There is a nauseous anticipation in waiting for you. Where raindrops form the rhythm of footsteps and every car that passes is yours. Every shadow that flickers or sound or breeze is the familiarity of your sounds, your smell, your breath on my face. I am here still, unmoving, and breathing patience like rain, clutching to these blankets that remind me of something lost, the fading scent of a boy. The cloth sticks to the sweat-filled hopes and salted air, humidity thicker than love and hate. How or why I am in this nostalgia? Even as I am still here, not more than 15 minute distant convenience. I have 3 weeks to go, yet these walls already feel like a memory, insubstantial, taken for granted. The storm is bittersweet tonight. Cooling the heat, but leaving the humidity to drown us in our own shivering sweat.

I thought I finally might have something to tell you, something for you to remember me by, something to redeem myself for whatever I have done. Which is really nothing, of course, and that makes it harfer to forgive or realize or speak of. I thought maybe I could draw you a picture, but in truth it would stop short just as my tongue at the precise moment where it mattered. Afraid, I suppose, of the wrong ending, of any ending at all. And these flickering thoughts so remind me of street lamps and city light, the echoing of cars and voices I hear at night, hiding myself away in these thin walls, listening to the loneliness of it, of the isolation and solitude that echoes here. How they collect to give me an impression of an uncertain desire, something I remembered 2 minutes ago but fail to hold the attention span to articulate. It wouldn’t come out right anyway and I am easily distracted.

I feel as if I am already gone from this place, a ghost of it, which doesn’t necessarily bother me as much as the idea to be gone from your waking consciousness. I’ll be another haunting echo of your past, of my own, a familiar scent on the wind. You insist on forgetting me even before I have left, which I think will be the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. That you could and you want to smoothme over, cover my face in layers of dusty impatience and oblivion of every day life. That I could be fading, becoming these walls prematurely of your own free will—to move on with time as I desperately try to hold on to it, stetching it. Yet, I am only making myself more transparent, easier to brush aside with hysterics and childhood dreams. All I can think is I wish things were different and all I can mouth is anxious silence. We’re all on the brink of something.

But still, it does comfort me in a strange way to hear that you fear losing me, that you would have a fear of anything, except yourself. That you, at least, touch me hesitantly in my silence to tell me in a strange way that you are still here, that I am still here. And I think that at the very least, I will still be a part of your waking subconscious if not always in the waking of your eyes.