it's midnight and i miss everything.

you can never see the moon from anywhere

Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody

- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

alchemcial drawing from Musaeum Hermeticum

“What I hate about this city,” I say into my phone, “is that you can never see the moon from anywhere.”

I’ve lost so much. So many people are dead to me and if I were to enter their tombs I would find neither body nor angel, just myself and the same grief I find everywhere else.

I know it’s all over but I can’t stop the wanting, I want to go back and apologize for every annoying or cruel thing I ever did. I want to fix my mother’s mind and bring back my father’s body. To win back every best friend I’ve ever had and to save all the love anyone’s ever had for me before it becomes something lost and cold.

I miss everything and I don’t know how to make sense of it, sometimes this lack is the main thing I feel.

I’m back on the phone with an old lover on the last train into the city and I cry at the sound of his laugh, how he clicks his tongue in that same old way and tells me about the cat he found sleeping on the hood of his car, how he took it home and called it Madeline and how he’s moving— we don’t talk about how this means I’ll probably never see him again.

I cry for him and it’s not desire, but memory.

I miss him the way I miss every boy who was ever kind to me when I was fifteen. How I miss the boy I went on one date with back in February who didn’t mind silences but hated dates because he said he never knew how to act like anyone but himself. The way I miss the girl who broke my heart and the friends who abandoned me over it. The way I even miss that stupid walk around my old neighborhood I took one thousand times and hated because it felt then like nothing would ever end but now everything is ending and I miss all of it.

I miss my friend who stopped responding to my texts because she made cooler friends and I got jealous and mean the way I always do because I miss everything before I’ve even lost it. I miss my friend who got too busy to send me letters and my friend who can’t afford to visit and but answers my calls at midnight and my friend asleep two doors down from me and my friend who told me once, eventually you realize it’s not like that at all, and never knew how sad it made me.

I’m a creature sick with want for lives unlived, a lady filled with tea and tears and the same words over and over.

want, miss, hurt, hope.

I wipe my face, go onto the balcony for some air. It never rains here but it rained today, the clothes on the line are soaked through. I peer up over the edge of the roof and I can, at last, see the moon.

the buildings are so tall i can’t see the moon

back in europe

i glow pink in the night in my room

AUTHOR AT THE TIME OF WRITING