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