Everyone's a passenger in your life and that's fine.

I don't feel enough to write pretty things anymore

Oh, the lights of magdala, flicker dimly on the shore, holy sailor sailing on the sea." The song was playing on her iPod, slow and forlorn, the night me and Cass shared our first kiss. Cass had been nervous, she said she had never done this before, and she couldn't believe this was happening. Me neither, I told her. She took my hands in hers then, great brown eyes honest and sincere as she solemnly reaffirmed her affections for me. I had to look away, my head circling with thoughts of the time when I was 12, how nana had pointed to two men holding hands down at the infant formula aisle of Target and told me 'wouldn't you look at all that sin'— "Magdalene, don't wrap your dreams in sorrow, save them for tomorrow if it comes." —Tingles radiated down my spine as Cass planted kisses on my left eyelid. My eyes were closed, her lips were soft, everything felt right, and I'd thought if I continued squeezing my eyes shut, maybe nana wouldn't look down from heaven, maybe nana wouldn't see— "Oh, if heaven were a lady don't you know you'd been the one." —If heaven didn't exist, would Cass have been the one? "Look at me." Cass' voice was a murmur, and I didn't think I had ever heard a tone spoken to me so gentle, so filled with love. "Sarah, what's wrong?" Nothing was wrong, yet everything was. But I couldn't tell Cass that, because I already knew what she would say. Faint creases appeared on her forehead as she looked me over, then her fingers fumbled for the buttons on her iPod, turning it off. And then it was just me and her, no more dirge, no more voices of Mark Kozelek and Hannah Marcus intertwining in perfect harmony— "Sarah." —Leaning forward, she pressed her lips to mine, chaste and tender, and how—it didn't burn like hellfire, did not sear like the heat of damnation. Instead, it'd warmed, slow and mellow, like chestnuts roasting on an open grill, or cherry logs kindling in the fireplace on a winter's night snowed in— "Cass." —I pulled back, she breathed in, and then I caught her on the lips once more, and then again, and again. We ended up stealing kisses through the night.

Most nights it is like sinking into the ocean.

Lying on top of spreads a faded grey and tucked beneath sheets a midnight blue

I am allowed to feel tired.

So I let the waves of exertion course over me.

They sweep me in, they tug me under.

The nightlight in the corner serves as anchor for the times when i don’t feel safe.

I close my eyes, I try to sleep. I tell myself that I am not drowning.

I remember that night out in Cornwall when I took the stars and planted it in your hands it was my promise of new beginnings but you could not bear to look at them for they were much too bright. on hindsight, a flower would have sufficed. but I wanted to give you everything. I was greedy, for the both of us and in my own way I thought I was loving you, yet I was blind to the things you did to yourself in the dark. Was I not good enough? Even then I was only thinking of myself while you were out playing with penknives and carving tools; leaving marks across porcelain skin that were so ugly I had to pretend not to notice even as I felt it all in my heart. That's all in the past now. Wringing hands and counting tears can't turn back time so forgive me if I don't even try. I still think back to the memories of that night where I planted the stars in your hands and I find it funny how the ways things are today have me planting flowers instead. Now I'm planting flowers instead.

In all honesty, I'm very good at playing dead. Very good at staying in my space and not poke around into the things you don't want me to see. Everybody has secrets, right? I can understand that. I can roll over and close both eyes, and you don't even need to ask. I know how that might come across as indifference. But it's not like that, not like that at all. I do care. I care a whole lot. When you care too much, you don't seek to find out the ways someone can hurt you in the dark.

It's funny how often I still think about you.

It’s been four months since we broke up and she moved out of the apartment and sometimes I’m still appalled by how easily connections can be severed. One minute she could be sitting in her little boy shorts eating ice cream out of a tub in front of my tv, and the next minute she could be moving halfway across the continent without so much as a goodbye text. A goodbye, text. Like. Did we not just spend two years of our lives together? Bare our souls, share our hearts? Did she not use my perfume every morning since the spring of 2015 and did she not hog my blankets every night for equally as long? Did all that not just happen? I knew every facet of her personality, I probably still do, and now we are not even friends on fuckin facebook. Hi, hello, how are you. I can never quite wrap my head around the many ways of relationship disposal and how clinically effective they can be. Do people have this special detergent whereby they can simply wipe off unpleasant stains on the heart, or do people have a special pair of scissors that allows them to rend connections as effortlessly as one cuts the strings of a marionette? If so, where do I get them? Because I’m still trying to get over everything about her and the acrid imprints of a failed relationship. Four months is a decent stretch and during that time I’ve been doing things. I’ve been running - not away from things, but towards a steady emotional state. I’ve been working, going out, eating right, having fun and just when I think I’m getting better, there’s always that one night where people start talking to me about love or start mentioning something new about her I no longer have the privilege of knowing anything of. When people do that, my mind unravels and it always brings me back to the night where I see her pack her bags—pack her bags like so many memories can just be crammed into two standard 77 by 45—and walk right out the front door without a single look back. Like babe, don’t go. If I could say that line a dozen more times, it would make for an even hundred. Why don’t people ever want to stay? Why don't people ever want to fix what’s broken? I don’t think I can live with that. Maybe it’s a different philosophy, but I don’t think I can live with the idea of throwing away an entire connection just because the severed edges are jagged and it might be difficult to put some of the pieces back.

There are some things they don't tell you when you fall in love. Things you never know, until you tumble and experience hurt for the very first time. No one tells you how love can feel so much like isolation. The way you can be lying close to another person, skin to skin, heart to heart; hear their breathing rise and fall each night  in the same familiar rhythm, the same familiar beat and yet, when you close your eyes and go to sleep,  it will never feel more like loneliness in the dark. They don't tell you that secrets are inevitable evils that will undo you. No one teaches how words unspoken are words that will hurt the most. They will hurt you so much but you won't even know; can only feel it in the way the toxic silence corrodes you from the inside out. Fills your thoughts with a sickening slew of images your mind creates  to bridge the blanks— whoever said 'ignorance is bliss' has surely never fallen quite this hard. Likewise for artists who draw red cartoon hearts cracked in the centre. No one tells you hearts can be broken in more than two pieces. No one tells you they can very well break into a million.

Sometimes I worry my brain is deteriorating.I know what you’re going to say, that I’m only 23 and I shouldn’t be agonising about mental decline. You reckon I’ll be the sort of person who at 35 worries about the onset of dementia. But it’s not like I’m completely overreacting. My brain doesn’t work the way it used to (I’m a little afraid it might have something to do with the smoking. They say that smoking destroys gray matter and thins the brain’s cortex. There’s a statistically significant decrease in smoker’s IQ compared to non-smokers, studies say). When I was in college, I did smoke a little less, and everything did make a lot more sense—not that I’m making a correlation here, any correlation at this point is likely to be spurious—it’s just that I felt like I could do anything back then. When I looked at an equation, I saw patterns and I saw logic. I saw that sigma here cancel out with sigma there and if I multiplied T by one-eighth here I could balance out the T on the other side perfectly and if I tinkled a little more I could always get a proof of beta hat converging to a well-defined random variable in the limit. Back then, it was easy. Now, nothing converges. Nothing makes sense. Not even when I look at numbers or graphs or anything substantial that can be quantified. When I look at a point on a line that intercepts with a point on another line, I’m supposed to get a value at the point of interception and that value is supposed to tell me something, but it doesn’t. The only thing it tells me now is that I’m too unintelligent to figure it out and too slow to make a killing in the stock market. If you were to ask me something like: oh, what are the impacts of rising inflation in the US on the Chinese trade-weighted renminbi, all I would do is look at you blankly and tell you that I do not know. A part of me thinks I’m supposed to know. But I do not. I used to know. But now I don’t. And I realize it’s like this because I don’t really care. When you don’t really care about something, you don’t seek to find out. From inflation in the US to increased oil sands production in Canada to property market boom in Hong Kong—why do these things matter? When I die, will these things matter to me?—and I would mull this over in my head and wonder with real regret why I didn’t study to become a vet. I know I’m too old to be this apathetic about current affairs, but maybe it’s because I’m older that’s why I’m so apathetic. The more I see things, the more I realise everything is just one big bag of white noise, that the error term is infinite—as I’m saying this, my metrics professor just keeled over somewhere with an aneurysm, and as I’m writing this out I’m realizing this counts as a type of cursing and I really ought not to do that, not that I belief in karma. You know how patterns are supposed to come together and eventually form a bigger, much clearer picture? Yet, the more patterns I observe, the more fuzzy things get (I wouldn’t say it's complicated, because things are actually not complicated, it’s only us that make it so) and I soon recognise that, for me, the world is a big picture of static and gray-scale dots and sometimes all I need is for this entire din to quell. For me, the perfect heaven would be perfect silence. They say that when you die and you ascend, you’ll find yourself next to Christ, but I don’t want that. I don’t want that unless the word Christ is synonymous with "great giant vacuum that sucks you in” then sure, go ahead and call me a Christian. I don’t mean for it to, but my less than stellar personal thoughts do bleed out into daily conversations and my friends tell me that’s not ok. They say I should try gardening if I’m ever in need of release and all I could do is look at them in horror because there’s nothing I detest more than watching plants grow and die. I did try to find solace in writing, but I soon realised I’m no good at that either.

For example, I'd wanted to write about a man kissing a girl for the first time beneath the moonlight. I wanted to describe the scene, to make it seem romantic and maybe say something about how great the girl’s hair looks, tumbling across her shoulders in soft locks with the moonlight streaming through, or say something about the way she laughs, how it’s a captivating bell-like tinkle that draws you in. But I can’t. I can’t write like this because I can’t describe things I don’t see. When I look at a girl, I don’t think about the way her hair tumbles across her shoulders or the way she laughs or how her eyes may “possibly glisten like globular nebulas” if I gaze into them intensely enough. All I think about is how best I can get her into my bed by midnight and how fast I can shove her out the front door come morning light before she even has time to learn my name or break my heart. The same goes for when Josephine’s best friend died. 'Josephine’s best friend died.’ This line has been sitting in my drafts for eons and I can’t help but feel like I’ve written myself in a corner here because really, so what if her best friend died? Logically, what comes next would be sadness and feelings and a whole bunch of tiresome emotions, but it’s the same thing where I cannot write about something I do not feel. But I’m told that people don’t want to read about things like that. They want to read about growth and discovery and things that make them feel. They want to read about things that are deep and thought provoking and, this I’ve been told, why would someone even bother writing something, if they have nothing worthwhile to contribute. What does sadness feel like? What comes with sadness? Tears are too cliché, acting out is too banal. How can I best quantify sadness on a piece of paper that will make people understand?

He'll trade Colorado if she takes him with her. If she'll only say the word, he’ll pack his bags, hop in the shotgun seat of her beat up Toyota Tundra, and watch her gun out of the driveway to go wherever, no questions asked. But she doesn't say, and he doesn't press, so against the backdrop of the skies painted a soft orange hue by the rising sun, he listens to the sound of engine starts up from the garage, and watches as the glow of her tail-lights spills through frosted windows before fading into pinpricks between the pines.

It'll be a whole two months before he hears her voice again. And the way the phone rings at a quarter past twelve, it's almost like déjà-vu, because he's been woken up this way more times than he cares to count.

"Hey sweetie." It's her voice by his ear, and though worn and muffled by the road and background static, it's her voice. And it's so familiar, so unmistakable, so near, that if he closes his eyes and pictures hard enough, he can almost see her standing by the phone booth, all wrapped in her grey-green army jacket with the hood drawn up, and wearing that dusty pair of light blue jeans ripped at the knees, with her left hand tucked into the front pocket while her right cradles the phone.

She says, "I wanna see you again--" There's a pause on the other end. It's a cue, so he holds his breath and waits for what's coming, because the script they're following now is one they've both rehearsed a thousand times before. "--But I'm stuck in colder weather, maybe tomorrow will be better.." Her words trail off with the wind, and wherever she is, he knows it's somewhere very cold, because the gales are howling hard and they blow through the mouthpiece from the other side. He hears the frost in her voice, feels the tremble in her words and for a second, just a second, he allows himself the fantasy that she too, is shivering from want and loneliness, not from colder weather.

Then, right about now, as it always is, the mechanical voice starts up; a flat, heartless tone that signals near the end of a call. Time is short, but he knows how these things go, so despite the wound in his chest, despite the words he has been bottling up for the past two months, he says none of anything beyond the things she wants to hear, because in the end it's all a script, and they already know the lines by now.

"It's a shame about the weather," he says, "but I know soon we'll be together. I can't wait 'til then." And years from now, he'll remember the voice in the back of his head, thin and whispering, telling him: no, I'm not going to wait, because you are never going to change.

There's a soft beeping. And he's alone once more in an empty room, on an empty bed, holding on to the ghost of a woman who is miles and miles away. And as he slowly puts the phone down, he thinks to himself that it's a funny thing, how God made him a lover, made her runner, puts them in a circle to go round and round; lost and found and lost again.

On the worst nights when my self-esteem has hit absolute bottom and some twisted part of me thinks I actually deserve the hurt, I like to do a little mental exercise.

I like to picture you with the woman after me.

She will be pretty, I reckon. You seem to like the ones with long, brown hair and eyes an innocent baby blue; lips so pink like they have never been bruised. That is how you like them.

I like to picture the way the two of you meet. How it will probably start off at one of the high-end wine bars down at the Boulevard. The ones where it costs half a hundred for a glass of house red and twice as much for a dessert white.

She will find you sitting by the bar—broken —I suppose, tears stinging your eyes and hurt stringing your lips.

What was it you liked to say? "Sob stories draw people in."

She will hear about me. But only the terrible things. How I'd lied and cheated and toyed with your heart till, poor and heavy as it is, the hapless thing finally cracked and broke into a million tiny shards.

She will hear about the monster who always made you feel like the smallest person in the room; who never laughed at any of your jokes or shown pride in any of your achievements. She will hear about this nasty witch who made you feel unworthy and unloved at every turn; who took you for everything you have to give, but never gave back much in return.

She will take your hand through all these things and she will nod, and god bless her heart, she will wonder how someone like me, could ever end up with someone like you

and oh god

I hope the day never comes when she finds out how; that she'll never become the next heroine in this sordid little tale you like to tell— the same way I'd found out about the girl before me, and how that girl before me found out about the one before her.

I hope history does not repeat itself again.

Does not repeat in the way you kiss her. Honeyed and sweet at the start but all too terrible at the end. Terrible in the way it starts tasting exactly like scotch and whiskey in the late nights you come home to me drunk, slobbering heat in my ear whilst begging for me to make you whole. I hope you will never taint her with those lips that taste like regret in the morning, and I hope you will never paint her skin in the same hateful shades of black and blue like the ones you left on me with stark abandon. They were ugly, mind; peppered carelessly without structure, without beauty, without love.

I hope she'll never have to know how cruel you can be. I hope she never finds herself to be like me.

i just don't have it in me to find meaning.

11 more days until the dreaded date.  My birthday, which I hate. Every year when I see it looming on my calendar, I feel nauseous. When people ask me how I want to spend it, I feel sick.  Why would I want to celebrate the day I was born when my greatest wish is for it to have never happened.

Laguna Colorada, Potosi, Bolivia, 2011 by James Schreck

. by Careless Edition on Flickr.