92. letter to myself in 5 years, part 2
hey. you. me. dear me.
how are you? how was your day? what's the last thought that ran through your head? how are you feeling right now? where are you reading this? home? a bus? are you in san francisco, or did you move somewhere else?
do you have friends? i'm sure you do. how are your friends? i have some friends, not many around me in the city, but enough i suppose.
i write on the most lonely and melancholy sunday night. a night of laundry underneath the warm sepia lamp, a night of finding a black curl of hair in my baked ziti at pasquale's, a night of an extra stella on the house, a night of... sitting. it's a night that feels like the gilbert o'sullivan song from 1971. alone again, naturally.
i like to tell myself this is the steps i take as an artist. as a lonesome hero of the story. and there are days when it's romantic. days when i cherish it in bombastic jubilee. then there are days of self-pity and wanderlust wandering. on these kinds of days, i don't feel like an artist. i don't feel like a hero. i just feel like a floating head of cabbage and a moving watery flesh machine. i don't feel alive.
i'm still discovering my purpose. i feel like the purpose i declare always changes. the sticky notes on the wall are constantly increasing. do you put up sticky notes on the wall? how many do you have? i have like 45. what's your purpose now?
would you rather go back in time or forward? if i could go back in time, i'd give my past self a hug. a long hug for both of us to remember. if i could go forward in time, i'd do the same.
it's strange to say this, but i miss you. i don't know how that works. but i know it's true. i do. i miss you, dearly. every second, i feel like i'm a cloud full of rain, reactions, air, thunder. all of it, swirling and mixing. sometimes it's just separate strands of air, amounting to a thin layer of gas. the sun shines through. other times, i'm a storm cloud. brewing.
life is hard sometimes. do you believe me when i say it now? how do you remember a night like this? is it rosy, nostalgic, wistful? are you glad to have moved on, seeing a different light of day five years later? is there anything you miss from here? do you miss me?
this is getting kinda meta. it's interesting.