Patrick (Haunt Me As I Roam)

In my dream you had killed yourself because your friend had killed himself – and had wanted to do so for a long time – but he didn't want to die alone, and so you offered to step up and die by his side.

That sucked, because I really needed you, but I understood. 

- September 27, 2022

Erin (In Retrospect)

I was driving around Inglewood in a stolen Dodge Ram pickup truck and somehow stumbled across the apartment you were living in. I hung out and walked around outside for a while. In the front yard was a shipping container suspended in the air via forklift. On the bottom of the shipping container the phrase "No me, no myself" was scrawled in black spray paint. 

I was getting ready to take a picture of the graffiti when one of your neighbors came down the stairs. Her name was Florence – early 40's, Italian. I felt awkward, loitering around your apartment with a camera in my hands, but she thought I was cute despite my disheveled appearance and sat down with me in the downstairs carport / parking garage that doubled as a lounge, makeshift couches and wet bar included.

After a while Florence left to visit her daughter across the street. Her daughter lived in a small trailer in the front driveway of her friend's house; the roof of the trailer had been painted to look like a Nintendo Game Boy from the sky. After introducing myself and hanging out for a bit I walked back across the street.

Your shades were drawn, where before they had been open. Someone was inside your apartment. Was it you?

Hours passed. The sun sank and the moon rose and still I struggled to muster up enough courage to knock on your door. Sometime around midnight Aiden joined me downstairs, pulling up a chair out front and whispering along with the creatures of the night.

I walked to the back of the complex, steeling myself for the moment to come. In the backyard were scraps of paper with obscure indie-rock lyrics scribbled on them – your handiwork, I assumed. One that I remember was written on the back of a Dixie paper plate nailed to a stake hammered into the ground. It said "Big Ugly Mouth," a reference to Henry Rollins.

I was still pacing back and forth in the backyard of your Inglewood apartment complex, hands clasped behind my back, brow furrowed, head lowered, lost in thought. Eventually I woke up, awash in nostalgia for everything that was and everything that could have been: the phone calls and the zines, the care packages and the schemes, the conversations and the stickers that never happened. 

Our early lives were an immense struggle, Erin. I hope life has gotten better for you in the convening years, as it has for me. 

                                                * * * 

We first started talking during my freshman year of college. My parents had just divorced, the childhood home I grew up in had been sold and I was living in a very nice neighborhood in San Pedro near the Pacific Ocean. The longing was immense. Living near the ocean always made me sad, glassy-eyed and thoughtful. 

Something about your rough-and-tumble lifestyle complimented my dour and depressive sensibilities, so I decided to take a shot in the dark and reach out to you from 3,000 miles away. The ensuing online and telephone conversations were some of the best I have ever had –funny, carefree, intelligent, desperate, nihilistic, no pressure. 

Eventually we began shipping care packages to one another, from New York to California. At the time we were both heavily immersed in the underground sticker scenes in our respective cities and were therefore familiar with sticker trading across state lines. It was also quite easy to procure free shipping labels from the United States Postal Service.

The doodles, the drawings, the zines, the stickers, the literature, the poetry, the music and the pictures that passed from your hands to mine and vice versa . . . 

I wanted a piece of you, Erin, to help me understand you better, and you gave it to me with aplomb. To this day I remain grateful for our correspondence. In my darkest moments it helped remind me of the places that were not where I was, and of the people and the places that remained to be seen, if I could only survive the moment at hand.

Thank you, Erin. I don't know if I ever told you that.

How long has it been since last we spoke? Some months back I found a care package from you dated February 2012, as well as the care package I had compiled in reply, for when you finally got settled on the East Coast after graduating from university. Our communication petered out sometime between then and now for reasons unknown, and finding those two artifacts from the past, as heartfelt as they were at their conception, made me sad, having become nothing more than wreckage from the past in a box in my garage. 

For weeks after I walked around in a daze, lost in thought: "Sentiment is a weight that tries its best, day and night, to chain me to the past." I had not felt that kind of aimless wandering in a very long time and had all but forgotten what living with that kind of weight felt like. 

I do not miss the reoccurring ache of regret and the distinct feeling –real or imagined – of missing out on love and life as the world passes me by. I have a purpose now and there is a lot of work that needs to be done before I can die. No time for depression or regret or nostalgia for a future never realized. "Regret is an ugly and destructive luxury and it must be avoided at all costs," Henry Rollins writes in Black Coffee Blues, and I agree with him.

It doesn't mean I don't think of you from time to time, Erin. Feel free to reach out if you ever feel the desire: (310) 780-7550. I am out here working my bones to ash, restless in anticipation of the things that will one day be mine.

All you get is this one life, right here. Make it count . . . I miss you.