Somethings
(9. July. 2018, instagram)
I finally finished this; a year after Mags gifted it to me. Maybe that's fitting. A year. And six. I don't like writing long captions on here anymore but whatever. As with most things I write, it's mostly for myself anyway. My mind's been full of unnamed Somethings. June does that to me. I always listen to books, to what they have to say. I'm always patient. Not with this one. Unfair, I know. But the Somethings always just wanted to rip away from me, project themselves all over the pages of this. I was so impatient. This was supposed to be a book review, but it became something else.
I was supposed to have dinner. We were supposed to have ice cream. It was a Thursday. It was a Monday. No one tells you how it comes, what leaving looks like. I went to the bathroom. The other time I left a bookstore. Suddenly is the only adverb. There and not. Didion describes it in her book, running through time, reviewing, replaying, again. Again. She does it so well. Narrating the process of thought and remembering. I hate remembering.
No, that's a lie. I just hate knowing that there's only remembering left.
Sometimes I catch myself asking my ceiling, "How are you?" Frowning when I do. I never believed in ghosts, but I've always been terrible at goodbyes. I smelled lolo's pomade in his car. Only because my cousin started using it after that month happened. The maya bird in their house still talks like him. ("He's the only one that talks to it," is what my brother whispered to me when we were there. We rarely ever are anymore.) Christmas wasn't so terrible. I don’t remember New Year’s Eve. When people ask me why I whistle so well, I tell them it's because of you.
"Life happens. I love you more than one more day." Didion said she kept her husband's shoes. He'll need it to come back, she said. I wish that didn't make sense to me but I felt some kind of panic when I saw your jacket behind glass and not in a closet. It's foolish maybe, but I believe you're the moon; my vortex comes in the form of tropical beats and oh na na nas. When I was in grade five, I spent hours and nights memorizing irregular verbs, but I forget about past tenses when I talk about you. Is is is. They wrote a song for you and it filtered through the hallways, through my earphones, and the soles of my feet at 1 AM. I'd run through Seoul again, just to feel you with them. Years ago, I wouldn't know how to pronounce your name. Tonight I say it's what I call the moon. My nails grew longer there and I have them imprinted on my palms. 너를 데리러 가. I would. I'll hold on. I don't know if I know how not to. Yesterday I watched you spray artificial snow on your wrists and call it perfume. It might have been 2010 and you didn't have your french fry hair anymore. I could have loved you then. So I’ll love you now. I love you more than one more day.
I still don't know what I feel. Can you really name bigness and ebbs of Somethings? I hit the brakes so many times telling myself this is irrational. The Year of Magical Thinking. Months of wearing lolo's bracelet, watching them see him in moths and candles when I couldn't. You're in the old songs I loved hearing you sing, in the picture frames you kept so diligently in your office. A week of running after him in under the rain and outside radio stations. Maybe you were between us the first time in three minutes. The moon walked us home. There's no such thing as useless emotion, he said. And I believe him. Hello and good bye. That's the same word in another language. Did you know that?
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