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