asking for it

with summer in four days' time

overcoming is comfort
endurance is a stretch
you have to learn

Yesterday, I wanted to leave it all behind.
I didn’t know what remained for me here.

Like, what if the best way I could possibly love a city is by absenting it? We apply the same logic to people all the time. I feel guilty for the mere thought of wanting to leave Richmond for the sake of leaving it. Yet this is how my favorite poem goes (Mark Strand):

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

It is such a banal sin that I may have scarcely written about it until now, but here goes: I do find things most precious in hindsight. Heartbreak has an awful way of distilling one’s experience. Giant salt reservoirs constituted a fortune, once upon a time. And life makes most sense to me when I am in transit. Life as what happens between train rides, stops for gas, etc.

But I don’t actually like to travel. Maybe what I am looking for is the feeling of leaving, of rupture. I’ve always been a masochist, you know. I haven’t indulged myself quite like this before, except maybe in leaving college. Difference being that I completed that mission, supposedly. I don’t know what I tasked myself with, in being here.

Life is still wondrous, still blooming. I do get the saddest during summer, it’s true. I don’t know what it is. Every season carries its own sacred logic, but something about the hottest part of the year is difficult for me to make sense of. I guess we’re celebrating?

I never know what there is to applaud. I didn’t go to my own graduation. I guess I’m a downer, or just committed to the process. I put my nose so close to the grass it can be hard to catch it growing.

I think by next summer, I’ll have to leave. Just to give myself something new to grieve, new to survive. That’s as close as I get to ecstasy, maybe. Am I anxious or just excited?

I hate asking for what I want. You’ve surmised as much. It’s caused issues. It has maybe kept me from that which I profess to value most, supposedly, ease, a purity of existing. To touch and be touched. I’m good at yielding to everyone except the voice that lives inside myself. It comes out here instead. I clip her wings, I pin it to the wall. Nabokov was a Taurus and a lepidopterist and such a stylist with prose, and all of these are the same to me. Married to beauty, I vowed non-interference. This has kept me alive, though less desirable, perhaps. Pitfalls of fidelity.

I used to want to die. Failing that, at some point I committed myself to tracing the patterns of the breeze. Or maybe the leaf that is agitated in his wake. If I have to exist, let it be as lightly as possible.

But I leave an impression despite myself. I hope it’s a good one. I hope it’s artful.

This is the most depressed I’ve been since I was dwelling in the court of liars last fall, and that was something different. Each summer is a more familar wave, cerulean scream: what do you do with yourself, born thing? Poor thing!

I don’t know. This is not really an essay, and definitely not a poem. If you’re asking me about genre, I offer you the lines on my palm. The birthmark on my shoulder. No matter how hard I try to file off each identifier. It’s always been just me.

The world is burning, and I’ve never been quite sure of what to do with my hands. I think I want to hold someone. I feel for it like a vase does water.

I am already free. It’s having to argue as much for the rest of one’s life that threatens to shorten it prematurely. Wherever I go, I am the absence of what was once there. I like you. Someday, I want to be selfish enough—brave enough?—to stay.