Hold Up

Listen lady,

I will prove to you that even in these dark and desperate depths of winter there is still hope for the new. Hope for the future is essential. Stay in St Louis for New Years, and we will meet up. And I will provide you with all the hope and whiskey rants you'll need to get through and over this jackass who is ignoring you.

Love,
K

sobriety up and left

Dear K-

He hasn’t kissed me since the day we met. I have an awful habit of pursuing those whom have no interest in me. Perhaps he doesn’t find me physically attractive, or perhaps I bore him. I’ve seen the way his eyes get dull when I try to tell a story or relate a facet of my life. He hardly spares a kind word my way beyond his usual ribbing. Why do I continue to waste my time and energy on unhealthy pursuits?

I have no reason to be so melancholy about such frivolous affairs. My mother writes to tell me that an old acquaintance has died. She pleads with me to come home to attend the funeral, but I can’t bring myself to leave this city. I spend the afternoon alone in my apartment, drinking whiskey and wondering what keeps me here. Is it the possibility that he may call, may suddenly change his ways and invite me out with him? Or am I simply avoiding the depressing task of having to confront mortality. Memento mori. Once they told me I had two weeks to live. Sometimes I am reminded of that fact when I feel my heart go faint in my chest.

So why am I still here, drinking manhattans by myself in a lonely apartment and waiting? I shake like a willow whenever I hear my phone ring. Every year seems to end the same way- with a buildup of hopes and wishes for my social life to succeed, and then every year it comes crashing down like the ball in Times Square. I have yet to have a “good” New Years Eve. For 2012 I am not holding my breath.

I am going to leave tomorrow.

-K

Get Wherever We're Going Before Me

Dear K,

My life isn't the great romance I thought it was going to be. I have all these quiet moments of loneliness and doubt. I've spent the last couple of weeks going through the motions. Working hard, eating frozen dinners, taking long baths and reading books I've read a hundred times. Some days I don't talk to anyone, except for the odd manager at work who comes over to ask how I am doing.

Oh, but then there are those nights. Those cold frozen nights when the stars come right down to our feet. Our breath hangs just above our heads, stopped by the cold, afraid to get too far away from us. That's the sort of night I like best, quiet, still, and cold. If there was a God, I would think that he spent a lot of time in a quiet still cold place before he made the world. It is the walk from your car to the party. All your friends are waiting and you know you'll have a good time and smile and tell old stories and make new memories, but there is that moment out in the cold, when you see them all inside together and they look complete without you. In the cold air you can hear their voices echoing. That moment is bliss, simple melancholy bliss. It is the clarinet's glissando at the start of Gershwin's Rhapsody and it is melancholy Shostakovich violin, calling out to the future.

When I see you in two weeks, not even two weeks, I will fill the room with my laughter. I will burst the joints at their seems, and we will tell stories and make new memories, if we feel like it we'll dance. But do me a favor and get wherever we're going before me.

Yours,

K

broadripple is burning

Dear K-

I faded with the winter, once again. I spent endless hours in miserably mainstream coffee shops, nursing expensive yet unsatisfying quantities of coffee while hammering my brain senseless with the accumulated knowledge of an entire semester. It was lonely and I'm not sure how many more weeks I can spend in such a state.

But now I'm at break and just as lonely. So does it really get any better? No. The answer is no. I'm too busy shunning society during the semester just so I can eek by with satisfactory grades that when I finally do come to a period where I do have time available for socialization, no one is there for me. And so I get up in the morning and go to work, come home and night and watch television until I fall asleep, praying the next day will bring more adventure, friends, excitement, but knowing deep down that it won't ever change.

One of the doctor's I work for has a laugh like yours. I realized it the other day, when he found a patient's comment humorous. It's that same spontaneous guffaw, a hearty deep chortle that rebounds off the walls, feeling much too large for such a little space. Just a few loud barks and then back to silence, with a wry grin remaining upon his lips, still slightly parted from the effort. It reminded me of you.

I hope you are doing well these days. I know I shouldn't be so low, that I should move on an find happiness where I can. But sometimes we all just feel a little at a lost that all our hard work in one aspect of our lives leaves the other sectors withering away.

We can never have it all.

-K

Place A Flower On My Grave In Winter

Dear K

This is true: from ages seventeen to twenty-three I had a recurring dream. I was driving in the rain somewhere in the suburbs. I drove through an intersection and was hit by a red car. I was thirty years old. Six years, and I dreamt a version of that at least twice a week.

But that's a form of bullshit. A spin on the truth.

I believed in visions and prophecies then, of an afterlife, Elysian Fields and plains unending.

I'm not that person any more. Part of me, a big part of me, still believes in my doom. I'm going to die alone. I'll push everyone away when I know it is coming. I'll wander out alone into the woods like a family dog that knows it is dying.

I feel like I haven't felt anything in a long time. I feel hollow.

Today my Grandfather was diagnosed with liver cancer, we're still waiting on the biopsy to confirm it, but the CAT-Scans left little doubt.

I stood in the hospital room, with my Mother and Sister and family around me, everyone else was fighting back the tears. I could only think about the next six months, when he wastes away. He's already a shell of himself. He is three inches shorter than he should be from back surgery, one Teflon knee and diabetes.

I want to feel the pain, but it isn't coming. It is like forcing yourself to vomit, but your fingers aren't triggering the gag reflex.

This year has been a hard one. I've lost half my grandparents. After one of the funerals, I was sitting on the couch with my sister, and she said to me "I don't know how I am going to get through the rest of these". I think it was then I realised the inevitability of it. Everyone I love is going to die, and all we can do is remember them.

Do you think someone will remember me?

Place A Flower On My Grave In Winter
-K

and i am not singing for you

Dear K-

It is hard to accept getting older. The act of getting older, in itself, is really quite simple. But coming to be able to accept that there’s nothing you can do to slow time, reverse it, or alter it in any way, shape, or form can be an incredibly frustrating concept. Even with everything I’ve been through, I don’t think I have any regrets. I am the person I am today due to a very complex and muddled sequence of events and experiences, and if I were to trade any of them, even the miserable ones, I would not be the person I am today. I don’t know, maybe I would be better, but perhaps I could be worse. Maybe if I hadn’t spent the summer of my freshman year in a musty hospital ward, tied up to computers and heavily medicated with the prediction that I had 2 weeks to live, I would probably be a different person than I am today. Even though that was probably one of the lowest points of my life, it gives one a pretty fantastic perspective upon the things that matter most. I had two weeks to live. I was given a second chance.

I should possibly apologize for the last response. It was uncharacteristically enthusiastic and optimistic for me. The truth is that I found a purpose in this crowded city and it made me feel good. It felt good to feel loved and to be attracted to someone, to feel like I found a person who synced well. When you called me, I had to excuse myself before the full extent of our conversation, because I was meeting him. I believe what I like the best about our meetings is that we can either have stimulating conversations or are content to sit quietly with our own thoughts. The words are not forced; there is no fear of silence. That night we spoke of circles. He argued that circles do not exist. At first I supported the contrary, but by the end of the night I am certain that I have never seen a true circle. Circles do not exist for me anymore.

And so it goes.
-K

Ruinous Wrecks in the Streets

Dear K,

I had a bit too much to drink. I threw up in the street, and then again in the alleyway, and then again in my sink. My stomach turned for days and days, but it wasn't the booze, or the rotten greasy food, or anything I ingested. It was all the regrets, spilling out of me. Have you ever thrown up regrets? The weird thing is they keep coming, once they're opened. It's like trying to cover a fire hydrant that someone opened for a block party, but the trap is you can only use your hands.

I have so many regrets. Things I left undone. Dishes sitting dirty in my sink. Garbage on the floors of my mind. I regret breaths and speeches and dances. I regret things I haven't done and things I did. I regret things I did too slowly, and when I moved too quickly. I think my skin might be made of regret, holding the rest of me together.

This will pass.

But it might be a long winter,

K

the part you throw away

Dear K-

We all get older. We are all dying, each and every day. It’s perfectly natural, and yet we all want to delay the inevitable as long as we possibly can. Sometimes I think of the creatures Vonnegut created, the ones who saw time in all dimensions. When they looked at a man they didn’t see what you or I would see; they saw every moment of his life, from crawling infant to robust youth to crippled invalid. In their eyes, no one ever was born and no one ever died, because the death was always present, always part of that perspective.

I hate birthdays as much as you, especially now that I’m past the “fun” years. I think about how when I was younger I had such a different path planned for myself. Don’t we all. But I’m glad I diverged from my youthful dreaming- at least most days.

You want to go back, but you know as well as I do we cannot. The clock is fixed to only function in one direction. You can never step into the same river twice, my friend. As much as I’d love to go back to Brno and eat halusky and cuddle in cafes with a Slovenian lover without a fucking care in the world, chronicling my days through games of chess and cups of tea, I know I never can. It would never be the same. That breath you just exhaled will never return. Don’t try to catch it- just let it go and realize you are thankful you are still breathing.

There’s much more to come. True, it may be miserable and never compare to the past, but in all honesty I’m too curious to give it up, so I’m not sure how you could. If you had asked me, at age 22, if I wanted to relive it instead of progressing ahead, I might have eagerly agreed. But now, in retrospect, to think of all the things I would have never seen, heard, loved, destroyed….I don’t think I ever could make that decision. I choose the future. It may be awful, it may be lonely, it may be anything but what I want, but do I really have a choice?

I choose the future.

On and on and on,
-K

Five Sixths of The Way Dead

I turned 25 today. Well yesterday by now. By the time you're reading this the me that was 25 is older now. I'm too old for the way my life is going. All the years are running like sand in an hour glass and my youth is almost over. I hate it. Turn back the clocks, turn back the summers and all the laughter and the tears. I'd trade my future just to do the past again. I want to do everything better.

I'm going to build a time machine and fix the mess God made when he let me slip through the net.

I'll make everything better.

Better better better.

Best,
K

proud flesh

Dear K-

I don’t know where the days go. Each afternoon I find myself in a similar position, slumped over a paper-littered desk trying to stuff my head with facts and figures while the sun slinks below the horizon and I am left in the twilight straining my eyes. Usually I am too preoccupied for a half hour or so before I realize I can turn on a light. Up until that point there are no thoughts except bcl-4 and p53, p21, C3a and C3b, and of course TNF and IL-1. Alphabet soup. My mental processes are being reduced to alphabet soup.

I look up and suddenly it is Thursday. How did I get here? It is necessary for my success, but I feel guilty for blending my days into a muddy grey haze. Four years from now, will I be able to look back and remember anything meaningful from this period of my life?

Living in the city is a different way of life. So many things I overlook every day but which truly are a contrast to with what I was raised. I look out my window and see the brick face of another building stoically glaring back at me. The sounds of car alarms and bellowing buses reverberate through my dreams. It’s not unusual to see not a single familiar face when I run around my neighborhood in the early evening.

But what about when I was young? I remember the fields, out on Tower road. Expanses of corn and beans and plots of tall, untended grazing fields, all shimmering in the sunlight and smelling like earth. That thick, sickly sweet smell of agriculture that feels heavy in your lungs. I used to know every bump and divot of that battered asphalt network of roads out there, knowing when to swerve to avoid a pothole or when I could coast at my leisure without fear of encountering another living soul. I used to drive it late at night, when I was sneaking back from the Harris household. Bubbling with emotions from the night, from stolen kisses or frustrating defeats, I’d let the slow winking red radio towers guide me home. Whether they were slyly winking in acknowledgement of our new evening secret or they were wincing in pitying consolation was always in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps, in retrospect, they were always doing a little bit of each.

But I cannot convey to anyone how much those roads mean to me. That’s a part of my life I can never return to, never relive. Of course this is not a new thought, not for me or for anyone. The fragility of time and the inability to hit rewind is nothing that hasn’t been lamented by many long, long before my time. But it doesn’t stop me from thinking about those roads. Doesn’t stop me from remembering driving with my windows down and listening to Modest Mouse while heading to the lake to take some photographs with a friend. Doesn’t stop me from remembering how the fields in winter were completely white, unblemished by trees or tracks, shadows or debris. Simply a horizontal band of white separating me from the grey expanse of the sky above.

But I can’t explain that to anyone. I can’t explain the things that mean the most to me, the things which I will never have again.

Returning to my studies,
-K

It's time to sing a silly little love song to the moon

Dear K,

I'm out in the courtyard under the sky, and the trees are shedding their summer coats, slimming down for winter.

You know I never really loved you. I only ever loved the ideas you gave me. That's no excuse for the way I act though. This letter isn't really for you or me, this letter isn't between us.

I'm sorry none of this is making sense, it must be the whiskey and the cigarettes, my two favorite poisons. The words keep coming though, somewhere my fingertips hit the keyboard. It is an abusive relationship. Just like the one I have with myself.

But this isn't about me or you. I wanted to talk about the moon, and why she doesn't love me anymore. I went there once, back in my late sixties, and I haven't left since.

Parts of me are still up there frozen in grey dust, thumping slowly across the craters. But she doesn't love me, she never really loved me, she just pulled me in when she was reaching for the ocean. But she's still got my heart and it is the only one I'll ever have and I gave it to the moon. I'm already old at twenty-five. I make my parents sit on my knee and I tell them how to live their lives.

I wish I was up there right now. Flying around, not giving a fuck about what Frank Sinatra says.

Fuck those old blue eyes.

K

allodynia

I should be studying the diencephalon but I’m tired of that. My life is an endless series of tests and outlines and handouts. I’ve killed more trees than I’d like to admit. But their flesh and bones allow me to eek out the grade I need, the recognition necessary in a long progression towards some prestigious fucking title.

Autumn also brings me happiness. Stumbling bumble-fuck down the leaf-clogged side streets of the city, enjoying the brisk air and the crisp scent of dying foliage, I am at ease. Between mugs of coffee that disintegrate my insides and textbooks on neuroanatomy and clinical optical techniques, I walk absently through the lingering afternoons.

But how am I supposed to feel when I count off the hours by the tasks accomplished? It is my modus operandi, to be constantly at work, but can I really get much satisfaction out of endless regurgitation of factual data about the limbic system and the coagulation cascade?

Sometimes I get lonely. But I don’t think it would be fair to try to meet anyone right now. I’m too isolated, too selfishly consumed with my coursework. I get a total of perhaps 4 waking hours each day to myself, to spend at my leisure. Those moments are already so precious, usually spent pecking dejectedly at food or writing a letter or sipping coffee while staring at the fire escape with nothing but my thoughts to occupy me. Could I bear to sacrifice these moments and split them with another? I want a lover I don’t have to love. Or perhaps I am more like St. Augustine, and I am in love with the idea of loving, but have as yet no real determination or drive to be in love.

Do you know what allodynia is, my friend?

Oh God, I should get back to work.

-K

Home Again In My Autumn Palace

Dear K,

My season has come again, now is the time when I run underneath trees shedding leaves, and laugh at the ending of everything. I was built for setting suns and longer nights. I wear jackets and blow frost breath at the full full moon, and streetlights are reflected on my eyes as I race beneath them cackling in the dark.


I am well, my life goes well, things here are swell. The winds and rains are coming more swiftly now and everything is starting to be put into its place for winter. Shutters are shutting. Clutter starts cluttering, and nobody can stop uttering those simple omens of doom and portents of ill tidings.

But we all die each winter don't we? Just a little bit like the leaves? They come back faithfully in the spring, and are pretty when they lie broken on the ground.


None of this made sense, but that's September wine for you.

-K

a conversation with the ceiling

Dear K-

You know I cannot. You know that isn't the way I work, though perhaps some days I wish that I could be that blissfully simple. But rarely do I have that desire, the desire to be the dead-eyed goldfish mindlessly blowing his own reflection kisses as he swaggers aimlessly about his bowl. Day after day, blissful and dull. I do not think I could handle such a life.

The ennui has evaporated, sucked from my flesh to leave me with nothing but frustration and the tingling sensation of impending deadlines. It feels rather strange to be back in the student setting, and more so it feels strange to be a professional student. Sounds pretentious as fuck, doesn't it? I'm actually having to study for classes every day, which is a new and terrible realization, and still I am not sure if I will maintain the pace which is required by these professors. Of course, I'm not the only one being overwhelmed, but sometimes it gets lonely.

I spent six hours in a cafe one night, huddled over a histology text and scribbling notes to myself on a pad of legal paper. By the end, you could hardly see the table top with it's ringed and crescent moon stains for all the tattered canary yellow sheets. Patrons came and went, but still I sat there guzzling bitter black coffee and writing away. It was almost like high school, although instead of being bored and angst-y I am now trying to focus and be productive.

Someday I will have to be addressed as Doctor. But that seems so far away, and for the moment all I feel like doing is disappearing into a foreign country, melting into the morning market on a crowded street in Brno. Or perhaps it does sound appealing, to sit out on a balcony in the dying hours of the day and sip at a glass of wine. Perhaps that is what I want to do.

But I also want to be called Doctor whenever I step into the room.

Doctor Who? Exactly. And this is my assistant, Rose.

And then I'll bow and exit with a quick grin and then I'll slip out into the afternoon and beat my way to the nearest cafe.

This life is lonely, yes. I haven't found anyone that I could say I truly mesh with well. Of course, it isn't like I have a great amount of time to socialize...but I find myself now, more than ever before, really missing the friends and socialization opportunities I held in university. Now it's like I'm starting again from square one. It took me four long years to build up the friends I made in undergraduate, and then I just had to wave them all away and start anew. What's the point? In four more years I'm just going to be moving again and saying goodbye yet another time. This is why I don't get emotional over departures. People are always departing. I am always departing.

Tell me about your day.

At least I can hear the metros growling in the distance from my new apartment,
-K

Oh Please! Oh, please. oh. Please. Oh! please. Oh? Please. ohhhhh, please. Oh please oh please oh please.

Dear K,

Oh! Ennui. Stifling steaming ennui! It is rolling through your letters and syllables like a thunderstorm. The sound dopplers past me and I hear its speed, spreading seeds of disdain and distaste and hatred of hate and then finally there comes cool waves of detachment. What a sweet summer rain of apathy my dear. Oh I sincerely revel in it. I have found again my love of humans and I am in love with our species and we are very happy. The human race and I are thinking about settling down on a nice little planet, the rent isn't too high and we can afford to sit outside and drink wine on the patio as the sun dips down in the evening.

Laughter and birdsong, these are the things I prescribe.

But really, in the worst possible way I want to warm your untouchable heart and make you laugh and sing silly little songs about toast with me.

We could be uncontrollable and hilarious and skip down cobbled streets with old shoes tied around our necks and bare feet barely touching the ground. Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't it be nice of us to be such great beings?

Or maybe it is better to relax and slowly droop our eyelids at the whole joke of it all. Entropy is rushing madly in and even the rules of time break as we sip our rapidly cooling tea. Maybe one day the universe will be so old that it will be young again and then I could convince you finally of the things that set me free.

I wish I could be everything for a moment, but for this moment I'll be fine if I could just have a glass of wine and sit, and sit and stare and laugh and smoke cheap cigarettes and not care about the cancer that comes later in the night of my life to steal me early into sleep.

Wouldn't that be lovely?

Oh please my lovely say that it would be lovely.

caution: contents hot

Dear K-

I have been busy. I apologize. For the record, I didn't automatically banish your call to my voice mail. I was up in international waters when you called and I didn't have service. I actually didn't receive the message until several days later, as it was.

It's the time of year for my insomnia to return. Hot, stale nights of laying on top of the sheets, wondering why I can't relax. It's fantastic. I mean that in the most sarcastic of ways.

Perhaps my lack of sleep is evident by the dryness of this letter. Who knows. Of course, as I sit in this crowded little cafe, drinking an unreasonable hot cappuccino that makes me feel like I'm sweating on the inside as well as the outside, I can't help but think that at least my insomnia has come about at a time when I can stand to sleepwalk through the days. I don't work at the moment, unless you call pecking away at a childishly-written detective novel work. Because that's what I've been up to lately. I've been trying to write again.

And it's all going in the drawer. I don't give a fuck. I did let a coworker read two of my previously written detective stories. That cheap, miserable drivel I pump out when I have nothing better to do. She adored the first, but then commented that in the second story the lead character started sharing too many of my own personal insecurities.

In high school, my AP English teacher told me to write what I know. I guess I know my insecurities. I didn't know what else to do.

I hope you are well. I hope you are enjoying your fluster of activity and preoccupation.

Undulating,
-K

There, I dropped you a line.

Dear K,

You must be almost as busy as me. I am very busy. Much too busy to talk. Please don't call, or write, I would feel so bad because I wouldn't have the time to answer.

Oh my yes, I'm very busy.

Also, I really am doing quite a lot these days, but you should call and or write and we should catch up.

Yours,

K

zugzwang

Dear K-

I’m sorry to hear of your loss. I know that’s what is always murmured when one loses a loved one, but I mean it sincerely. I am sorry.

I haven’t been around lately, even though I haven’t gone anywhere. I’m just not here, in the sense of that I am not really living but I am merely killing time. The days have been like leaves, and I’ve been watching them slowly turn and wither until they drop away one by one into the muddy creek bed below. But what can one do when one knows she inevitably must up and move again. No point in drawing connections, no point in looking to join any clubs or organizations, no point in tying yourself to anything here. Just live day to day and do your job well until the day you leave.

Sometimes I think about death, but I try not to do it often. More frequently I think about aging and that actually tends to upset me more. Every day I see patients who are reaching the end of their lives and they tell me how they don’t move fast anymore or they aren’t happy or their spouse is gone and it’s lonely in the nursing home. They tell me about how everything I have and enjoy will eventually go away: your mobility, your independence, the people you love. It all goes away. I hold their hand and I feel their weight sway hard against my forearm as I help them walk about the office. Usually I have to stoop over to support them and they comment about how I won’t be so tall once I begin to age and I won’t be able to wear heels anymore. Sometimes when they press against me I feel like they would collapse, their bones would crumble into dust were I to step away and let go. To think that someday I will be in that state is incredibly upsetting. I try not to imagine how miserable I will be when I am old.

So perhaps, in a way, maybe some people enjoy death. Maybe they prefer it rather than to postpone the inevitable and prolong the pain of being alive. That being said, I’m still sorry for your loss. I still imagine most people would prefer not to die.

Try to stay on solid ground for the next few days. Don’t tread on soft soil.
-K

This Is Heaven

Dear K,

We dream of a field. Green grass stretches to the horizon. And we walk up stone steps out onto the field. But there in gentle sunlight filtering through white clouds and sleepy breezes are all our friends and family, and there we laugh and giggle and gallop as we did when we were young and innocent.

We run and jump screaming from the joy of it all. Old faces and friends we never saw again.

This is my dearest wish when I die.

I wish to hold the hand of my beloved as one of dies, and know that I will see her again soon.

I'm going to say this at my grandfather's funeral.

K

Dear K,

The next day after I wrote you we had a wedding shower for my sister. My grandpa was supposed to come.

After the shower we went over to his house.

He had died in his sleep. He was a really good man who earned his rest.

,
K

What do you think about when you think about death?

Dear K,

Another one of my family members died this week. It was my Grandmother's brother. He died of an aneurysm. Apparently it runs in my family.

I've always thought, or known somehow, that I am going to die young. Somehow, with the death of this man that I barely knew, this has become more sure.

I think about my friends and what they will say.

But mostly I think about my last words. So here are they are in case I die before the morning comes.

Thank you. I'd like to say thank you to everyone here, and everyone who couldn't make it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, thank you.

I feel my heart beat too fast sometimes. I feel the wind on my arms, and up the back of my neck. I feel something calling me, a great pulse, and I am leaving you now. I'm taking everything with me though. The great tragedies and romances I left unwritten on the page. The jokes I never told and the hugs I never gave.

I want to be cremated. Please throw some whiskey in with the fire and let me drift up in the air.

I always believed in Jesus, somewhere deep down, I believed in redemption.

Redeem me.

Goodnight,

K

How Many Times Do I Have To Tell You?

Dear K,

I write letters about you, but to you. My letters are little poems and movies. They're like tiny little songs about you and the things I think about between the things that fill the empty stretches of our lives. My letters are miniature portraits painted in words. But they will never be novels. I can't write novels, even though I keep telling everyone I'm trying. I mean I am. But not fully. I don't have a the time or energy to become that machine right now. I mean I want to. I want nothing more than to quit my job and spend eight hours in the cafe downstairs writing a thousand pages of misogynistic bullshit. But I'm not that machine right now.

My life's been a movie since I saw The Royal Tennenbaums in the ninth grade.

Tell you what I'll be Chaz and you can be Margot.

Come on. You know you're a muse.

Get out of your head,
K

keys open doors

Dear K-

I always wanted to be someone’s muse. I wanted to inspire poetry, music, films, paintings, novels. Sometimes I like to imagine my life set in high contrast black and white, with a soundtrack that hovers deep and ominous in tempo with my stride down the sidewalk. Something like what David Lynch would make. Cut shots of traffic lights drifting silently in the night, me sprawled on a couch reading a novel with my feet tucked up under me, a dog barking in a neighbor’s yard, the flickering neon of a lonely liquor store front. O-P-E-N. A half-empty glass of amber liquid sits beside me sweating onto the coffee table, the liquid swirling and wavering as it is slowly diluted by the ice melting inside it.

But I’m not really remarkable enough to inspire. Even if I did serve to model for various works, I would probably be uncomfortable or unsatisfied, although potentially flattered. It would probably be more enjoyable to have the subject be vague, but to know that somewhere in the text my shadow touched it all and brought it to life. But I cannot say because I do not know what it feels like.

I’ve been swimming again. There have been a string of bad days lately, and I found myself wanting to do nothing more than put my head underwater and pour out all my thoughts while I steadily completed lap after lap. The sunlight makes dancing, scintillating patterns along the tiled pool floor and I like to watch them shimmer as I gently glide through their rays. It’s calming to spend an hour moving rhythmically and hearing nothing but the inward and outward passing of your breathing, and the swoosh of bubbles with every motion and exhale.

The days are growing longer and I am growing restless.

Longing for a change,
-K

Let's All Dance In Perfect Rhythm

Dear K,

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

I'm laughing because it is spring and I'm sleeping with my windows open. I'm watching television from high school. I feel young. I feel older than I used to because this is the oldest I've ever been, except for right now.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

I'm laughing because I'm starting to get the joke. Gears are coming together, I feel like I'm getting a skin that's made of wires and the wires are starting to connect and maybe my memory is coming back, blinking on and off like a light bulb in a gas station sign.

buzz. hum. buzz. hum. buzz. hum.

Listen to that. That is the sound of the electricity in my apartment buildind. Beyond that is the sound of motorcycles on the streets. When I got home from work tonight it felt like morning, and birds were singing.

I feel like the next president. I feel like a champion water polo player. I'm rising out of the water kicking until it is at my waist and I'm taking the shot, and the goalie can't move fast enough.

I'm going to be something,

K

variable time speed signatures

Dear K-

I hope you’ve found your car.

This weekend I went to the city. The purpose of the trip was to attend a mandatory meeting for all incoming professional students of my class. Imagine, if you will, the following situation: I eat breakfast at 6 and then drive 3 hours to the city. I check into my hotel, and a half-hour later I take a shuttle to the university and prepare for the seminar. Mistakenly, I thought a meal would be provided, but this proves not to be the case. Everyone else shows up with guests, whether they be significant others or a parent or two. They place all of us, approximately sixty people, in a relatively small room with nondescript pop music playing softly in the background. They hand us a nametag and tell us to socialize.

I hate mingling, especially in large groups. It really doesn’t play up my strong points. So I plaster on a pleasant expression and wander around the room, attempting to engage in conversations. It’s an endless execution of standard small-talk procedures, one conversation after another. Hi, I’m so-and-so, what’s your name? Nice to meet you. Where are you from? Oh, really? –Insert vague comment or observation about the town/region/state the person hails from-. What brings you here? Yeah, me too. Boy, this is awkward, isn’t it?

Yes, yes it is. And my dry demeanor doesn’t ever help. I really prefer to meet people in small groups, and with a specific purpose bringing us together, such as meeting for coffee, or a group assignment, or to watch a game on television. If you drop me into a crowded room and tell me to start mingling, I can only tread water for so long before my limbs get tired and I start to drown.

With the warmer weather my insomnia has returned. It gives me a lot of time to think, and it dulls me for the workday. I drift through patients and drudge through the weekdays without comprehending the passage of time. When my circadian rhythm is off, I don’t seem to register the passing of minutes, hours, days. Only when I finally catch a little glimpse of sleep do I realize the expanse of time that has elapsed.

When I do dream, the dreams have been pleasantly mundane. I dream of sitting in an airport, watching the people around me. They shuffle down the halls dragging their luggage in tow. They sit in cramped, connected chairs placed near the terminal gates, coughing into their fists and turning dry pages in beat up novels and wrinkled magazines. It makes me feel at ease to watch them, and I don’t seem to be at the airport to catch a flight. At least, I don’t feel any sense of urgency or anticipation, needing to check the departure board and find the correct gate. Instead I simply sit and watch the people there, stare out the window and watch as the planes take off and land. It’s very soothing to watch those great powerful mammoths of steel and gasoline hurl themselves into the air or swoop down to the landing strip but to not hear a single sound. The thick insulating glass lets me watch their maneuvers as if they were completely silent creatures, performing remarkable feats without even an audible whimper.

I like those dreams.

-K

I Never Got To Play Infield

Dear K,

Tonight I ran in the rain. I ran past people in cars and men standing outside the few fashionable restaurants. Wearing their trench coats and holding umbrellas out for their wives.

I didn't feel good during the run. I felt weak and strained and my lungs wheezed. My knees hurt, and my shins hurt, and my feet hurt. But I feel better now. Afterwards I stretched and took a bath, and watched a documentary about baseball, I've been watching this series about baseball and it makes me feel like an American. It makes me think of the springs I used to know with four or five other farm children in the pastures. We would take turns and run bases made from scratches of dirt. Every now and then the ball would land in a cowpie and we'd stop playing for a while to decide who had to clean it off.

Just before I went to bed, dreaming of the ball park, the crack of the bat, I remembered that I hadn't moved my car this morning and I went to go move it to the company lot.

I haven't found my car yet, I'm afraid it has been towed by the city.

I want to say "When am I going to catch a break?"
But really, a break is anything you decide is a break. I'm not really looking for any. Mostly I'd like to meet interesting beautiful people and pass my days watching the minor league team throw the ball back towards the infield to get the runner out at third.

It still stirs my insides to hear "Take Me Out To The Ballgame",
Just like watching fireworks,

-K

trust in the winter

Dear K-

Don’t retrace steps through broken glass and rusty shards of metal. Spring betrays us with thoughts of sentimentality, bringing us to doubt decisions of the past and longing for what we have left behind. Of course you miss her. The weather gets warmer and we see the sunrise and we think of sleeping outside and whispering language into a sweet girl’s ear while laying atop lumpy blankets over prickly grass under star-filled skies.

But never trust the moon when you’re about to fall in love. You cannot take back the sighs and murmurs of lost summers, and regrettable as it may be some loves are lost for good. I will never again caress the flesh of the tender Slovenian who stole my heart and kept it abroad as a keepsake. Do I miss him? Do I miss?

It’s only human.

But what can we do? Is it possible to believe that lost loves go about their daily lives without any thought of us at all? It must be so, otherwise we would hear from them and know that their hearts still beat. But we don’t. At least, I don’t. I assume they have forgotten about me, carrying out their daily tasks without a single pang of memory of me and what we had together. And rightly so. It only serves to further frustrate me, however, when I find myself drifting into nostalgia whenever I make French toast, or ride my bike aimlessly down city streets and feel the wind whipping through my hair, or drink my tea with milk. Will I ever give up the ghost of lovers lost?

Don’t let spring tint your vision rosy in retrospect. Love is lost for a reason. Sometimes we should not go looking for it in the same old places where we found it before. There is nothing left for us in those places-they’ve been found by someone else now.

-K

This is an old thing

Dear K

Where is she? Sarah. The name still tugs and pulls at my heart. I feel my arms around her in the night. I feel my breath stop short at her neck.

What is she doing with her life?

Was there ever room for me or her?

God I miss her hands, on my back, in my hair, intertwined with mine.

I miss her lips and breath. I miss.

It is spring. I cut things off in winter. I told her that things had never worked out between us and that they never would. What a terrible thing to say. How do I go back? How do I take my words back from that? How do I say I'm sorry again? I can't. Not in anyway that means anything really. I just want to know that she's alright.


K

i have nothing to offer except folding your shirts

Dear K-

I’m sorry about your parents. Don’t let them keep you from being yourself and finding your own personal satisfaction in what you do. I’ve been blessed with fairly supportive parents; a father who showed up for every single game, drove me to the endless tournaments on every weekend of summer, and sat in the backyard for hours while I hurled softballs at speeds upwards of 60 mph at his body. Sometimes I worry about the day when he won’t be around anymore. Then who will be left to be proud of me? Who will be left that I will actually want to be proud of me?

I’m sorry they weren’t there for you. There’s a lot of room for letdown when it comes to parenting. The ladies at work are older than me, and most have children or currently have a child growing in their belly. So, they talk a lot of parenting and raising children. Every single trivial detail is highlighted and spun out into a grandiose tale of personal triumph or humiliating defeat, no matter how old the child. Ethan threw a tantrum because he didn’t want to go to daycare and mommy lost her temper and yelled a bit too harshly and now she feels sorry for it but knows she can’t soften her position on the matter. Drew brought his girlfriend home and they got drunk in the basement together at his parents’ house and father caught them together on the couch. They wished he wouldn’t have dropped out of college, wish he would have stuck with it and tried a little harder.

The woeful stories actually don’t worry me as much as the happy ones. What about when Ethan brought his mommy flowers from the yard and told her he loved her? What about when he gave her the picture he made at school and she oohed and ahhed at his talents? When Emily asked to first start shaving her legs and her mother realized her little girl was growing into a woman, why do I get more upset at these anecdotes rather than the miseries?

Because I don’t think I have it in me to pull it off. Do I have the patience and the enthusiasm? Will I suddenly gain the enthusiasm that I currently find lacking in my approach? I don’t think I can jump and clap whenever a tooth is newly lost, grabbing my pocketbook and eagerly anticipating the evening when I can slip currency under a babe’s pillow. What if I just bury them in the yard? I’m not strong enough to continually smile with every gift of a macaroni necklace, or a glittered construction paper picture frame, or a mudpie. It makes me feel empty and distant. I wish I could be the supportive mother, the ever faithful source of strength, comfort, and advice. But no one is perfect, especially me. There are too many little factors beyond my control, and at the moment that prospect terrifies me greatly.

I will fold the shirts, cook the meals, sew on the missing buttons. I will someday be a suitable wife. But I'm not sure yet that I could be a proper mother.

I’m glad to hear you enjoyed the coast. You know I am always a strong proponent of travel and exploring new locations.

Head up, head up,
-K

This Would Break My Parents' Hearts

Dear K,

I was at dinner with my parents tonight, they were catching up with some old friends they hadn't seen in a decade. For the better part of an hour we talked about my sister. About what she was doing, when she is getting married, how proud they are of everything she's done. It kept going on and on until it was painfully obvious to everyone that they hadn't said a single word about me.

They said, "Oh but we're really proud of our son too. Go on tell them what you've done." Then I had to tell these strangers about the things I'm doing with my life. It was really obvious that I wasn't proud of anything I'd done. There was uncomfortable silence.

Then we changed the topic.

I wondered if they remembered the time they forgot me in Texas at a restaurant. Or if they remembered all the birthday presents they never got around to ordering. I wondered if they remembered all the swim meets they missed, and all the school plays where I gave my lines to an auditorium full of other people's parents.

But those were useless ugly petty thoughts. All of those things were accidents. They didn't mean any of that, but does that really matter?

I don't know if I want to have kids, it seems too dangerous.

K

Home Again

Dear K,

I went to the coast for bit. I went to the great metropolis. The bright lights and tall towers. I saw the rats in the gutters and watched homeless men struggle through the subways. I saw the statue of liberty and slept in a building that never seemed to end.

I saw all sorts of things: statues of dogs, men crying and screaming in the streets, women holding the hands of singing children, and endless streams of cars. I saw a man with no legs holding a cup out for change, and I saw women in fine fur coats.

But I didn't see hills and plains. I didn't see blue skies that stretched to the ends of my sight. I didn't see rows and rows of tilled earth waiting for crops. I didn't see men in coveralls standing next to their trucks angry at the world.

I want to leave the midwest.

But I always want to stay.

Let's ride bicycles across the plains.

Regards,
K

we exchanged helium because we're tired of ceilings

Dear K-

Fool, I will remember. I will remember it all. I couldn’t forget even if I tried, and I don’t want to. To think about the things that people will say about you once they have no motivation to please you with their words is certainly something I’ve thought about, as well. What would someone say about you knowing it would never get back to you? Would it be positive or negative? Would they sigh and lean back with a smile, their eyes glittering as they recall the fond times with you spent together? “Oh, he was such a character, really. Always up for a good time. Very sensitive, friendly disposition.” Or would they use more choice words to describe you? “Well, between you and me, he was kind-of a drunk. A sap on society. Meant well, but he was always just off in the clouds somewhere, never really making solid contributions to society.”

No one can blame you for wanting to be remembered positively when you are gone. We’d all like something to show for our brief time here, but unfortunately it’s never very easy. Even if we think we’ve made an impact on the lives of others, for how many generations will we be remembered? Will they tell their children of us, and then those children tell their children? How many years will our memory linger on? Once the acid rain has eroded to text off the front of our tombs, will they even know your name?

There is a graveyard near my house, an ancient affair with broken tombstones and a forgotten landscape. The tombstones have long been worn down to an unreadable state, and many have been fractured or relocated. No one knows where the bodies go anymore. No one knows who’s bones lie deep beneath the soil. And no one cares to find out.

As for insomnia, I can’t recall enjoying it. I always thought insomnia had a somewhat romantic, rugged appeal to it, as if it would fuel my writing and make me into a mysterious, provocative character. But it didn’t. Insomnia wore me down, made my days all blend into one fuzzy, dull march. I laid in bed at night thinking of the sleep that wouldn’t come, and when the alarm finally buzzed to prompt me to get up and ready for work I was almost relieved to have something to go do. But I missed sleep.

I like sleep. Things have the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake.

I run 5 kilometers a day now, and that helps me find slumber. It also makes me feel better about myself overall. I have always enjoyed running, and I like coasting about at my loping pace and observing all the people I pass as they go about their lives. When I listen to my i-pod as I run, it is as if I am setting the soundtrack to their lives, to my life. Of course, when I come home my legs feel heavy and my heart feels light, but I like that feeling. I like to feel like I’ve accomplished something.

I feel anxious here. I am eager to move again.

-K

My Thoughts Keep Turning Towards The End

Dear K,

I went to the coast for bit. I went to the great metropolis. The bright lights and tall towers. I saw the rats in the gutters and watched homeless men struggle through the subways. I saw the statue of liberty and slept in a building that never seemed to end. I ate dumplings. I was yelled at and mocked. I was hugged and greeted. I was made to feel at home and simultaneously alienated. The great heaving mass of humanity all around me had little or no effect, I was not suffocated or lifted up, I was simply holding onto the pole in the middle of the subway car.

But despite all of these things I feel sucked dry. I am empty and passionless. I feel rootless and transient in my hometown. I don't know how people do this.

Right now I can't sleep, again. I love my insomnia sometimes though. It bevels the edges of my depression and makes loose associations and I feel fluid and liquid. Is it strange to say that I am sometimes addicted to a sleepless state? I am. I am hooked. I love to sleep and dream, but even more than that I love when my dreams rise and bubble and burst forth into my waking consciousness.

This is America. I have no reason to get up in the morning other than the fact that it is what I'm supposed to do. I don't like my job, I like the money they give me. I need to do something else though. I am not built for that corporate world.

This might sound depressing, but I'm not broken up about it at all. It is warm outside, and I'm lying in bed with my windows open. I am alone.

Do you ever fantasize about your death? I find myself fantasizing about my funeral sometimes, oh it isn't as macabre as it sounds. What I really do is imagine what everyone I knew will say about me after I'm gone. It is an abstraction on imagining what someone says about you when you leave the room. I also fantasize about leaving behind some sort of legacy. I want someone to say something about how I did one activity better, or more uniquely than any other person ever has. I want to write a great book, and paint, and I want to have biographies written about me. I want people to be interviewed about knowing me, and I want them to look into the camera with surprise in their eyes and say, "Him? Oh well he was such a dear. You'd really never know he was thinking all those great thoughts if he hadn't written them down. He'd usually call me and ask how my day went, and I'd jabber on and on, and he'd listen patiently, and then more often than not he would change the subject or hang up before I could get anything out of him, he was such a dear." And she'll finger a smart necklace of pearls around her throat.

Do you think you will remember me after all the years of our lives?

You don't have to,

K

trade organs for oceans

Dear K-

I slipped off the map again for a while. For some reason, despite the warm weather, my confidence took a dive and I had a series of days where I couldn’t bear to make eye contact with anyone. And so I measure my days by my footsteps, focusing on the laces of my shoes, content to hear a voice but not address the eyes. I suppose when I’m done with school and I am a licensed doctor I will have to be able to stare people in the face and speak plainly. But for now I am content to look at my hands fumble with the dilating drops as I explain “this might sting for a few seconds”.

The warm weather has got me anxious, eager to move on to the next stage in my life. It also has me drinking a lot more. I still am not feeling well, and neither is my mother. My father is old. People come into our practice every day and occasionally a few weeks later I receive notice that they have died. I suppose it shouldn’t shake me up so much. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “things die. All things die.” So it goes. Someday I’ll be old and grey and I hope I can look back on my life and not only feel no regret but also feel content with what I have accomplished.

I am sorry I cannot come visit you anytime soon. It makes me anxious and that makes me feel worse, and I apologize for my neurotics but I’m not sure what else to tell you. I take full responsibility for my tattered nerves. Maybe once I am feeling better (if I’m ever feeling better) we can get a visit worked out. But for now I am not allowed to drive long distances by myself.

Waiting for blood to flow to my fingers,
-K

The Hollow Center Of My Torso Calls Me In From The Dark

Dear K,

Spring is coming soon, I can feel it unfolding, right there in the hollow behind my navel where everything is felt before it happens. I feel it.

I know that we're going to see each other soon. I can feel that too, in the empty space in the middle of my torso. I cleaned my apartment tonight, and I thought about whether I was going to let you have the bed while I sleep on the air mattress. I haven't decided yet, because my bed is really comfortable, and it is actually the main reason I'm not homeless and on a never ending bicycle trip around the country.

I feel like such a fool to fall prey to the seasons like I do. I'm starting to fill up with hope, and that's a foolish thing to do. Every spring so far in my life has been filled with failures of every sort. I feel like the Cubs at spring training, maybe this is my year, and we won't know until October that I've wasted another precious season.


I hope flowers grow around you soon. And I hope that the birds come back to sing through the gentle quiet rains. In the end I hope you run in the sunshine and forget all that trouble snow.

As for me,
We'll see how everything shakes out in October,

-K

Dear K,

Are these even ourselves up here? I can't be all of myself at one time, I am too many contradictions. I pull myself apart. I'm writing something now. It is about the search for redemption, but why does that matter in the end? If god doesn't exist then we're all just corpses in the ground, and if Jesus was right then we're already forgiven by the time we die. Why is it important to redeem yourself?

What have I done. Where am I going. Why am I anywhere.

I read your latest letter, and it was so beautiful. My eyes watered as I read it and I held my breath, and then I read the poems you wrote down for me out loud to my empty apartment. I don't think I pronounced everything right, but it was beautiful anyway.

I'm going to buy some envelopes and stamps. I'll start physically sending things to you.

If we're in a play who is the audience and who is the author? Do you believe in reincarnation? Of course not, it is a very silly notion. How about this, instead of reincarnation there are great cycles that run through all things. There are even cycles of types of people, we're all variations on a theme. I think I might be a variation on Edgar Allen Poe.

If you do believe in reincarnation, then you'll understand that I am ready for nirvana.

How long until I can escape?
I feel trapped at every turn.

-K

heart consumption

Dear K-

You’re an interesting case. It seems you want to be close and you want to be intimate-you need those relationships in your life that make you feel worthwhile. But at the same instant there also exists a dismissive trait, one that pushes away and fears that close attachment can only bring disappointment and regret.

Sometimes I read your letters and wonder if you’re still writing as me, or if you’re writing as you. Do you understand what I mean? Sometimes I feel so similar. As if we’re both portraying this painful and delicate theatre performance, and right now you’re in the middle of Act Two, at your character’s lowest point. I’m in the background for now, merely moving about the scenery. And for now I am content there; I’ve been distancing myself from family and friends again, as I periodically do. But your character, desperately fishing about for his heart among the sewer muck, is at an all-time low. He’s moaning and dreaming of something better, but the dream is blank and white like a bank of new fallen snow.

What of Act Three? Where is the redemption? Will it come? How long is this miserable second act going to draw out before we finally break for intermission?

I’m sending you scraps of my life, in the hopes that it will make you smile. I want you to pick up the broken pieces of my days and fill your nights, finally finding sleep among the bits of me you find in them. I’m not sure what else to do. I wish I could send you pages upon pages of letters and drawings, but I feel like that would be a less accurate portrayal of what my life is truly like right now. It’s not flowing or flourishing. It’s flaking off, like rust from oxidized metal, and I’m sweeping up those little bits and sending them to you. Hopefully it doesn’t make you angry. You can just toss them away if you’d rather.

Warmer weather brings lighter hearts,
-K

Untitled

Dear K,

Why am I so lonely? I have friends and relatives. What is so important about having a physical relationship? Remember that person I talked about? The one that came back into my life. Well I cut her out again because it was too painful otherwise.

We were caught in a cycle of pain, and I wanted out. I still want out. I want out of this plan I have for my life. I want out of everyone's plan for my life. I want to be able to write for days and weeks at a time without feeling exhausted by every line and every scene. I want to be thin and beautiful. But mostly I'm tired.

Spring is around the corner, maybe I'll be happier then.

Every year feels worse than the last.

Regrets and wishes keep me up at night,
I wish I had someone to soothe me to sleep,

K

Continuity Of Self

Dear K,

That is the way I have always been. I've never felt a continuity of identity. I'm not the same person I was yesterday or a couple of hours ago. I wake up several times each week wondering who I am and have to spend the first hour or two of my day reminding myself of my name and how that person acts. My mornings are filled with panic when ever I'm interacting with someone I think I know, after every action I ask myself "Is that something that 'I' would do?"

It is like waking up without a mask, only to find out that the face underneath is blank and featureless.

I am constantly amazed by the assertion of identity by others, because mine is actually so frail and thin. I have journals filled with things I've done and the way I felt about them at that moment, and all of it is useless when I wake up.

I think my greatest fear is that I'll wake up one day and not be able to know who I am ever again.

I want to look forward to your warm linoleum floors.

Waiting,
K

magnum plots

Dear K,

When I was young my teachers used to always tell me to write about what I know. They discouraged me from stretching into any topic area that was beyond my knowledge. I could not write about being a 32 year old man in a struggling marriage. Nor could I write about being a sea monster trying to find acceptance in the cruel dark cold of the bottom of the ocean. All I could write about was being an angst-filled teenage girl stuck in a small Midwestern town.

So that’s what I wrote about, because that’s what my teachers wanted. I wrote about the endless cups of bitter coffee in cafes and unrequited high school love and basketball. But I still dreamed of living a more interesting life, one that would permit me to write about war or true heartbreak or all the big-hitter topics of literature. Maybe I’d hunt a great white whale or go to the bull fights in Spain.

Eventually, I escaped the misconception that I could only write about what I know in terms of my own life. The narrators shifted to become the 32 year old man, or the soldier, or the spoiled, hopelessly bored rich girl. Even though it wasn’t exactly me, it was still me. I was still hidden within those characters. Even if I tried to eliminate myself completely from the text, I’d still find my finger tickling through the letters, my hair weaved between the paragraphs, or my eyes set dark and sad in the background. And that’s when I realized that I was still writing about what I know. Always. And in a way it became a peculiar game that I played with myself. How much could I morph, how deeply could I hide my true self within the pages?

It allows you to escape a bit, to be that different person for the days or months that you are writing as a character. But it fucks up your reality. When you set down the pen or stop typing the keys you still have to return to the standard personality, the person who comes and goes to work each day and interacts with society. Sometimes it isn’t as easy as I’d like. Sometimes I show up for a coffee date still bending like an alcoholic businessman, or show up for an appointment speaking like a disappointed weatherman. It’s not so easy to shake the lives I create on the page, and sometimes those lives are more interesting than mine and I don’t exactly want to set them aside right away. It’s almost as if maybe I can eek out a little more creativity, find a little more inspiration for the text, if I can just persist in that mindset for only a little longer.

I hope you don’t get trapped in characters like I do, but perhaps we are possibly alike in this idea.

Are the sun’s rays looking longer to you? I swear they are stretching further every day, coating another twenty minutes more or so with every passing week. The day approaches when we will be able to soak in their warmth, laying on the linoleum floor in front of the kitchen windows and smiling at the ceiling fan.

Soon,
-K

To Sleep

Dear K,

I'm still in the grips of this low tide. I can't sleep. I eat and it tastes like ashes. I drink but I am still thirsty, and when I bend towards the earth I find it farther down than when I started.

I went and danced this weekend, and I drank whiskey like tomorrow was the second coming and Jesus had just said there wouldn't be any whiskey in New Jerusalem.

Send me everything you want.

I think I might want to be Kurt Vonnegut. I wish my youth hadn't been ruined by not going to war and seeing that profound demise and misery, but that's missing the whole point isn't it?

I'm not sure that I can do anything right. I feel my mind slipping away, and I'm losing my edges. I'm dying so slowly it just looks like living, and isn't that the real tragedy?

Nobody can save us. I'm not really sure there's anything to be saved. I wish we were all just dreams.

When?
K

romance to the grave

Dear K-

I wondered how long the bout of euphoria would last. You and me, we’re meant for crumbling. We dream and aspire and build build build our beautiful cities, carved from stone and forests and earth, but in the end our lovely spires will come tumbling down. Our foundation is weak. We can try to build our hopes as many times as we’d like, and maybe those glittering pinnacles will stand erect and admirable for some period of time, but eventually that foundation will give way (just as it has always and will always give way) and we will crumble.

I’ve been watching weathermen on the television sputter into icy microphones, with fogged over glasses and frostbitten peachy cheeks. The snow gusts in horizontal waves, like a wintry white wall that pulls at their furry hoods and makes them brace their feet like an awkwardly posed statue. This miserable weather allowed me to leave work early, mostly because all our patients scheduled for the afternoon decided to reschedule in light of the predicted climate. I spent the free afternoon shoveling the parking lot, because I get paid to do so. Unfortunately, it was truly a Sisyphean effort. Within minutes of moving on to a new section, the previously cleared section would be filled with two to three inches of new snow blowing in from the North. I still labored away for two hours, gaining the glittering adornment of an ice headband across my scalp where my hood and earmuffs failed to overlap. I felt no cold. It was a matter of continuing to move, feeling the muscles burn in my back as I bent to lift a shovel-full and toss it over the curb. By the end of it all, my cheeks were red like cherries and my eyes were smeared with a coal-like lining. Apparently Sephora isn’t blizzard-proof.

Hold on tight. We’ll get through this lull. The current is very strong, and I want you to stay with me a little while. Even if it means I need to start sending you things in the mail. I’ll send you whatever comes to hand. Letters, cocktail napkins with scribbled notes, conte crayon sketches, receipts for things I bought that reminded me of you. It doesn’t matter. I just want you to feel loved. I’ll send you fireworks, city asphalt, a rosary, children’s laughter, shooting stars, green chewy twigs, circuit boards, church chimes, old currency, sweater vests, blades of grass, ocean shells, whispered secrets, fears, dreams, regrets. It’s yours. It’s all yours, if you want it. It’s all that keeps my veins pumping blood to and fro in the cold nights.

Someday the sunlight will return, and maybe then I can stop running in circles. Maybe then I can run through the streets again and beat a path through the forest like I used to in Ljubljana.

Weary in the winter,
-K

Hope and Sorrow Wash over us in waves of amber and grey

Dear K,

It is late and I am depressed. I don't to die, but I'm not really sure I want to live. If I could sleep for a century and wake up from my dreams in time to see the earth get hit by an asteroid, well I think I would. I want to be fluid and mercurial and not bound to my body or the laws of reality.

I want to waste away in the real world and get stronger in my dreams everyday.

I dreamt that I was poor and driving through a graveyard with my girlfriend, and then we stopped to have a picnic lunch, and we found that one of the graves was made of quarters and silver dollars and other coins. We took them because we were poor, and I carried her giggling and kicking all the way back to the car and we drove on and made love by the side of the road, spilling all of the quarters out of our pockets onto the floor and never caring for a moment.

Once I dreamt that I was a tree, and I grew tall and strong and shot rainbow colored peppers from the edges of my leaves that exploded on contact with a psychedelic-mushroom cloud. I lived a full life and died in peace at the center of the forest, surrounded by other trees that couldn't talk or listen.

When I was six I had a fever dream that a dragon was robbing the bank where my mother worked. I woke up shouting and vomited on my bed.

I dream of things that will be and things that haven't ever been and never will be. I'm tired of what is and what can be. I want to live in the land of dreams and impossibilities.

The only question is where to find the poisoned apple or enchanted spindle.

Regards,
K

Forks, Books, and Fucking Drum Circles.

Dear K,

Today it was warm, well it got up into the thirties. I'm wrestling with something else too. Someone has come back into my life, and I'm torn between the scars and the love buried underneath.

I feel my life forking again. I'm excited to see which way it goes. Because life isn't something to be suffered, it isn't a drudgery to be borne. I'm excited for my life.

I need to leave this town next year though. As much as I love it, as much as I love home I need a bigger city, I need vibrancy and life, and that is hard to have in a town full of banks.

I miss college, and being poor, not that I'm rich but I felt like I was accomplishing something by struggling. My life is too easy here. I only have to show up at work for eight hours and they pay me. I don't have to put in the effort, but I do.

I need young people, and I'm surrounded by middle age and automobiles. I want to ride trains with strangers and get into arguments with people about what Proust really meant, not that I've ever read any Proust or have any idea what he meant, or why he would write such a god-damn long "book".

I'm trying to write again. Did you know that whiskey helps? I'm at a bar right now. My first glass of whiskey carried me three pages, and those were just sketches of dialogue, once I get back to them and embroider them I'll have nine or ten out of them.

But now there are too many people, and everybody is here with their friends, and all of mine live in other cities.

Also the people who play the drum circle every tuesday and wednesday night below my apartment are here. I'm not sure why they have their own place and their own space to play in. I fucking hate drum circles.

Regards,
K

please connect this call

Dear K-

I don’t. The days get bleaker and I get more bitter and weathered with every exposure to the winter wind. I’m faded, resting pale against a pastel landscape. I miss the sun, the summer air and the summer cares. Deep in my bones I know it will someday come again, but for the moment I ache for relief. Hours stretch into days and days into weeks, and eventually I will be old and remember all the winter days I wasted in anticipation of spring. And perhaps I will regret.

It’s funny how little things can throw off your balance. I’m a creature of routine, and I rely on stability and repetition. Something as simple as having to shift which wrist I wear my watch upon due to the bruises left by an IV needle is enough to set me off-kilter for the entire day. I look to my wrist for a sense of temporal bearings and instead I find a sickly green and grey bruise with a tiny purple pinprick at its center. My stomach lurches, I quickly glance at the watch on my opposite limb, but already I have been knocked out of step and I’m stumbling to find my rhythm. I fumble with some paperwork, drop my pen, forget to smile to a patient. My mind is still thinking about the bruises.
I don’t adapt well to change. I hate transitional periods. Lately, I’ve been feeling like this entire year is a transition, and it makes me sick.

I’m going back abroad in the summer. I plan to see Brno again…the city I loved but couldn’t have, although in all fairness I had every opportunity to take it back. I’m both eager to see it and frightened. What if it’s not as beautiful as I remember? Will I still be content to stroll its streets and admire my surroundings, or will I find it more faded and dreary than my crisp, beautiful memories? But what if I find it even lovelier than in my dreams? What if I break my heart all over again and throw my life to ruin just in order to return to its embrace? What emotion will I feel when I smell the brewery? Taste the halusky, drink a beer, amble through the Tesco, hear the fluid river of native Czech language spewing from a citizen’s mouth?

Don’t worry. It’s not a one-way ticket, and I’m being accompanied by a lover who aims to keep me settled in America at all costs. He’ll bring me back. He’s part of the reason, whether he’d like me to admit it or not, that I stayed in America in the first place. He was one tether that I couldn’t shake loose.

Be cheerful to compensate for my persistent gloominess.

-K

None of these things.

Dear K,

I've had several drafts of responses to your last couple of letters. But I'm not going to send them because they are too tragic and true. It is raining right now. January rain is a sign of hope, and I feel it welling up inside of me. I'm looking up at tall buildings with the promise of a future instead of imagining them crumbling to the ground.

Can you feel it? Can you feel the edges of your consciousness slide towards hope? Do you feel the wonderful tingling of tomorrow, as your soul bends around the other side of the world, glimpsing at the bright light heat of tomorrow's sun melting everything around us? I feel it. I feel that hope for the children playing in the street.

I've been helping homeless people eat, handing them money and telling them that they know what they need to spend it on and who am I to tell them what to do.

I feel it. I feel the hope that is Winter's secret promise. This is the only way to be ready for Spring.

Tell everyone you see that I love them,
and that none of these things
stop a brighter tomorrow from coming,

-K