignificant weight adjustment as it keeps effortlessly spinning. College,
work, death; the perpetual motion machine, fueled by the chaos of entropy,
spins out into infinity with or without you.
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I hit the
road. Drove almost a two thousand mile straight shot to Mexico. Thought you
might be hangin’ there. Lyin’ to myself again.
Guess
there’s no choice but to send this letter, so anxious that the words all blend
together. Letters add up to words and words add up to sentences and sentences
add up to letters. But letters are only words and the circle continues.
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Drive into the deserted parking lot in
your black mustang with a license plate from Texas, get out of the car, and
pace back and forth with your dark brown leather chelsea boots stomping on the
concrete and your dark blue levi’s creasing with each increasing step. Your
face is lit by fluorescent pink and blue lights that are being cast with the
departure of dusk, but it’s still clear that your skin is tan and your chestnut
hair is perfectly waved - both not showing your age of 45. And here is when I understood how women
end up with men twice their age. They accidentally stare at them pacing outside
deserted motel parking lots a few seconds too long.
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Too
many sunsets have passed between us, but you still missed me so you turned your
television to pure static and let the sound soak into every atom of your body.
You thought it would drown me out, but little did you know that I had the same
idea about you. Motel to motel, the sound wave strings travel back and forth
all night as if our souls are playing tin can telephone.
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He
told me that he was going on tour and that I should come. But I can’t; I’m
going on a very different type of tour of my own.
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They say if you wanna be immortal, you
should borrow money from everyone you know before you go. But I think if you
wanna be immortal, you should become a ghost within a song. Just please don’t
become my ghost. I’ve spent years trying to reclaim what I have foolishly given
to them as we laid on my floor laughing and letting the melody sprout roots
that intertwined us together. Now that they’re gone, those roots feel more like
a chokehold.
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In
mid-June, you found me in a clover field, but I refused to come back with you
because I hadn’t found myself.
Eventually,
you surrendered and sunk into the pure green ground as god began to paint the
sky every color just for me and you.
At dark,
we ditched our skeletons in the imprints of our bodies in the grass, got into
the car, and drove north.
We spent
the night floating among similar lost vessels as the FM became unfamiliar and
eventually turned to white noise.
We couldn’t stay under one frequency long
enough to be found.
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Hey, babyface. Why are you smoking that
cigarette? I want to ask
you. Because I know I know I know you’re looking to look older. But you’re just
gonna end up looking 70 at 40, move down to Florida, and keep buying lottery
tickets from Publix in hopes of winning enough money to cure your lung cancer.
And you won’t even fit in with the senior citizens. You can’t collectively
reminisce about things you weren’t alive for! Once again, you’ll be an outcast.
But this time you won’t “grow out of it.” You missed that shot when you
stuck that first cigarette between your teeth. I hope you think of the next
cigarette as your life, slowly, but surely, burning down into nothingness.
---------------------------------------------
I caught
a whiff of summer in the mountains when I almost followed suit in creating more
rubber tire tracks on the concrete road leading up. Sometimes, the view just
overtakes you and you lose control of everything else.
I imagine that’s how it was for you, too.
You found comfort in the view out my window as you lay hugging my slow
breathing sleeping body tighter. Now you can’t get that view out of your head.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
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Perfect
vision and cat like reflexes that have previously prevented me from getting
into deathly highway car accidents didn’t teach me how to tell my right foot
from my left. I was always putting shoes on the wrong feet, stubbornly making
them fit, but feeling the bloody agony later as the discomfort grew into a
state of mind. A state of mind so toxic that I forgot that, as a kid, I had
been most happy barefoot.
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Someone
once told me that my handwriting habit of not fully closing my letters was a
weakness and I’ve always closed my letters since. But I don’t know who said it;
I seem to have lost the source. In college, they tell you that the information
you present is only as valuable as its source. But as the years go by, who I am
drifts farther and farther from the point of origin.
-------------------------------------------------
In
Boston, you could throw us like spinning tops and we would ricochet from party
to club to party in utter bliss and utter chaos and eventually find ourselves
winding down at 4 am in an old townhouse filled with smoke, cuddled up next to
real life Charlie Bartlett laughing and talking about how much we love Shakira.
--------------------------------------------------
I
see barely out of high school girls posing with their friends on hot summer
nights and I laugh, while feeling pity of the naivety of the impending doom of
being pieces of confetti thrown by a child at a map of the world. Only the
years go by, and no one really comes to clean up the mess.
---------------------------------------------------
The
day I first felt at peace was in rural North Carolina where I could not feel a
single live soul. Because out there, it’s just you and the sky in an empty
cornfield; no light pollution like in the city. And you look up to see as many
stars as there are freckles on your body and you realize that’s the beauty your
mom has always told you you possessed. Too bad you have no way to say thank you
now.
---------------------------------------------------
Tired
of sleeping in the middle of mom and dad’s king size bed alone, I packed up and
left, only to realize that motel beds don’t feel any better, even when you’re
sleeping near a friend. The booming infomercials at 3am from the room next door
keep you up as much as your thoughts would have otherwise. I wonder if the
person next door knew that, too. And everything is so pretty and lonely and
infinite when you hit the road and you can’t stop until you tire yourself out
enough by the end of fall to hibernate comfortably during winter.
----------------------------------------------------
Driving to the mountains next to a truck
carrying logs that were once trees, but now will soon be firewood keeping me
warm during the pending chill. The leaves nod as I drive by, but they’re
getting ready to cushion the snow. You always have another purpose; it’s
just the afterlife.
