winterlist

I. 

I’ve never seen the start of snowfall. I’ve only ever stepped into the world

mid-blizzard. I don’t know beginnings. 

II. 

I can’t read romance novels, can’t watch lavish Indian movies or 50 episode dramas. I can’t catch sight of someone in love, can’t talk about my dreams and speculations. All of them turn my mind into a decrepit one screen movie theater playing broken reruns of that night in  your apartment with your t-shirt on the lamp and my unfinished cup of ice cream sitting on your desk, slowly melting along with my courage to speak up. 

III. 

You know the kind of despair that is so potent, it renders even poetry useless? That is what I have in me. 

IV. 

I try to romanticize it, but either way I’m left with the cold reality  that I do not want this, not in this way, and that even if you have a  guillotine painted on your stomach and wore a black water-stained suede  jacket that sparkled with snow the first time we met, I should know  what’s best for me. And I should know it’s not best for me to like these  things about you. I’m aware that’s what got me into this mess in the first  place. 

V. 

We watch Rupi Kaur perform on your phone in place of  pillowtalk, and laugh at her because we think she’s a nothing writer  (we’re both writers and we’ve done nothing). Her poems are just thoughts and sentences, I say and you laugh. Everything’s a poem,  though, you say. I think you’re full of shit. I tell you as much and you  proceed to break down the poetic implications and hidden meanings of a subway sign.

VI. 

A teacher I adored in high school once gave us all index cards at 8:30 on a cool November morning in a sunny classroom with clay sculptures drying on every windowsill and a painted out-of-tune piano in the far

corner. She asked us what happiness was. It took me a moment to write down words — I had a song stuck in my head, and it was a song that reminded me of someone I loved — but it wasn’t difficult to find an answer. Maybe because answers to questions like that are always varying strains of non-answers. 

“Happiness is…” 

I read aloud, pausing like I was  reciting poetry because I thought I’d unraveled the knot with a single  string (in retrospect, I was quite embarrassing), 

“To be in love and be  loved, with everything and by everything.” 

How foolish. 

VII. 

Every bedroom I sleep in is colder than the one before. It’s like the cold  follows me. I’ve switched bedrooms three times since I moved back  home for the year, once in the summer during a thunderstorm, once in  the middle of the night on my tiptoes, and once because I still believed I could escape it. It’s colder in Massachusetts, sure, but this is different.  This is inescapable. 

VIII. 

They had a British accent but were born and raised in 

Massachusetts. We sat next to each other with adjacent names at graduation where I waxed poetic to a crowd of proud cameras. Two days later, they confessed and I woke up to the exhilarating feeling of being wanted. Before I could build my courage, they moved to London and I moved to New York City, and we both thought how fitting, it feels like  we’re moving back to where we came from. I wrote them a song a few  months later and sent it to them and they sounded winded after hearing it and I thought this is what suffocation feels like. I wrote them a letter and  told them I’d send it because I laid myself bare and they said they’d read  it, but sometimes pressure relents and lights fizzle out and so I never sent it, but maybe the pressure relented and the lights fizzled out because I never sent it. Years later, I think about sending it to them with no warning and seeing if it’s enough to reignite anything. They have a girlfriend now.

IX. 

Every time you text me, my heart seizes in my chest and I feel  

like I’ve just run a half marathon. This is not a good thing. You make me  

question who’s the bad guy, and everyone around me says it’s you but  

they only know what I’ve told them, so I must be the bad guy. 

X. 

Maybe someday I’ll meet them again in another form. And  

maybe then I’ll say yes to every question they ask me, maybe I won’t  

hesitate the second time because I know what the consequences are. I  

know the loss, I know that it will never be worth more than the lack of  

surety. 

XI. 

I want you to know that if anyone from my past told me they  

loved me, I would leave you. Not because I love them more, but because  

they’re strangers that feel familiar. You and I have no history, and I  

think that might be the most important part of love. And I don’t have the effort to  

make any with you. I’m completely empty. 

XII. 

I’m crying while hysterically texting a girl who lives with my oldest  

friend. She’s admitted before that she’s in love with me,  and in response I  

told her I’m incapable of relationships in real life. That when I think of a  

lover, my chest squeezes and when I think of her I feel nothing so she  

should expect nothing as well. I don’t think she gets it but she gets  

everything else—to an uncanny extent—so I talk to her when I panic. I  

talk to her when I’m so low, I cannot talk to any of the people I really do  

love. Maybe it’s the perfect combination of knowing she thinks of me  

and knowing I don’t care what she thinks of me, so my mind loses any  

inhibitions and allows me to lay myself bare in ways I never could with  

any real lover I might ever have. And maybe it’s because she tells me  

I’m an expert in talking her down and I know for a fact she’s terrible at  

talking me down, and that satisfies my ego enough to apply a bandaid to  

the problem of my inadequacies.

XIII. 

I’m using her like a garbage can to dump my black-tar insides into.  When her typing bubble turns into the most wrenching sentence I’ve ever  been told, I collapse in on myself. 

“You’re not half as wretched as you think you are,” 

it reads, and it’s so painful, it’s like my chest is sinking  under a construction site filled with wet concrete. It’s pure, agonizing  compression. I can barely catch a breath.

 “Stop,” 

I text her and turn off  my phone. I chew on seven melatonin gummies and miss all of my  classes the next day. 

XIV. 

Are you an ignorant villain, obliviously cruel, because I want to  stab my own stomach and it boils down to your lack of warning, or am I  a despicable person because I can’t take responsibility and you were  never in the wrong, it was me who never had the right timing. 

XV. 

She gets high one night and tells me I’m a monster from hell. I send her a recording at 5am in a sleep-hoarse voice instead of doing my final, and I let her know that what she’s doing is not okay and she cannot continue. I tell her we cannot continue. And so we haven’t spoken since the first week of December and it’s now the new year and I know she’s been on at least ten dates with ten different people. 

XVI. 

I wrote a song about how much I do not feel for her, and how I sometimes wish I did because finding someone that wants me is like finding a needle in a haystack. When I shared it with her she told me, with audible smugness, that her friend said I was in denial and that the  song I wrote was a love song. I immediately panicked and denied the  notion. Sometimes I really don’t help myself. 

XVII.

Last summer, I was indecisive about an essay and someone told me to write my titles like Yukio Mishima. I added Spring Snow to my 

bookshelf a few weeks later, which I guess is not really what they meant. Then I bought a book in the West Village called Madness, Rack, and Honey, and I wondered why that someone didn’t tell me to write my titles like this. But I guess that’s what they meant in the first place. 

XVIII. 

I should title you. Madness. You’re a Gemini and a writer and you make fun of things we both know you actually love, and I like that, so I should fight for you when my friends make faces. Rack. You’re a poet,  and I heard your poetry in your voice on a park bench in the winter, so I  should defend you when my mind tears your words down and declares  them terrible. Honey. You keep talking to me and texting me like you  want to be with me, and the last time I saw you, you pressed a kiss to my  forehead and it felt like the sweetest thing, so I should keep you even  though my chest doesn’t squeeze, it explodes. Maybe that’s actually what it’s meant to do.