The spring and summer of 2020 had clear, affectless skies, the colour of the backs of eyelids. Sound was the exclusive domain of wind and the highway. Everything that wasn't footsteps or talking was hummed far I the background. Stillness, long thought dead for good, had returned with a vengeance, putting the world in a chokehold as the rest of us got sick and died. I spent most of my time hearing it in my garage, where I called you from midnight to the morning almost every night for a couple of months. I would look at the moon whenever you told me about your mom or your sisters, and all the years spent bouncing from Phoenixville and Pottstown. Roads and commuting on them were a motif in those stories, as they are in pretty much all things. I remember feeling as if you telling me all of that was another stop in the long trip we were then both on. Perhaps it's no coincidence that we constantly talked about traveling cross-country in those days, as if we were tramps from the start and had a birthright to assume going all in with it. In our bedrooms, separated by the 49th parallel and a couple of days' worth of traveling by car, we were fellow travelers. We still are, I hope.
Since I've moved, I've kept those days in my mind like photos in a wallet. I'm going home to them one day, but home never stops being home. Whenever you get lost, home still exists. It's still out there, fixed wherever, waiting for you to start again in it: the center of the universe. It's a weird world out there, and I'm becoming a weirder guy. The concept of 'home' is becoming murky to me for the first time in my entire life, which I'm aware is something most people can't give a shit about as much as I can, given the fact I lived in the same room for 21 years. You're a part of whatever sense of home I have now.
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I often reread your old posts to cheer me up. I've had plenty a shitty night where my one life preserver was something you wrote about me 2 years ago. There's been no shortage of those nights, so I owe you something similar you can use, being as you have been having some pretty shitty nights yourself this last month.
Madison:
You remain punkish and true. You're a skilled swordsman of cynicism and irony, dual-wielding either weapon to defeat even the most formidable verbal combatants, myself included. That's to say you're incredibly witty. It's not that you're one of the funniest people I know, you're clever. Intensely so. Your wit is sharp. Cutting, even. I'm not sure if you realize that. You're smarter than I think you understand. Your brain is a fierce computer. I see it in your quips. It's small, but I understand what it would take to make them. I know it's easy for me to front as smart hanging around all these neo-Kantians, but I hope you never feel dumber than I am. You're not. Not by a long shot.
But you have a good heart. It bleeds. That's my favourite thing about you. You're guarded, sure, but good hearts often are. It means all the more that I get to be one of the people let in. Your sentimentality burns bright. Fuck the naysaying that reduces that word to a pejorative. It's a beautiful thing. You, more than anyone I have ever met, have taught me that. You love without apologies or adjectives, like those folk punk songs that got younger you survived with; love as a thing that bashes against, that *insists* and never gives up. That gets tired and tells everyone about it, but there is not a single doubt in anyone's mind that it will get back up again, ready to continue to feel for everyone.
Your ass is also pretty, fucker. Don't tell me otherwise. I know you want to. That's just not true. You remain cute, even if these Neanderthal party boys at ESU can't get with it. Who needs them? Your homeland is elsewhere.
There used to be this IGN video about Elder Scrolls: Online when it came out. The narrator in it brought up the concerns about the game defeating the point of Elder Scrolls, being a MMO rendition of a game that the entire appeal of is hinged upon you being the lone player in a world that's up to you to wander through. That's how I think about you: you're out there in the world, fighting for the morning just as I am. It feels good knowing you're out there, just as I am here. Quantumly entangled.
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It kills me every day about our last year in the Little Dark Age. I know it's past, but I never want to lose this. Neither of us ever did. I know that, certainly. It got bad, yes. But I believe the two of us cared about each other then. Not for a second does it appear to me that either of us let up, even when I got shitty. I really believe that. That might guarantee our invincibility.
Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me
