The city explodes every morning you leave it. On the train you watch the buildings in Harlem catch fire in the glare of the sun. Steel melt like cheap mascara. Fire escapes vanish into asphalt. Bricks undo their jigsaw. Everything around you crumbles like faith. The screams crash through your headphones. You want to come back later, touch the char, read their stories off your hand like newspaper ink. But instead you hope the ground will open up and swallow them whole before they realize they have nowhere to go. In their white noise and toasty air you close your eyes. You go to sleep. There’s nothing you can do anyway.

You are alone in an apartment that is not yours. The walls are white here, like the cabinets and the doors and the sheets of the king sized bed you sleep on the edge of. If you throw your arm over you can rest your whole hand on the cold floor. They are white too, so white that you feel embarrassed by the random abstractions of hair trailing the few places you feel comfortable enough to just be. But you settle on leaving it all there. Because nothing else in the room tells you that anyone really lives here. You open drawers to find them empty, two closets sparsely filled albeit with designer clothes, a white keyboard piano the roommate has to impress girls covered in dust, a balcony with no chairs. You ask why the room is so empty and he tells you he doesn’t have time to decorate. But to you it’s not a matter of decorating. It’s a matter of living.

The day you stop writing is the day a boy tells you he likes that you are grounded. And you aren’t. And you weren’t. But you want to be. You want so badly to be that you lock up the words from before, the words that told the truth of who you are, of what you fear, of all that you want but can never have, you shield them from the eyes that will never even bother to look for them and you pretend that you were never like that. You were always grounded. You think about deleting them until you realize it would be a bit like killing a part of yourself. There was a time where you wouldn’t have hesitated.

In the quarter before the pandemic hit, I took a creative writing class on memoirs. We’d sit around the square of tables that rolled if you ever even tried to lean on them, in the basement of the building that a person who once lived in the room right next to mine jumped from. And on the days that I would make it to class, I’d stand outside and see the wrinkled flowers on the steps, the candles no longer lit, rain having pooled in the wax that the fire once pushed away, the words written in his honor that he never got to hear when it mattered, and I’d wonder if that was exactly where his body landed. I’d wonder where he went after. I’d wonder if he’d gotten what he wanted. I’d hope that he did. And I’d go to class a few minutes late. There were no windows in there, but it didn’t matter because it was never sunny anyway. Not the way I remember it. But then again, I remember things wrong all the time.

Hello again, it’s been ages. Well it hasn’t really, but when I am away the words that build up inside my head come to rest in my hands, full, heavy, swirling with a confident certainty but also with the half life of a hydrogen isotope. The hours that pass as I lie unmoving press away at these thoughts I once had, water drops on folded sheets of tissue, and when I finally wake, I find my arms aching and my fingers stiff, clutching at a scrambled mess of letters, empty vestiges of all that I once thought and all that I thought I knew. I string them up in random orders looking for sense, logic, familiarity, I calculate the permutations, I solve the puzzle. No. I do not. I never can. Instead I give a trick answer and erase the past few days. If there was nothing there to begin with, there is nothing that I could have lost.

It’s easier to think about my brain as a separate entity. She is mysterious and volatile and brilliant and flawed. She needs to be managed, and also freed. I feel around her folds to try and find what makes her happy, what she wants. And often I find my hands empty, my fingers tainted with feelings and thoughts that I cannot control or understand. They taste like ink, and I do not have a pen. I smear her colors over the door, the mirror, the window. I drop her into a candle flame and look for answers in the smoke. She has adapted to years of never wanting, never needing, and now in this mess of reality she has no direction. I offer up new hobbies, new people, new things and she is capable of being fascinated. But inevitably, she retreats into a corner of comfort, a sedative to defend from knowing that she cannot have everything she wants, and she wants the world.