in the morning you are so full of light. you walk and walk, overflowing.
indulgent, you say when you text her, and you are. the two of you luxuriate, slowly becoming enveloped. this is one of your skills, luxuriating.
you would do it again forever.
but you gorged yourself, saved no joy for R and the evening: you exhaust each other then, perhaps temperamentally so. to you, her problems are so simple. to her, yours.
"what do you even want, you think?"
"the same as everyone else?"
"well I want a stable, long term relationship with someone who loves me. Maybe a family."
"ah. well that's what I want too"
"then what's with all the choices?"
perhaps also something that subsumes you entirely, makes everything into that which it is not. a searing white light: purification. there are two types of people: those to whom at a base level all of it is tenable, and the rest. it is for this reason that you struggle with job applications.
you had thought, somehow, that you and R were exactly the same. but you still get ice cream, eat it at the park, see the landscape from the roof of her apartment. you linger. and at last manage to wrest a few moments of true presence from the evening.
you talk with A about social accumulation, states that eject you from polite society. sometimes you can speak of the past as if it was a thought occurring to you anew, like you’d never really considered it before. ah, it was one long unending disaster, wasn't it.
later you're cleaning out the old apartment, throwing away people's tchotchkes. kintsugi bust, trashed. industrial microwave amplifier, kept, tentatively. a thick Nixon biography, you cannot decide. almost comically dusty, because it can't really be that old.
after skimming an uninspired page in the middle, you leave it. you aren't that nostalgic, even if you try to be. you kept V's cigarettes, though. plastic bag of them in your new apartment. only there because you hid them on top of the bookshelf so you could give her just one each month, until you yourself lost them.
she said when you met that she could remember every single cigarette, in a long perfect catalogue. so you would stand outside the apartment with her, when she smoked, after the two of you made dinner perhaps, just watching. you knew it had to be you, there, next to her. part of her catalogue.
you think about how you write. hiding, always hiding. you know nothing in life but this. you just needed to meet one person who didn't smoke. you wanted bad things to happen to you, so they did. conviction now that everything would be okay if only V still spoke to you. that everything will be until A stops.