youllneverfindthisagain

[youllneverfindthisagain]

i read that you sold your house. okay, i didn’t read that you sold your house. i figured it out through a series of instagram posts and tiktoks that your girlfriend made. i can’t believe i’m back here writing to you again but i quit my job and it made me manic and i’ve been losing my mind a little bit ever sense. i quit drinking and it makes me think of you. sometime in november will be a full year since i’ve done cocaine unless you count the time this girl from work pulled out all her little baggies with the gummies and spread them on her coffee table and we did like, the faintest line ever but i didn’t feel anything and it was like 7 am and i still hadn’t slept. anyway, i’ll count it as a year in november. i’d have to remember the exact day. i guess it doesn’t matter. 

well, when i think about you selling the house i wonder if when you were cleaning it out if you ever found the server book i left with some cash in it that i used to get change from my drug dealer and there was a magic the gathering card in there and this thing you wrote about love is like a house on fire. i can’t remember. i found this thing you wrote in college online. i didn’t really know you could write. i guess i should have known you could write. sometimes i wish i could ask you for advice. it’s like your dead. aren’t you, pretty much?

i used to hate you for living your entire life without me before you ever met me. sometimes i feel that way about my fiance now, that i’ve already lived my life. i’m ready for the picket fence, now. i fear he is not. sometimes i resent him for not knowing the same things i know. i suspect at times that he’s only here because he needed to get out. he protests, he says he could go anywhere he wanted. he says he was never trapped there. i don’t believe him. i would never tell him, though. i bought a wedding dress yesterday. 

it’s rather glamorous exploring the conceptual idea of lifelong commitment for the first time with someone who is also experiencing it for the first time. i realized, though, that he’s just not a very romantic guy. i wouldn’t call him passionate. maybe it’s the depression. i think that if you’re as depressed as often as he is that it’s just a personality flaw at that point. i feel bad telling you this. it isn’t as if you were without your flaws. you’d have lost your luster after a certain point. i’d have gotten so fucking sick of you if i hadn’t spent so much time longing. i remind myself of this a lot. i wish i could ask you now when the exact moment was you knew you hated your ex wife. i can’t believe you’re getting married again. i could say a lot of things but i can only say one thing for certain: she definitely isn’t me. i would be ashamed announcing my marriage if it were to someone who’s been married and divorced twice at your age with a child from each. maybe she’s kinder. or stupider. 

i quit drinking and i drink water and i cook all of the time. i don’t feel any different. do you feel any different? that’s what i want to know, really. i just want to know how you’re feeling, how you sleep. i want to know the exact moment you began to hate your ex wife and the exact moment you considered it prudent to get married again. talk soon! 

love, a

[youllneverfindthisagain]

minimalism is bourgeois. large empty spaces are bourgeois. deliberate urban minimalism is bourgeois. owning a large space in nyc and deliberately making it look like an empty warehouse is bourgeois.

i have analyzed the poetics of space, of growing up in small confined spaces, of hoarding books and plushies that individually mean something insofar as they have concretized my memories. i don’t hoard, i assemble. i assemble things that give me a sense of permanence. i don’t give my books away because they tie me to an experience here. and when my parents are gone and i have no family/property/anything left here except myself, my books won’t have changed. but i will have, i can approach them with a different attitude and involve myself in studies differently.

whenever i walk into houses i always feel secretly embarrassed at myself for sometimes fantasizing i’d have a house or some sort of permanence here. but i do not. and i don’t need empty fuckin space to remind me every second of the day. only comfortable people can live without things. can buy things and give them away. can feel free at the lack of being ‘tied down’ by possessions. and i don’t mean possession of wealth, i mean knick knacks and objects that i’ve cathected meaning into since i do not have a stable space.

the precarity of immigration is that you can be kicked out at any moment by the landlord, once again - this time because your father is back home trying to be there for his family - the precarity of immigration is that you always feel like at any given moment you can lose all meaning associated with the space you’ve inhabited for a given time, be reminded that your intimate space was really borrowed

fuck minimalism, really

[youllneverfindthisagain]

do you still have this address?

i’ve been dreaming of you but in the dream the building is burning down or i am searching for you and cannot find you. i know this may seem a little insane but if you are reading this it means you knew where to look to find me. 

i am thinking of the time you asked me for this url to give to your brokenhearted friend. i am sure that everyone has moved on by now. i know i have. 

the other night my partner suggested we get some cocaine, and i was drunk, and i hardly get drunk these days, and i texted everyone in my phone if they knew where to get cocaine. i was not successful. i’ve spent the days since not talking to anyone because i’m embarrassed. “just when i thought i was out, they pull me back in.” 

i’ve been thinking a lot about the sad lives people live and how i guess, at the very least, i don’t have to live a morbidly sad life. i think about the people i know who spent their lives in and out of prison. this one girl, we’ll call her kristy, she had it real bad and now she’s a meth addict or heroin or something but i used to sometimes send her messages at 3 am when i was on coke to say hey, i could have been like you but you were a very positive influence on my life, and as you can probably guess that did not really go over that well. the most most recent time i found kristy she was selling stolen jewelry on facebook marketplace. what a waste, i think. 

i think about that night that i tried to get meth because nobody could get coke and i got into a big fight with my druggie friend tim, but i don’t really remember why, i was champagne drunk (remember that, ha, champagne drunk) and i guess i just went home or whatever but what if i would have done meth and what if i would have kept doing meth and then maybe i’d still fucking be in phoenix selling stolen jewerly, too, man. 

how does one reconcile with all their close calls? well, if you find out, let me know. i know that we could talk about horseshoes and hand grenades or whatever and the futility of asking this, but i could have died. remember how you almost did, that night? and the next day j was so jealous. he said, kinda sneering, “i guess you’re bonded for life now, huh?” i don’t know if that’s the case, but i do know that ever since i got your email i’ve been having dreams of burning up inside buildings with you and maybe it means something, or maybe it means nothing, or maybe i dream in metaphor, and maybe it was a close call, after all. 

[youllneverfindthisagain]

Ernst Wiesner – Crematorium Brno

1930, Brno (CZ)

via #1, #2

© Muzeum Města Brna

[youllneverfindthisagain]

smoke stained strawberry wallpaper

[youllneverfindthisagain]

Ghost ship

[youllneverfindthisagain]

By Lynda Barry  May 2016

[youllneverfindthisagain]

Taxidermist, Newton, Kansas, RA Clayton

[youllneverfindthisagain]

this tumblr has become a real relic.

[youllneverfindthisagain]

holy shit

[youllneverfindthisagain]

[youllneverfindthisagain]

“Summer has been consuming my energy in the most ruthless way.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry c. June 1927 featured in “Diaries,”

[youllneverfindthisagain]

having a bad trauma response night (week?) and i am all alone here I wish someone would touch my hair

[youllneverfindthisagain]

vignettes

[youllneverfindthisagain]

American Poetry - Brendon Burton

[youllneverfindthisagain]

notes on longing

i have this long-held fantasy when i am heartbroken or missing someone. it goes like this: i am working at my bartending job, and for some reason in this particular version i always look my best. i am always very busy. i am at the entrance of the restaurant, and he walks in the door. i look up at him, our eyes meet, and he reads my silent “what are you doing here?” and he says, “i had to come, i had to come here. i miss you, i love you. come home.”

the he has changed over the years, as have the restaurants. but i had the fantasy again the other day, and this time it was you. i am at the hotel. you walk through the door. you’ve been looking for me, you see, and you have found me all the way here. all the way to the city you have come to tell me to come home.

i think we must often delude ourselves with these fantasies to survive. frankly, though, i’ve never been one to hold on for too long. i’ve always fallen in love easily. hell, i’ve almost always cheated. there’s generally someone there waiting for me to take someone else’s place. i mean, at least for sex. it’s just always been this way. i prefer to be in a partnership. i prefer to not be alone. now that i am older, i realize this is a character flaw. at least i recognize my character flaws.

i know i will never see you again and i can’t swallow that pill. i simply can’t do it. you kept saying you would fly out here. i told you i would cry the second i saw you. you said you would cry, too. and i have this other fantasy where i park my car and i rush inside the airport to baggage claim and there you are and we just drop everything and i’m holding you again and you touch my face and neither of us can stop crying. and i think about this so much, you know? because you kept saying you would. you said you would. you said you would.

i awake to a text from you: “i hope you don’t hate me. i love you so much.” but of course, you don’t mean love love, not love like that. not love in the way i mean it. but i let you say it, because i think maybe you sort of actually do mean it. and maybe you will realize how much you love me and maybe you will show up at the hotel one day. or you’ll embrace me, in tears, at the airport. maybe you will, maybe that’s what love means to you.

i can’t hold on to that anymore. i have deluded myself for nearly as long as we were ever together. i dream about you. i dream about you, you’re out on a date. i dream about you, and you’re touching me, and i wake up and i immediately am in tears because i miss you and i can still taste you, and i’m crying and i say out loud, exasperated, please, please not again. not again, not again, not again.

[youllneverfindthisagain]

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