Types of Loneliness from Now and the Past
Everyday during quarantine I walk around the park from my parent’s house back to my parent’s house. There is a billboard at the intersection of Pico Blvd. and Patricia Dr. For days it was empty, a black rectangle overhead receding in depth and expanding out again at the edges. I walk the same path, point A to point A, but stasis is never boundless. On a Thursday morning, a glittered line of graffiti ribboned the edge of the billboard. New neons weaving into each other against the black background. I pictured an artist in the night, wearing a mask and gloves like the mask and gloves Mom wears to the grocery store. He must have leaned atop the billboard, face right next to his spray paint, and whispered his name into the slow gust of the night. All the walkers in the park witness his invention of the passage of time from the inside.
Watching my phone, thinking of you.
What if I am the drunkest one at this party?
3:00am on the 4, going back into Manhattan. Me and the homeless person asleep across from me. Dense, twisted pop music oozes through my headphones but the words from earlier are louder. I was lacing up my boot and Chris said, “I’m viewing you more as a friend right now.” But when is right now? When did right now begin? Will right now ever end? Right now seems like a pinprick at the edge of anything.
I hear my roommates talking in the kitchen from beyond the threshold of my locked door. I know those voices, voices that spoke to me in a time before, in tones that remind me of what those voices were to me within the dust of yesterday. I can’t hear what they talk about. I hear the click of a toaster, a metal fork dragging across a plastic plate, the tender hum of the refrigerator, coffee sloshing around in a mug. The voices mumble to each other in a language that I can no longer decipher. Maybe I don’t belong here anymore.
There is a tangerine decaying on Danalda Dr. I leave it there for two weeks and watch it rot into the blissful temporality of things that change and fruits that die.
Watching my phone, thinking of you. Watching my phone, thinking of you. And then you text me but I wish you wouldn’t. Watching my phone, thinking of you, thinking about how I know you never loved me like I loved you. And that kind of knowledge is a terror.
I found a bottle of vodka in my rain boot. I don’t know when I left it there.
In my childhood bedroom during quarantine I found a letter that I wrote to you in 2016. It was about how I helped you hang two large swathed posters of Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue onto your dorm room wall. Blue so synthetically bright that it glowed in the dark. Later that night I was biting your sternum when the IKB posters fell from the wall onto my back. A snap and a crack. The blue as delicious as
ancient aquamarine pressed powders. You hung the frames back on the wall. You went to sleep and I placed my hand over your back, just an inch above, and the air between us felt like it was fogging up a mirror. I wrote that letter to you years ago, when we thought we had any control over our fate or the vortex of our love or how everything can turn into hate.
Tyler snapped his surfboard in half. But, with or without a surfboard, the beaches are still closed.
My parents sold the Volvo three Novembers ago. They didn’t tell me they were doing it. They cleaned it out before handing it off to its new master. Old In-N-Out receipts, random Latin commentaries, a small stash of weed, speckles of blood from when I gashed my knee open and didn’t have a Band-Aid, a collection of fine tipped Muji .38 pens, a Lord Voldemort figurine. They gave me a small box with the remains when I went home for Thanksgiving. I held it to my chest and tried not to think of my Volvo back on the roads to freedom in Los Angeles, embracing someone else’s body, enfolding someone else’s life.
Surprise duplicity: my eyes can either look green or blue. It depends on the light and how early it is in the morning.
A skincare product gets thrown out when it expires, before it’s used up completely.
Long ago, your room was on the eleventh floor of Junior Village with a view overlooking the Connecticut River and the pine tree in Middletown Square. Rainbow Christmas tree lights hugged the branches of that tree in town and the whole thing was so tender that it felt dangerous, like being nostalgic for memories that are not my own.
I wear that sweatshirt that I bought in Rome to sleep most nights. And now, I wear it at my desk and look at a street view of the Pantheon on Google Maps: tourists still herd towards the entrance, they still drop gelato on their sandals, they still tip the street performers. And now, nothing. Rome is empty. The Pantheon is empty for the first time in thousands of years, the marble floors shivering without the kiss from a stranger’s feet.
Emma Graham