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