These will just be places to me now
James Bowden
1.
pasadena, ca
princeton, nj
berkeley, ca
stanford, ca
nyc, ny
la, ca
philadelphia, pa
seattle, wa
dallas, tx
chicago, il
2.
Of all the places I’ve been in, you
were my favorite ones.
3.
I’m on the train. As soon as I transfer to the Stanford
train, the lighting changes. Softer, yellower, as if to
forcefully induce nostalgia. I start to get melancholy,
sad, yearning pining as usual. This has been my stress
response ever since R. Whenever the world feels like
it’s closing in upon me, like I am not and cannot be enough:
please. i just don’t want to be alone,
4.
Soon I will go home. My father texts us
about dental hygiene. Why do I despise
brushing my teeth so? Because I do it
only out of fear for the future, for future
ugliness and pain. I don’t want to live in
fear. PDLIF.
5.
I sit on the Stanford lawn. God, it’s gorgeous. God, it’s sunny and beautiful and perfect and everything that I’ve known it is and hated it for being. Someone asked me the other day if I shouldn’t just have come and bought in and been happy. Maybe I could have. Every plant so carefully curated and meticulously manicured. Leisure, taken physical form. Men walk by, It all seems so worthless though. Like, Why did I memorize the Krebs cycle? Why did I do it! Children romp and whine. Parents scold: You’re ruining everybody’s experience! All I wish for is a nurturing hand. All I wish for is to be held, and not let go of, and not just full of someone’s blunt claws.
6.
Any time you deify something, you must be prepared to pay the price. To:
sacrifice something.
7.
On the train, I hold my phone. My fingers clasp around it over my stomach. My precious…
I get off and walk. It’s warm, but I hide my hands in my jacket pockets like the pocked man in Gina Berriault’s The Overcoat. Can anything hide the psychic mess bubbling behind my eyes? I have not physically damaged myself yet, but I wonder if I don’t just long to be crucified. To justify my pain. To atone for my elegiac existence. I read Infinite Jest as a comfort book now. 12:15 ETA. ETA. I had an ETA shirt, Enfield Tennis Academy, I loved it, I don’t know where it is anymore.
8.
Dance, monkey, dance! A tear slips.
9.
In Berkeley last week, storms psychic and manifest. If you can forget that you, you! are being rained upon long enough to hear the sound of water hitting everything around you, and realize, it’s raining! And the stream flowing happily, fully? and the leaves jerking upon impact, and the grass trembling, and all of it alive and free but also responsive to its clime, conditional and mechanical.
10.
They’re happy, but they’re not. This happiness is bought with desensitization. I hear your every third word. I pay you no regard. Imagine: to feel everything every second and touch it engage with it love it be it to commune so to speak to roll around in the grass and wrap it round you and: feel yourself beloved on this earth. What I mean, man, is to fight this mortal apathy, encroaching and dull, to study not your blade but your shield, your armor. What I mean, man, is to be naked and protected at the same time. Bare and unbroken. Loving and unloved. Will you resist beside me? Will you? I bow and kiss the ground, heavy, I spring forth and am gone.