“I want to write a book about nothing,” he said. “About ordinary lives. Plain. Uneventful. Boring even. There’s happiness there. That’s life.” I looked at him from across the table. I commended his ambition. All the same, I could see past his lie. He would not be happy with an ordinary life. I don’t think I would be either.

I am, for the first time in the very long time, in anger. I am not angry, I am not screaming, I am not consumed by it in the way that I am used to. I dragged myself out of the ocean of misery and sadness that I was wading in directionless yesterday and found myself upon a field of flames. I let it singe my fingers but it does not take me. And yes, I feel alive.

I believe I have, at this point, completely and utterly lost my fucking mind. But in a very different kind of way compared to the mind losing that I’m used to. These days, instead of the breakdown and collapsing onto the floor and crying, unable to speak, unable to think, unable to do anything but feel and have those feelings eviscerate my soul and grind it into whatever kind of fake wood my floor is made out of leaving me irrefutably and irreparably empty, alone, and hopeless, yeah now instead of that I have bangs. Fake bangs, but still. Still a breakdown? Oh for sure. Pretty sure bangs are the one most generally socially accepted manifestation of female identity crises. Preferable to the historical pattern? Most definitely.

The city explodes every morning you leave it. On the train you watch the buildings in Harlem catch fire in the glare of the sun. Steel melt like cheap mascara. Fire escapes vanish into asphalt. Bricks undo their jigsaw. Everything around you crumbles like faith. The screams crash through your headphones. You want to come back later, touch the char, read their stories off your hand like newspaper ink. But instead you hope the ground will open up and swallow them whole before they realize they have nowhere to go. In their white noise and toasty air you close your eyes. You go to sleep. There’s nothing you can do anyway.

All that I cannot see, but my friends see for me.

You are alone in an apartment that is not yours. The walls are white here, like the cabinets and the doors and the sheets of the king sized bed you sleep on the edge of. If you throw your arm over you can rest your whole hand on the cold floor. They are white too, so white that you feel embarrassed by the random abstractions of hair trailing the few places you feel comfortable enough to just be. But you settle on leaving it all there. Because nothing else in the room tells you that anyone really lives here. You open drawers to find them empty, two closets sparsely filled albeit with designer clothes, a white keyboard piano the roommate has to impress girls covered in dust, a balcony with no chairs. You ask why the room is so empty and he tells you he doesn’t have time to decorate. But to you it’s not a matter of decorating. It’s a matter of living.

The day you stop writing is the day a boy tells you he likes that you are grounded. And you aren’t. And you weren’t. But you want to be. You want so badly to be that you lock up the words from before, the words that told the truth of who you are, of what you fear, of all that you want but can never have, you shield them from the eyes that will never even bother to look for them and you pretend that you were never like that. You were always grounded. You think about deleting them until you realize it would be a bit like killing a part of yourself. There was a time where you wouldn’t have hesitated.

It has been a month. I locked the site and stopped writing. But I suppose I’m back now. Because every once in a while, the cycle comes back around, and I remember what it’s like to have something to say. To have things to need to put down on paper. To have phrases float around in my head that I want to remember and build into something bigger. I don’t know exactly where I’ve been. But I’ve been thinking. And living. And changing. I’ve cut back on some vices, and oddly enough I’ve gained a couple different ones. So net neutral. But I know that in a while, those will cycle through too, and the person I am in another month won’t be the one writing this.

It’s always when someone asks that you realize you do not know who you are. At least I apparently don’t. What do I do? What do I like? Who am I? Who do I want to be? I know nothing. But the thing is I do. The days I spend awake are not nothing. But when I need to answer, I just disappear. The kind of spell where you can’t find gem if you’re looking for it. But if you’re not, there it is. He says, what music do you listen to, and I pull out an uno reverse card and slap it on the table. Because I’d rather listen than talk. And I’d rather learn than share. And I’ll say oh I like that to. The person I am is a slippery fucker and as much as I don’t want to be, I can’t seem to help it. Hiding is just oh so easy.

In the quarter before the pandemic hit, I took a creative writing class on memoirs. We’d sit around the square of tables that rolled if you ever even tried to lean on them, in the basement of the building that a person who once lived in the room right next to mine jumped from. And on the days that I would make it to class, I’d stand outside and see the wrinkled flowers on the steps, the candles no longer lit, rain having pooled in the wax that the fire once pushed away, the words written in his honor that he never got to hear when it mattered, and I’d wonder if that was exactly where his body landed. I’d wonder where he went after. I’d wonder if he’d gotten what he wanted. I’d hope that he did. And I’d go to class a few minutes late. There were no windows in there, but it didn’t matter because it was never sunny anyway. Not the way I remember it. But then again, I remember things wrong all the time.

I do not like the smell of covid. Usually, you can tell when you’re at the tail end of a sickness because it’s right when you realize you can breathe easier. And the hours and days before then, when you forgot when it felt like, when you thought you’d never get to remember what it felt like, suddenly begin to fade. That fade always has a smell. Colds smell like Spring. Not what Spring actually smells like, but what you smell when you think of the grass and and the dew and the flowers. Sinus infections smell like the richness of chocolate with the sharpness of mint. The flu smells like if you stomped on a blueberry and it crackled like a dry leaf. Yes, I am aware that that is not a smell. But it is. They’re not exactly pleasant smells, not anything you’d try to make a candle out of, but they’re not at all bad. Maybe it’s like the opposite of medicine that everyone hates because it’s so strongly associated with feeling like shit, since this I associate with the recovery. But I also think most medicines taste like shit regardless, and I also know that a lot of the time that’s on purpose to prevent abuse. I’m always a little sad when I can’t smell the illness anymore. I won’t be sad this time.

There’s a riddle that used to go around, and it was supposed to test if you were capable of thinking like a psychopath. A girl attends the funeral of someone in her family, and sees a boy she doesn’t know, but a boy that is cute, a boy she likes. She doesn’t get his name or his number, but wants to see him again. How would she do that? Kill someone else in the family, obviously. Is it concerning that I got the answer right on the first try? Though I am decidedly not a psychopath. As far as ills go, this past month has been a fortunate sequence of physical ones. Alarming as it might be that my body may be falling apart, it’s liberating to be able to point to something so tangible when I sleep more than a person should, when I am tired always, passive to a fault. This, everyone understands. Besides, it’s not so comforting to think about dying when you have a fever of 103 it feels like you actually are.

There’s this building on my way home from work. It’s not special. I can’t even tell you where exactly it is. But on the days that I leave early enough to walk into the sunset, the lights on in the building may as well be reflections off the reflections from across the street from the sun off the Hudson. And the way that it stands, tall and tapered, makes me think of taking a knife and running it up along the side peering down at the street the way you would scale a fish. And one by one the windows would fall to the street and shatter into knives of their own into the people walking below and the lights inside the units would snuff. I climb up and peak inside at the people who are living and whisper the questions that will pull their ghosts out by the wrist, who are they in the darkness? Who are they without their faces and busy lives, their menial tasks and lingering pasts? I tear their bodies into pieces, burn their letters, toss their jewels. And when they, at last, realize they are nothing, I realize they are just like me.

Hello again, it’s been ages. Well it hasn’t really, but when I am away the words that build up inside my head come to rest in my hands, full, heavy, swirling with a confident certainty but also with the half life of a hydrogen isotope. The hours that pass as I lie unmoving press away at these thoughts I once had, water drops on folded sheets of tissue, and when I finally wake, I find my arms aching and my fingers stiff, clutching at a scrambled mess of letters, empty vestiges of all that I once thought and all that I thought I knew. I string them up in random orders looking for sense, logic, familiarity, I calculate the permutations, I solve the puzzle. No. I do not. I never can. Instead I give a trick answer and erase the past few days. If there was nothing there to begin with, there is nothing that I could have lost.

In the spring break of 3rd year, my friends and I found ourselves in a V for Vendetta themed bar hidden in a corner alcove of the cobbled and winding streets of Prague. Masks on, drinks in hand, we went around in a circle declaring what phrase it is that we lived by. I said nothing lasts. Fairy said everything passes. And if you cut through the language, dust away the subjective connotations that crowd around the sharp edges of its core, we really just said the same thing. Even if we didn’t mean to.

He is back. He is the bitter black of a painted canvas, the shimmer in the grooves, the edge you think he might have missed and the light refracted from a faraway bulb that draws you near only to step closer and find that it is all only him. There is no sun here. The rain glazes his surface and in your thirst you drink in the gray until it spills out your eyes. You feel for the ground and press your body down, crawling backwards for a door, for a vent, for a wall, for a safe. There are no corners here. You press the bulb into your hands and inhale once before it shatters. You slice blindly through his tar, his fog, his love until you feel canvas. You tear away at his fibers and run. Sprint. Because anywhere is better than there. And when you stop feeling the burn of his stain in your lungs you finally dare to open your eyes. You wish you never did. There is only him. There will only ever be him.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who liked to sleep because she liked to dream. She’d drift down the bends of a silver river, eyes heavy as coins until her soul sank deep into the sand and watched as her body floated away. She wakes up in London, in the arms of One, in the park where the sky is only ever a muted shade of pink. She is almost always with friends, and when she is not, she is walking the streets of a city at night. She does not carry pepper spray. She is told she is loved. She does not get tired. She performs without fear. She talks without filter. She fights and she wins. She already knows she will always win. If she were given a choice to have everything in a simulation or to live life as it is, she would take it. She already has.

All I feel is fatigue. And every morning I wake up tired, I am terrified. Because I see his shadows in the blinds, in the glare off the mirror, the space between the lines of the work I am supposed to do but do not. I feel his fog burrowing into the folds of my mind, calcifying, spreading, eating away at the fibers in my back. I lay enveloped in his familiar scent on the pillow I had only just washed. I wash it again. And in the mornings, he cradles my face in his hands and pulls me back. Escape in to me, he says. I force my eyes open and his figure is only smoke. I tell myself that he is not back. It’s all in my head. Of course it is. I put on earrings so large it hurts to lay down. I tell my body to do what it is supposed to. This is not the time for this. He is not back. Maybe he never left.

I am cold and dead inside. But at least I am clever. And at last I’m starting to actually understand finance. Though the counter to that is maybe realizing that what I’m doing now isn’t what I want to continue to be doing. But that’s something to tackle after the test. I’ve been making progress on studying, and apparently being able to focus for an entire Saturday and get through half a book is not a normal occurrence according to my other analysts. I’ve noticed that whenever I’m in the office, I’m always inordinately hungry. Constantly. And yet when I’m at home, I sometimes don’t even begin to feel the hunger until after lunch. I can’t figure out why. It’s because food is free there and you little bundle of anxiety can’t help but stress eat.

I’ve been on a musicals kick, likely due to Glee being my background show of choice for the past week or so. And after my test, I’m going to go see all of them. This is a sad goddamn song. But this is not a sad post. This is a post about things coming together. About appreciating these few days where somehow everything is working out. Because I know that at some point something will unravel, but I also know that when it happens, it won’t break me. It’s about raising a glass to the person that I am now. Because I wake up early and look in the mirror and like what I see. I love that I’m killing it at work. I love that I’m not procrastinating (as much). I love that sometimes I can manage to run two miles without stopping. Love those qualifiers there. I love that I seem to have found myself and some kind of balance in life. And I love that at around 11:30pm on a Wednesday night, the part of the upper west side that cradles the edge of central park is empty and quiet. It’s so quiet I can hear him whispering things to make me laugh. I hear the rhythm in the clack of the boots I debated for half an hour whether or not to wear. I hear the buzz of every streetlight we pass. And when he puts my arm around me the city is not a city. I drink in the quiet and forget everything else.