if please please please comes on autoplay one more time, i’m going to start screaming.
i don’t know how to live in a world that reminds me how firmly i exiled you from my life, what a shell i became in your absence, the many different veins that make me realize i’m never ever going to get anything real again. i realized i loved you on a tuesday on the subway when there was a man, yelling, not aggressive but not comfortable, and i was scared, and i thought that i wanted you there. and i realized i loved you again in september when we were on the phone and i felt so bad i threw up over the side of the bed and i let you keep talking. and i realized i loved you seven months after i broke up with you, because sometimes you get the right thing at the wrong time and all that’s left to do is write about it and listen to sabrina carpenter. and sometimes i sit here and i write and i wonder: if i told you i thought i was going to die, would you still hang up the phone? or would you stay on for five minutes and pretend you forgive me? i could do a lot with five minutes. i could keep sending you stupid, desperate messages, until the day we both die. me first. i always knew it would be me first.
what no one ever tells you when you’re a kid is that you can be alive, perfectly alive, skin and blood and bone, and still a ghost.
no one ever says, you can be the spectre in the subway station and still have seventy years of life left to live (if you’re lucky). no one ever says, one day you will get coffee on your own in the morning and you will feel like your heart is being ripped out of your chest. no one ever says anything important, but you transcended all that simply because you were important, and now nothing is important, because time and space themselves have shifted to accommodate for your loss. i’m not a doctor. i’m not a lawyer. i’m a physicist, and i can tell you the following laws of the natural world: love is real, i walked away from it, i am a still-living ghost. someone somewhere is still letting me breathe and i don’t know why. i want to believe the universe is on my side but how can the cosmos be playing for my team when even i don’t want to? i’m on the sidelines. i have nothing left to lose. i feel like, maybe i don’t have anything left to gain.
i could get a doctorate. i could go to madrid and dublin and izmir and seoul. i could adopt a cat. and i think at the end of the day these are things i might be able to do, but i’m beginning to fear that i’m going to do them completely alone. do you think it would matter if i did them completely alone? do you think that the garden of my life could be a place worth living in even if no one ever came to join me?
yesterday my mother was driving and there were sparrows in the road. and i wanted to tell her to stop, but it wouldn’t have been fast enough, and even if she had the people behind would’ve crashed into us and the domino-shaped vehicles would’ve tumbled into nothing. she didn’t run the sparrows over, though, they got away. they drew back. the universe is looking out for those sparrows. i guess, if we’re going to split hairs about the whole surviving nonsense, i guess i’m still breathing. i guess the car didn’t run me over either.
i don’t know what difference it makes.
see above: you can be a living ghost.
no one has ever been able to haunt me the way i have haunted myself. and there is someone out there, tapping very similar thoughts into a very similar keyboard, and i think, you don’t know anything about what i’m living through. which might be true but it is equally true to say that i don’t know anything about what she’s going through, and why am i talking about her anyway, and god, can’t i just accept that none of my old friends are dead, they just don’t love me anymore, and that’s worse?
it’s so easy to pretend to be a person. wake up. paint a face on. get dressed. i don’t have anyone to talk to so i remember to brush my teeth. pin pride to the front of your lanyard but hide it in front of your dad. shuffle onto transit. keep a modern family episode going on your phone so you don’t have to be alone with your thoughts. spend $7.89 on breakfast. get behind the desk. type lines of code. circle the sick spots on the placenta. wonder, if someone were circling the sick spots on me would there be anything to leave out. eat lunch and ignore that it tastes like gas. ignore that everything tastes like gas. more code. maybe a meeting. pretend to be awake. pretend to care. shuffle home. let your father yell at you. clean the dishes. watch television, a drama this time, a teen drama where no one has real problems but i never should have let you let me go makes you cry. go to sleep. try not to dream.
my life is a slideshow of open doors. i haven’t walked through any of them.
ghosts can’t touch anything, you know.