godless brother in love / a return.

dear homecoming, dear buffer, dear parting,

Hello again. 

It's been a long time.

In my time away from these words I have been writing other words — papers drenched in academia until the spaces between paragraphs were bloated with jargon; papers written at ungodly hours and the holiest hours both; papers I didn't care about; papers I obsessed over in my waking hours until they bled through to my dreams. All in all, it has been enlightening and numbing at the same time. A wise person told me this time feels ripe with contradiction. I have been holding all these contradictions within my body for so long, and maybe now I will write them down (after all, they have been writing me, rewiring the softness of my flesh from the inside out).

These days are filled with uncertainty. I keep trying to find some beauty in between the moments of despair, but it is tiring and I have been tired for such a long time. At night, I have dreams that last eons. Often I dream of the place of dreams, the place where I have been writing and breathing and (hopefully) growing. I have never felt homesickness with such clarity as I do now. The most beautiful part of this process we often call "growing up" has been scattering pieces of my heart to the people I love. Only now am I learning of the drawbacks to this — to the pain that balances the pleasure — because we have all scattered with the wind to various safe havens.

Amongst the uncertainty of these times is this uncertainty I have with words. I sometimes visit this page to scroll through the letters I have sent. Reading my own words back always feels strange. I think I usually forget them once I hit send, like they don't belong to me anymore. There are some words I have been holding in the drafts. I read over these, and they render me silent for a moment — my whole body pauses to ingest the words again. There is one letter that I didn't send because I didn't think it was ready yet; now I read it and I don't have the space to hold the words in any longer. I have taken them back in and found myself too full with their addition. Writing has always been a release for me, which is why I am so quick to forget. My thoughts may be my own, but my writing never is. My writing is always overflow, always escaping when my internal processing reaches max capacity. I have been full for so long. I have not written for so long. These two facts are inextricably connected.

These words feel ripe now, ready to be shared. Maybe their incompleteness is just another one of those contradictions we should all be looking for. Maybe the contradiction is essential. But that's for you to decide, this day and the next and each after. I will end this letter with these ripe words (bordering on rotten) and try to forget the cliché taste of them against my tongue just as quickly as I forget their content.

The fruit flies have found my kombucha.

Irritated with the faint buzzing, I chase them around my desk with my hand. I never quite reach them; instead they are sent skittering on gusts of air before landing, again, on the paper towel lid of the jar. There are some scenarios that feel metaphorical. This is one of them. How do I explain that the fruit flies are not really fruit flies, and the kombucha jar not really full of kombucha when that is exactly what they are? 

Lately I have felt like I am a rotted and decaying thing. Lately, I have felt grotesque, and deformed, and discolored with mold spores. Lately I have felt sickly sweet with death, like an object around which flies buzz and gather. This is to say that I have reached that point in my life when I feel as if I must restart, but something about time keeps me stuck in this half-gone state. The death of the person named [static] has not yet concluded, but neither yet has the rebirth. 

The fruit flies settle. I settle. For a moment I let them rest atop the paper towel. For a moment both of our existences are beautifully finite and futile. 

until soon.