CW: Suicidal ideation
One
Trying something. Not sure if this is for the me I am today or the one who might read these words again some tomorrow. My friend told me that “nothing’s wrong when nothing’s true,” which he heard in a song, and tonight, it’s a line to cling to.
Two
The edge between morning and night has become blurrier, but it was past midnight when I thought of how waiting for sleep comes always in sadness these days. That, or it’s a poisoned sleep. The poison still feels preferable though. It leaves less space for sad.
Three
11:11. Funny how there’s some things you never could stop wishing for.
You do stop wishing for people. These can be replaced. You can use 11:11 to wish for someone else’s happiness, but really I think this bargain with time is a selfish concept. You wish for yourself. I do. Benjamin got it wrong.
I do wish for you to be mine, and for me to be yours. I’ll wish it all for me. Every time.
Four
Today is grandmother’s summer. I can tell because autumn is not supposed to warm like this. It’s the seasons pretending to be something they are not. Because even they’re subject to this wanting.
Some say it is a second youth, short-lived and ill-timed. Out of place.
Perhaps, it could be something good as well. After all, good things have happened before in this season.
Perhaps, it is a gift despite its fleeting nature.
Babyne lito.
Six
Six might have been better to skip. Not that it was an intentional skipping by any means.
It’s just everyone knows six is the devil’s number, except I don’t know why exactly that is. It’s actually supposed to be a triplet of sixes, for them to have their full Evil effect. Curious. I did some reading, and there’s a bit to do with triangles and primes and a lot more to do with Revelations, except, there, they say it’s “the man’s number” and somehow that’s twisted into The Beast. It’s also the sum of all the numbers on a roulette wheel. I haven’t played roulette, but that sounds to be the Truth. Roulette seems very anti-Christ in general.
Seven
The only thought is empty.
Eight
Apples. I don’t know anyone else who finds the same joy I do from them. Maybe I’ve taken it to the extreme, but their tastes hold memories — anchors in my own chronology of being. I’d eat the core too, and someone once asked me if I knew it held cyanide. I don’t think I care that much at all. If the seeds I’ve ingested have planted their death inside me, I figure I have a few more years to go.
Their taste holds memories that root me in the past, yet somehow, still surprise. My friend asked to have a bite of mine, and a wave of sad hit me because someone else used to ask for bites of my apples. They’d never eat the whole thing, and it would make me unreasonably frustrated. And then that would remind me of someone else. Apples and lemons, and lemons and apples. Strange how I have tied myself to these fruits. It’s nice, on one hand, because fruits are the products of one’s labour. But fruits rot so quick, and maybe the seeds are starting to get to me. These days there’s something rotten inside, and I couldn’t pick it out even if I wanted to.
Nine
We’re not responsible for the thoughts we have past midnight. Or rather, we don’t think about the responses they will inevitably evoke.
Past midnight, I thought about everything I had been and could never be. I thought about lyrics and about lovers, and how everyone somehow writes the same thing over and over. How could I escape this repetition?
I went to sleep with this guilt, and still woke up to the sun.
Ten
Warm, warm hands ran through my hair. They were tougher than my own, yet they moved with a gentleness I don’t think I have known before. They traced my neck, my arms and my back, painting invisible strokes. I think they were trying to let the ease flow into me, and they touched my iced fingers and held them, as if making a promise.
I thought if I closed my eyes tight enough, I could get my mind to stop. It wouldn’t though. It just raced faster and faster, the slower the warm hands made their caress. Until the hands stopped rather than my mind. Much, much too soon.
Eleven
You didn’t talk to me today. And I suppose I didn’t say anything either. So I searched for an excuse for you to remember me, wondering what I could possibly ask.
The truth is, the list of questions I have is nearly infinite. But no one ever has infinity.
Twelve
When will we at last decide? If it’s all sadness within joy? Joy within sadness? What has been hidden, and what can we find?
Thirteen
It’s absence again. The eve of something. The cusp and the edge. The border. You don’t know what you’re about to fall into. Only that you’ve stepped off a cliff, and now you’re resting on a ledge before something blows you over once more.
Fifteen
I missed fourteen. It was supposed to be an important number. Until it wasn’t and perhaps it never really was.
I’ve travelled forward in time to the place where it no longer matters the same. It is, at once, still, and it moves quicker. For all I know, the dream I’ve entered is more real than usual.
Sixteen
It’s here. I feel closer to the thing I am chasing. It’s more of a feeling really, and fleeting. In this place I could walk to no end, and neither the cold or the wind and maybe not even the rain could hold me still. My friend said that distance makes things worth more, and I wonder if this is some parallel truth to absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps, the air is fresher here because it was too far away to breathe before. Perhaps, one day it will choke me too.
Today. It gave me life.
Eighteen
This life. It takes so much that I really do think time has become different. In living, you forget the date and the hour. And I wonder, at what point does the dream turn fully into delusion?
Nineteen
Today I walked among the dead. The greats and the nobodies. Still no matter where my gaze happened to fall, all I could sense was the breathing around me. The trees and the graves.
Twenty-One
Now I travel back in time, and I’ve lived a day I didn’t write. Perhaps, someone should instead write a book about us, my friend mused, as we sat tucked in the warmth of a café corner. I think we deserve to be the subjects of a book, she whispered. Subjects. I looked at her and laughed in agreement.
Hot wine coursed through my veins.
Twenty-Two
I thought I could come back and separate the chunks. That breaks could serve as chapters, and that I wouldn’t have to reread the past pages. I was wrong, as I am too often this autumn.
I still don’t know whether I am the subject or the author but either way it seems like I don’t get to choose the characters in this life’s novel. They walk in and out of each sentence as they please. And I don’t even know the title.
Twenty-Three
I can’t remember when I could last wake so easily with the sun’s rise. It’s my body, longing to still be elsewhere. It clings to the time I have lost, even though really, I’ve gained it. Maybe it’s smarter than I am. It’s urging me to get up and see what I haven’t in months. Recall the colour of the sky before the sun takes centre stage.
It’s making me wonder, really, whether the living starts at night or in the morning. Is it with midnight’s chime that we turn the page, or is it when our eyes first open again? Must things close before they can open?
Twenty-Four
If there were a day of the week where you’d pour almond milk out onto your not-even-favourite cereal and find some sort of goopy, pasty coloured gunk flowing in its place, it would, without doubt, be a Tuesday.
I’ve thought this all through before. Tuesdays are meant for disappointments, and they’re too stranded in the depths of the week for there to be comfort on either side. Sunday, the day of the Lord and Rest as they say (not really), can ease you into Monday, which is like pressing the start button. So much happens in the first few minutes that you don’t even realise how quickly it flew by. Wednesday is meant for waffles and camels, so that makes it alright too somehow. Thursday is perhaps the best of them all, as anticipation propels you through the day. It’s the Eve of the week truly, and Friday comes like Christmas pour faire la fête. Saturday got the most precious spot when they were handing out assignments. It’s almost like it won too easily though, making it the default day to sleep away. Maybe you’ll have a nice brunch or something. Call your grandma.
But if there were a day to watch out for when pouring almond milk out onto your not-even-favourite cereal and finding some sort of goopy, pasty coloured gunk flowing in its place, the kind that takes away your appetite and means you can’t even have this cereal, it would, without a doubt, be a Tuesday.
Twenty-Five
This was the kind of morning that had me reading the messages I send myself sometimes. It started with a plane ride. Not of the transoceanic kind but rather the kind that flies across the continent in two hours because they caught the right jet stream or something. It had been a late flight, the sort that has you looking at all the lights twinkling below you. It had me wondering about the people. The lights were the people, and I could see the lights and knew they were hiding a story from me. Every. Single. One. And most, I’d imagine, I would never even get to know. But I saw them. Every. Single. One.
I didn’t have anything to write with then except my phone and a lack of service. So I sent the thoughts back to myself because I wanted to keep them.
Ten days later, I had written down a judgement of my friend’s that I found particularly funny. In a miserable kind of way. He said America tastes fake, and I’d say he was right.
Then the messages progressed into some kind of memory game. I’d write down the names of the books I read, their authors, to remember them all. Advice on giving a presentation en français made it in there. Some questions about anthropomorphism too. And:
We don’t need to stop to eat
How’s dad gonna eat
I don’t care about dad i am starving and need to eat something
We don’t all need to eat now
Next, some “money rules” for Europe. A phone number. More French vocabulaire. Names of songs I could make (kindly encourage) children to dance to, along with some yoga videos.
The thing is if it’s raining I can’t do lawn parties, I just can’t.
Why did I hate the rain for so long
‘Drowned in living waters
Now I’m prone to misery’
A link to “Pet Milk”.
Now it’s Russian vocabulary, and an idea for a birthday gift. Boba flavours that I don’t even like. The lemon story but in a different language this time. Questions for an American in Paris.
Life in cemetery
It’s a bit like what I am writing presently. Perhaps. Except the messages I don’t write to read but to remember.
Twenty-Six
I went to sleep wondering which bit of me is the bad part. It’s difficult to pinpoint, because we’re often blind to ourselves and the people who know us well enough to tell us often hesitate. They try to show us the good parts instead, in case we’ve forgotten. Maybe we’ve never “gotten” in the first-place because we were so busy wondering about the bad. You know it’s in you. Hiding. But you don’t know what it looks like, so how could you possibly find it?
Twenty-Seven
Tell me, what does it feel like to hold another’s hands? Does she feel anything like me?
Twenty-Eight
They say today is the last day of sun before the rains. Before the cold.
The trees are ablaze in transition. And change slows everything down.
Twenty-Nine
You hate my clichés. They’re something we circle back to. The start and end of a period. You tell me they’re a disservice to what I really mean. And perhaps you are right, but you always talk more and I say little because you freeze me.
I didn’t realise this until I stepped away from you again this morning. You froze me last year too while, inside, a bit was dying to burst through.
Thirty
We keep cutting.
Perhaps to see the colour bleed inside? To remember we’re alive? To pierce through dullness that will not cease?
Or because we cannot trust — cannot let — the other stop. Cursed by love that we’ve received. And now I can’t open my mouth, and I can’t swallow. And my bones sting, there’s a drone in my ear, and my face has gone numb too. Mirroring numbness that spreads inside?
Thirty-One
I waited to write before falling asleep, but I don’t really know what to say. I’ll write down what you told me to. My words have become bullets.