It's Not Enough To Feel The Lack
stuff about my old best friend and old hometown. when there's enough distance between us i'll write about it but i hope i never get the chance to.
everyone says they exist at the intersection of art and technology. nobody admits they also exist at the intersection of trying to mourn their childhood without reverting to it.
i said id never go further west than i had to. but if you go west long enough you eventually make a full orbit and end up back under the bleachers at your high school. running from somewhere is the best way to stay there forever.
get a load of this guy. trying to do away with it entirely, now living in an inversion of it thus continuing to refer to it indirectly. fucking chump!
i get through ohio imagining im beautiful enough that people want to know what im writing about. my direct address puzzles america. they’ll ask me, adoringly and sickeningly, “who’s the ‘you’ in all your poems.” they’ll be excited to sell the info to the tabloids but ill say “sorry, deux moi, this isnt about a boyfriend. for i am thinking of a neon genesis evangelion style post instrumentality single entity, in which every person i ever loved and every person i every missed have morphed into one being, able to receive and understand my feelings without having to read my stupid book.”
everyone i love has the capacity to become someone i will miss. love is colored with preemptive grief. i spent all my time committing to memory the image of the back of your head.
i haven’t been able to write or file taxes. tell the irs not today. ive been floating around in the horrid realization: i miss cleveland. i miss the house i grew up in, i miss when i didnt have to track love on the gps. i wouldn’t have left so smugly if i knew i wouldn’t be able to go back.
i dont have it in me to write about you. you dont think about me at all. you dont think about me enough to wish ill upon me. i wish you hated me so you’d be doomed to at least think of me for as long as you cursed me. by the way, theres an invite reserved for you at my book release.
it would be better for my writing if you were still my friend. except we haven’t been friends in four years. maybe it’s like a president situation. maybe once your best friend always your best friend. maybe if i died no one would tell you and you’d have to rack your brain to remember what the top of my head looked like.
if you still cared for me you’d be disappointed im here. if you knew i was writing poems about you you’d feel secure in your anonymity, resting easy in the knowledge that no one thinks of us in the same sentence anymore.
maybe when im older and braver ill write more about the people i miss. but right now i live with the simultaneous hope and fear that they’re reading what im writing about them. they’re keeping tabs on me. they’re making fake shein giveaway accounts to watch my instagram stories. they’d be mad i was writing about them if i weren’t doing it so lovingly. theyd be mad i was writing about them if i weren’t basically writing obituaries. if you find it in you to come to my book release you’ll soon realize it’s just one long epitaph. and it’ll start like this.
there’s a wall in chinatown with both our names on it. there’s a place in paris that knows what we smell like. when there’s enough distance between us and our friendship is far enough behind us, ill write about it all. i hope i never get to write about it all.
everyone i was girls with is long gone and unreachable.
i was talking about how i don’t keep in touch with anyone from high school anymore. my mom was asking me about all my favorite teachers, my friends who went to college before me, the other kids i couldn’t wait to leave behind — i didn’t know how any of them were doing.
“you didn’t look back,” my mom chuckled.
“you didn’t give me a choice,” i said. i wasn’t fooling anyone.
it’s like how caitlyn siehl wrote, “if you walk into a room and notice what is missing from it, it’s still there.”