Maybe I'm tired. Of you. Of this. Of circling around the kitchen sink drain, clogged with the soggy remains of someone else's oatmeal I refuse to fish out. The thoughts are just a stupid stalemate of how nice it would be to trace the veins on the underside of your arm and follow where they lead and how I should've studied more about entropy and thermodynamic equilibrium and how I hate that raging headache caused by the odd mixture of caffeine dependence, unfounded worry, and a cold that's almost as stubborn as the peeling skin on my fingers. I'm sleeping well despite it all, curled underneath enough blankets to have the sort of weight that promises a crude substitute for emotional intimacy that's complacent to the slug out of bed in the morning tempered by the slow settling shock that the night is already over.

There's no fun little metaphors for it. Stripped down to the bare visual language of it all, the chair covered with unfinished projects, crumpled laundry, barely opened used textbooks, and unproductive sentimental hoarding might as well be Malevich's Black Square hung in the corner in some reference to Orthodox icons. Even striving for independence or "newness" or simplicity, it's referencing those old holding patterns. Some habits you don't break. You just ignore them around everyone else. But they always come back once you go home.

The carpet still feels the same against the skin of my cheek, rough and undemanding. It burns my knees the same way it did as a child. The sun rises through the same window. The coffee pot sits in the same corner. The walls are the same color. Someone still hasn't vacuumed. The small pieces of paper, last crumbs, pencil shavings, they're all larger than the looming future and easier to pin the unease on.

Might as well be a memory, but something has shifted in me. I feel it in the bottom of my stomach, hanging like a water droplet caught on the faucet right before it falls. I have to know what I'm doing now. I promise, I didn't lie when I said I hadn't dreamed of anything past that moment. I don't have any foresight, any ambition, just the sneaking suspicion that maybe I wasn't meant to be around right now. Hell, I don't have a bucket list. Maybe a black truck will just come out of nowhere in the rain, no headlights, just tumbling down the ravine. Maybe, I'll just stop breathing. Surely, the fog in front of me is only because I wasn't meant to cross the river to begin with.

Do you miss me? I don't think you do. Even if you do, you shouldn't. I bear the weight of your silence. I remember your face. And how now I think there must be something broken in me to be so comfortable sitting across the river, mirroring other's movements, pretending small talk sets the posts for bridges. Don't touch me. I couldn't bare it. Having the stiffening reflex read as fear. Even if it partially is... Just the sort of holding pattern that would take too long to explain, require too much of me without enough security, the soggy remains of someone else's oatmeal clogging the drain...

Signed,

Vivant