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