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WHAT I THINK ABOUT IN JUNE

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I only know a handful of people living in the hour radius around me but this isn’t usually the case. It’s less warm than I would expect and the heat of the sun hits me in surprise in the afternoon. Slowly it withdraws after 7, only leaving a pink hue I used to mistake for the grace of things ending. I’m working on being kinder. I’m trying to find something tangible and solid like forgiveness could be and a way to look my mother in the eyes without tears forming in mine.


I’m enjoying the mornings. The white bedsheets are cool against the early morning light that contours my room and I dissolve myself into some dream-state that the space blurs into. My body feels somehow deeper into my bed each morning like I’m trying to go underground in my sleep, almost as if I could bury myself and come out fresh with each passing day. I would like to peel myself a new layer and dust the soil off my body like dead skin.


I’ve been feeling good. Recently, I’ve been walking a lot. I am grateful that I’m understanding things better and I relieve myself with a quiet smile that these old methods are still working - that 'it' is still alive. There is enjoyment in new conversations with untouched faces but I wish I didn’t have to be living alone to realize this. With less people around, I’ve gained a curiosity in those I am meeting as if there is something shared between me and everyone still living here out of season. Like we could share something forbidden in our choice to stay here over the possibility of a brighter life somewhere else.


I’m eating my food slightly saltier than usual and I remember my housemate last year teaching me the importance of salt. I am less wounded but it still has the same effect.


I have never known grief like this: missing. I’m grieving over my loss of grief. It’s puzzling. The 8’s are lined up and the houses sit pretty and I am so clean and riddled with things that cannot be articulated. Someone jokes that “we’re all using each other for something” and it ticks in my brain like either a clock or a bomb but I can’t tell which or the difference between the two.


I make a list of people in my notes page I must remember to stay in contact with and I wonder if people were kites what colour you’d be and how many I’d be holding onto. Maybe if things worked this way I could find it easier to let go when my hands got full. I’ve been thinking a lot, like usual. One of the boys at work remembers the names of everyone he’s ever met and I am grateful for my ability to forget better than I can forgive. The sky is still pink, the kites are being flown closer to the ground.


In a dream, I wonder how the kite threads became tangled; for a moment it seems that they may not even be attached to my fingers at all but just ravelled around eachother. These things grow so messy and I can’t decipher the origin of the knot or what really holds it together. Mostly, I think I am too exhausted to tackle the efforts of undoing such deep entanglements. It seems especially difficult when you remember the beauty of the initial clutch, how effortless and easy flight once was, the pleasure of when you catch the breeze just right – so much so that you slip into the naivety of ease, you close your eyes and it is always exactly this moment that you forget the volatility of air - that you are blown straight into unstable winds that will shake you long past your fingertips.

It is so strange to realise you are getting older.


My mum tells me she sees boys fighting in the park and she is worried it has all gone wrong for us. The taller one kicks the other lying on the floor in a fetus position. He is so injured that he can’t make it home, he can’t make it back to the body he was born from and my mum says she couldn’t help but think “where is his mother?” and how “that is somebody’s son”. Her words are ringing in my ears and my eyes turn blank staring at the ceiling when I remember that he, too, was just somebody’s son. We are all somebody’s child and is that enough to make us worthy of forgiveness?


I change my bedsheets to blue so I can dive deeper. I’ve been spending more time inside of myself. I am alone. I think its worth it to challenge any form of regret but it is more painful inside the mind than out. I wish we spoke more about what you knew of love, you only ever mentioned it as some unfathomable fiction. I wish I had the chance to tell you that its already here but hiding in plain sight.


I read somewhere on Instagram that the final act of love is letting go and I’ve been chewing it all week like its gum and my mouth is addicted to stale tastes. People drift in and out like I’m watching television without my glasses on. The cars pass through the carwash.


We were only children, we are, still, only children. I am slowly convincing myself that you were nothing more than somebody’s son. I think about the principle of forgetting myself in exchange for forgiveness.

 

What else is there to do but resign myself to these changing seasons?

The pink laces itself between the clouds. There is a diamond shaped spec in the distance.

 

How pretty things can look when you catch them in the right light.

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