I'm back with the Wattpad you didn't know I promised you. Long time, no see. You're two hours ahead of me, so by the time you read any of this, you'll either be asleep, as it is past midnight in Eastern Standard Time, or, alternatively, you'll read this some time tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning, for me right now, that is.
I'm writing to you on my grandfather's old HP laptop, which he gave to me for university, in the basement of my parents' house. My parents don't like it when I call it that. It's still my house, they tell me. I can come back any time. I don't even have to let them know beforehand.
You wrote to me in your last post that you no longer know what I'm thinking, and that makes sense. We have barely spoken this summer. The silence rivals our little Dark Age a few years ago. There's less venom, sure, but perhaps that's worse. The longevity of our friendship is not so much threatened by dramatic resentment as it is by quietly getting carried away with things. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Can you tell I almost have an English degree?
In my head of heads, I don't actually think you and I are going to stop being friends. Certainly not now, even with our months of silence. Far worse has failed to stop us in the past. In my heart of hearts, however, I sometimes worry. I'm never certain, but I worry. These days, my life is marked, regimented, and scheduled by big things ending slowly. People are graduating. People are moving away. Neighbours and parents are dying. Friends are getting married. Sometimes I worry that our friendship, the central institution of my late teens and early twenties, is following suit. All endings have their own unique kind of melancholy to them. The melancholy of the thought of you and I definitively going our separate ways has a narratively conclusive quality that all the other endings don't have: it would mean that a time in my life I really enjoyed has completely ended, along with all the things that come with it. I would then live in something new now.
Many months ago, a friend of mine and I used to go on weekly walks around our then-shared neighbourhood. They grew up really far away from here, in Africa and Europe. Changing schools meant changing countries for them, and still does (with the slight exception of their post-secondary, of which they're in the third year of their graduate program in math). They know a thing or two about change. Back when we used to be neighbours, I was really worried about this time in my life that I'm in right now. I was worried about the inevitable arrival of summer, where the Island of Misfit Toys bullshit I had half-wandered into, half-helped build would immediately and permanently dissolve, and I would be left socially and spiritually rudderless in a merciless Canadian summer job market. Unlike somebody less neurotic, they understood the real content of that fear. It wasn't just that everything would end, but there would be literally nothing after it. The future - in my mind then and in my mind now - is this black hole that wholly abstracts any scenario I attempt to imaginatively impose onto it (I have been told this is a symptom of depression). The fear is not of collapse, but of endings. In my mind, I would have nothing else to do. But my friend reassured me of something they know best as an immigrant/expatriate: nothing ends, things just change. Nothing lasts forever, sure, but nothing itself can't triumph over the existence of something. There will always be something else later. My university friends won't be my university friends forever, but that doesn't mean they'll stop just being my friends. For some people, that may be true, but certainly not everyone. Certainly not for you and me. Death will bring change.
However, the silence between us is worth addressing, given what it usually signifies. But, at this very moment, I don't think I know how to. I feel like I have little to say. I guess it'll be a longer conversation over a video call. I'm very tired.
You told me in your last post that you're no longer sure what I'm thinking. Despite my lack of energy, I'll go ahead and give you what I can:
Today, I donated plasma this afternoon because I'm flat fucking broke and scrambling to get a job lined up for the fall. I'm trying to cough up enough change to a) afford my constant trips back and forth from Edmonton, b) eat, and c) have some money when I spend a week in Montreal. This will be the first and hopefully last summer that I couldn't pull a job together. My folks have been extraordinarily helpful, but my perceived and/or actual laziness about the job hunt (depending on what month of the summer we're talking about) is understandably getting to them, especially my mom - who, despite being a self-proclaimed agnostic, is the most hardcore believer in the Protestant work ethic I have ever met. I'm trying not to ruffle too many feathers, but there have been arguments between my mom and me. The move is to keep my head down, shut up, and try to build up some infrastructure in my life so that I have some money coming in through the winter, and ideally, all the way until next summer when I finally fucking graduate (God willing).
In the meantime, I'm broke. I'll have a couple of hundred dollars saved up before the end of this week, and then a couple hundred more once I get back to Italy, and hopefully by the time I return from Montreal, I'll be working. By then, I hope to pay off all my relatively small debts, and like I said, keep my head down and shut the fuck up. I just want to get out of my immediate situation. That's all I can think about, even though it shouldn't be. There's a lot of good about my situation right now. A lot worth dreaming about, as it is worth fighting for.
That last line was a segue for me to bring up R--hel, whom I haven't really brought you up to speed with. Three days ago, it was our three-month anniversary, which was not acknowledged or celebrated beyond the going-away party our million friends had for her (pictured above). On Friday, I leave for Italy. On the 21st, she leaves for Montreal. On the 3rd of September, I will see her in Montreal. On the 8th, I leave. Around the beginning of November, I start my second attempt at my first practicum (long, miserable, hilarious story I'll finally tell you soon). On the 19th of December, I will finish (God willing). Around that time, she returns from Montreal for Christmas break (assuming long distance doesn't kill us, which I honestly don't think it would by then). She will leave again in January. I will go back to the schools around February. I will finally leave school in April, and then graduate in June. Hopefully, I'll have a more solid game plan of what my next summer looks like soon.
I am so hung up on deadlines and dates these days, thanks to the money problems, that the interesting stuff, my feelings on the matter, are as inscrutable to me as they probably are to you in this very matter-of-fact schedule-orientated account of my mysterious third relationship, one that started somehow infinitely more controversial than the last and is shaping up to be my most respected decision this year. God fucking damn it, where is the fucking joy in any of that? Apologies. Allow me to slice open a vein. Let's see where the memories will take me...
Parties nowadays usually wrap up around a responsible 1 a.m., now that most of everyone I know has work in the morning, except for the Quad, who always stays up late.
The Quad primarily consisted/consists of (they may no longer exist, depending on who you ask) H--den, M---, R--hel, and I. Nowadays, our friend R--dra is a staple, so in that case, we call it the Quint. I have floated the idea of renaming us "Yesterday's New Quintet," but it doesn't have the same punch as the monosyllabic Quad (which I coined), and it's also a MF DOOM reference (fuck you!) H--den works a night shift, R--dra is in grad school, and the rest of us don't work, so we very often find each other when there's nobody else awake, especially during the ...
TO BE CONTINUED. I am tired and I have a doctor's appointment in the morning.
