Letter from the Gulag III
In case you were wondering
Dear reader,
I slept in today, as every day I wake up later and later so that today I finally rolled out of bed at 1 p.m. The smell of spring and the mew from a lost seagull entered my window with information that there is still life beyond these walls and that maybe I should live it. The sad, bleak boy inside of me wishes it would stay cold and rainy, just until I figure it all out; but nothing stops without you, sometimes it goes on evermore absolutely, until it appears that as it carries on without a thought of your absence, perhaps, you think, you deserve to live it too.
I still find broken shards of glass from a desk I had slapped when a girl, who once loved me, made me upset. I can’t remember that argument, but I miss her—that very person in that very moment, I miss her. We are the only beings with the (involuntary) capacity to be haunted by the intangible recollections of memory, that arrest us when we smell the fragrance of some passerby that reminds us of mother, when she used to spray the stuffed bear when she was going out so that I could cuddle it and believe she was with me, or some cooked meal echoing through the apartment halls that smells like a family behind those doors; hear a song that we think we have known before then but just can’t-quite-put-ourselves-to-grasp-it feeling; innocuously touch the skin of someone and then remember what it was like to hold hands and feel the intoxication of what forever would be like in love. How can I say all this without admitting that I am in agony?
The sun is setting now. I stepped out briefly for a walk with cousin and only after the meal that served as breakfast and lunch (and likely dinner), did I sit again to continue this. The sun now perforates through the window and is shining its diminishing dusty yellow rays onto my face, and that makes me feel alone. I often wondered what sharing a life with someone would be like, what it would require. And I think I am convinced it means feeling the sun set, the breeze between the beams, the prussian blue of a late evening summer, the smell of autumn roll from August into September because it smells like the first day of school; and I think it means knowing that she feels it too.
So many people in the world. No one belongs to me.
Jesus, in case you were wondering. You should hug someone today.
Earnestly yours,