July 31st

Bemidji, Minnesota

森林湖 Chinese Immersion School

A mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam, transverses lazily along the blanket of night. A patchwork quilt of light and dark veils the sky, while in the darkness of the cabin so many girls snuck out of to see the stars that night, I remain alone.  

I called my boyfriend, Hayden, for the first time in four weeks today. His voice was familiar and warm. He had a driving test later in the afternoon, but I still don’t know how that went. Little by little, it felt different. He seemed more hesitant, unsure of what he was supposed to say. It might have all been a self-induced trick, yet it felt different when we said, “I love you.” Less meaningful, somehow. I cried later. He might move to Arizona. I have begun to understand what bittersweet feels like; I cried a different cry than I had over him before, a cry that had been brought on by replaying happy memories but not from the happiness. It was a sad smile and an incomplete farewell.

I don’t remember the saddest day of my life. Yesterday, I realized what was the happiest. He and I both were lying on the side of the gulch. We looked upwards, and we saw treetops. Broken and fragmented skies of blue between the golden-green filtered light cast down through the foliage. We heard composers, hidden, in the voices of birds.

He would kiss me, and it was kind. We were sweet. I didn’t know if I truly understood what I wanted to say, but I knew that I wanted to know. I told him that I loved him. He told me he loved me the same. When we would kiss afterward, it was what I thought love would feel like. We felt like more than one person, an entity, melted by the slow sun sinking into our skin. I felt glad to be able to give time from my life to him, and his to me. A precious gift I never spoke of, and I didn’t always realize I was giving until it was gone.

It never truly felt as though time had left me. It still doesn’t. I replay these memories often enough in my mind that I would like to believe one day I’ll freeze and live inside of them.

I want him to know these things if, and when, our time runs out and our strings are cut. So that he knows it wasn’t for waste, and he’ll be the story I write of the first boy that I loved. I think about that, too. One day, I’ll just be reduced to merely his memory and a story. The first girl he ever loved and her name was Maya. I hope he’ll remember me as kind, as I will him. I hope he will remember the sweetness we shared in lack of fruit. The music that we loved, would find, and play for one another. I hope that he remembers the love. I hope that he remembers what it felt like to just be fifteen, to sit on the edge of the docks and watch the world turn to glass, while I watched the flame we had built out of raw emotion sputter. His eyes transfixed on the ocean he had never explored. And mine, likewise, on him. However, I saw different stories unfold, rather than his hopeful gaze forward into the untold. Saw the burning turn to smoke, and the smoke to soot. These are the moments he will never see. It’s a strange thing, to watch someone you thought that you loved the turn in against themselves, and simultaneously the world. Merely to hide in promises of the future, half-fulfilled and perpetually empty. It took some time for me to realize I was watching myself.

I hope he remembers my imperfections, along with all of the little things. Maybe those will be enough for him to let me go. He’ll see me as I actually am versus the version of me he has constructed inside his head. Then, with hope, he will move forward. He will see the girl he once loved turn to shadow and melt into her own mind, as she turns her back on everything he has given to her. She will feel the weight of what one thousand lakes is like to take home inside her lungs. As she walks down the paths she use to retrace with the fingertips of memory, she will finally see what it’s like to witness glass melt.

Several weeks later, sometime in August,

during a phase of depersonalization.

Sequim, Washington

No one had ever warned me what it was like to not have enough trust in your emotions to differentiate love from like. I had no forewarning that this rule must apply to yourself, as well. That why every relationship I had encountered I fell down, harder and harder, into a spiral of my own self-sabotage. A black-hole tunnel with no concept of upwards. That words carry the weight of waves.

Every day has become the same. So monotonous, dragging, and similar that hours tick by in a matter of seconds. My head is filled with a neverending TV static that quiets and roars. When it’s especially strong, it’s as though my mind turns white. I don’t feel sad, necessarily, nor happy. I feel nothing yet everything all at once. I feel rather apathetic as if my emotions have been turned off. In fact, at one point, I was afraid I was rather sociopathic. However, I’m not completely devoid of emotion, nor lacking empathy. It’s as if my brain settings and emotions have been dialed down to the lowest possible setting. I was once told that in certain situations, some people explode, while others implode. It seems rather fitting, doesn’t it? For me to turn in against myself yet again, although I always have felt I am the only real person in my life... for me to lose sight of that, too?

I don’t sleep at night. I stare at empty ceilings, trying to imagine who else has lain here. It’s more interesting during the times I sleep in unfamiliar places, trying to imagine the others who, unconsciously, have these shared memories. That have slept here doing the same things as I. Occasionally, I don’t feel like a person at all. As if I’ve forgotten that, too. Multiple times now I’ve been unsure whether or not I existed. Not in an existential crisis way on whether or not I impacted others, yet instead I genuinely had no way of telling whether or not I was real or a figment of my own imagination. Some days I’m not even myself, yet a spectator, observing my life happening through someone else’s eyes. A side character in a poorly scripted movie, without the will to control my own actions, yet merely to watch them pass by.

Maybe my writing is the shorthand for my mind. My body will go on autopilot and I’ll fall into the roars; perhaps the thoughts and expressions locked inside my mind will flow freely out onto the paper I press in front of my eyes. What a turmoil of a situation, wishing to go brain dead to release its contents, but having to live not in the present, past, or future?

Eventually, I conclude, the TV static will turn into a dull buzz, its roar forgot. Even demons, I realize, must sleep too.