last week--

[magneticsyntax]

i should be cramming, but here i am. i do not know where all these words will probably go, i'm not even sure if i should follow them. i've forgotten how to write, it seems as alien to me as trying to tell time backwards. it's a memory that has slipped away, displaced by things i'd rather not know. i've discovered the secret to forgetting--it's all about remembering. but i acknowledge that i can never completely forget. you can erase the memory of a country, but you'll always know what it looks like by recalling the borders that surround it. you can lose a puzzle piece and still know the picture you're missing. you're days away, weeks, maybe even years. time is a distance that proves more difficult to transcend than yards, miles, or differences. i feel like we're running in halls of light and even if you're near enough, even if i can smell your hair, you're not really there. i hate how the scent of you lingers even if you've been gone for so long. and after you leave, there's always that empty space where you so comfortably fit, shoes made just for your feet. i imagine you in so many spaces of my life. i've stopped taking walks now, because the shape of your body is on the sidewalk, sitting on a bench somewhere in the university, smoking, gazing at the sky from under rows of trees, walking on dead leaves. i've come to fear my home too. you're still beside me in bed, sitting on the chair by the dinner table, in the passenger seat of my car. you see, after you left, i didn't feel anything. i learned later that everything is causally related, everything is the effect of something else. but empty space, just like the ones in between stars or in between paintings or in between your jumbled sentences, offers no tinge of any color. somehow it happened, that you began stealing my time, and putting it between us, until slowly i lost all of it. when i looked up, i saw the seconds, minutes, hours in between us. i couldn't even see you anymore. but here i am. i've forgotten you, but i'm looking at you right now. you're out of focus, but i get a certain satisfaction knowing that it's your light kissing my lenses. maybe this is the answer to the puzzle, the one that explains the underlying fabric of the universe. you look into the night sky, but it's all actually just a retinal after-image. it's an old photograph of an opera house demolished five years ago. it's all the stars we see at night. it's just light, but it's just not really there.

another day--just believe.