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There’s a song where the beat only drops one-third into the melody and I think you would have liked it.
Are you coming home tonight? I’m leaving the lights on.
To be who I am means to be haunted at twenty-nine. Two hundred-year-old bones with screws and bandages all over a carved bed.
You laugh and with a deep sense of self-annihilation, I make myself exist more in your world.
You’re lovely. The kind of person people write nice things about in yearbooks. I laugh and shake my head when you want to know about the bike accident because there is an existential risk. I don’t have a single photo of myself from high school, do you know why? I am a man who takes pity on himself since love is for suckers and I am too desperate for people to see me, but not the full me with his head resting against the shore, feeling seasick. There is a dead desire inside of this rattling cage in the name of connections, one that Quest would sacrifice his inner life to fulfil while I stand by idly.
Call me, I want to say when you are in the midst of a conversation, engaging with people I could easily talk to too, if I were to open up.
Is there anything left to preserve me once I start pleading my case?
Most days I feel like an endangered species, cold stones underneath bare feet and people gawk and poke but no one is making any effort. Your gaze lowers through a sob story that you have heard for the twentieth time and I wonder, at what point will I be too much for you? The thought enters me like the beat of that song, one-third into the beating of my eardrums and I am looking at the boxes behind this cupboard you will never see, a literal metaphor on this cycle of repetition where you say hi to me and I forget the lump inside my lungs when I greet you again, accordingly.
Hah.
After a year of failing grad school, perhaps Nightowl needs your love more than I ever do.
I died and lived and crashed and am crashing depending on whose route you are rotating, a paradoxical existence to new narratives.
Oh sweetheart, in a world as cruel as ours, I wasn’t born to be a forever after.
I wasn’t born to be anything, at all.
Blink. Start. Restart.
Once the game returns to its original screen of a blurry desktop that isn’t mine, I wait and light up the lights.
Are you coming home to me this time?
Will you say hello?