Telemachus’ Telemachus

James Bowden

I have written 800 posts on my private Instagram now, private to me and some ten
others I have decided to share shreds of my internal life with. Eight hundreds. Bleh. I

miss you, where you = many people, you included too, but especially those that I’ve
loved and lost lately. “Lost” alone being too strong a word, so instead, qualify it with

lost, at least in the capacity I’m used to having you in. Which is to say, currently, you
= {Kristine, Antonia, Rachel, etc.}. And it isn’t like that, so don’t you think that, I just

miss how life was with various people during various periods. Don’t you? But here’s
the crux of the matter: when I’ve the choice, I always choose to rip myself open and

hemorrhage hurt. So let’s begin again: I was listening to Conan Gray’s “Astronomy” in
the Philadelphia train station today. Rachel gifted me that song in severance some

two springs ago. I paid too much for a stupid Amtrak ticket: inelastic demand. Transp
ortation always reminds me of missing and leaving people but especially Rachel. Of

being left, as people depart for things more important than me. I am still shouting in
to the dark: What is of more consequence than a lover? What matters more than a

son? Thankfully, nobody hears me. Not even my ten constituents–they don’t really
read most of my posts anyway. Nobody really wants to get that tangled up in some

one else’s consciousness, though it’s easy to think that you do. The question, then, is:
do you feel abandon or relief? My answer leaps out through my eyes, before I’ve even

managed to seal my lips. Transportation often feels like crying to me. Tears like trains
like texts like telemachus like falling asleep alone with someone in mind, perhaps with

the Archduke Trio playing. Like Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto playing now, Joshua Bell.
And this is not about Rachel, but rather the inevitability of self. Apathy in antithesis.

Reticence in retrograde. And what do we do with that? How do we do with that? I
think about filling holes, how I’ve been shittily filling the ones in my heart whenever

I can but failing to find any lasting balm, each patch poking holes anew. Adhesion: a
belief in permanence. I know that the self persists. I want to be gorgeous. I want to

be beautiful, burn bright and lively. I want to love everything and everyone I can
manage. And here, today, I am what I want. How do we deal though, how do we

bear it? I used to pray that I live in terms of presences rather than absences, but it
turns out that to hold is to let go. To need, to not have. No thing without nothing,

no self without you. My train arrives back in Princeton and suddenly I am the
conductor. Faces pop in and out. You you you you. My arms grow weary of the

reins. The baton turns to lead between my fingers. The train to coal and dream
scape. When I wake up, I am on a dinky little island and I pull at my face in the

mirror. Gentle waves lap at the mountain of Dilaudid beside me. I am once again,
unbearably alone. I sew my eyes shut that I may begin to face myself now.

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Draws from Ocean Vuong’s and Louise Gluck’s Telemachus poems, and Infinite Jest. And a lil Uncle Vanya from Chekhov, mainly the bear it bit.