Hey Loners,
I’ll give you a few new thoughts and I’ll attach some older thoughts I had when meditating about seeing a beloved pal again. You are that pal. Hello, hello.
There are two recordings at present of Alone In My Room and I’m working on more but this month I’m starting a new job, I’m finishing old projects and I’m in a state of transition and scared shitless. I’ve overthought everything and as always it ends with me neck and wrists in stocks, rotted tomatoes in eye. I want good things and yet I don’t know if I deserve them. Ever since the world told me I mattered I felt like I could look up my worth in the Kelly Blue Book and I wouldn’t be happy to know the value given the year I was made.
Want good things for you and I want good things for me. It’s my dream to have a big enough pie that all my friends have a slice and when everyone has their fill there’s still enough for me. Looking at your mouths covered in very berry slime I’ll be nourished by the crumbs and your smiles and the way you say my name. You having some of my pie doesn’t hurt me, it fills me up. That’s my dream.
One of my favorite skate spots has this long open road and it gets dark and the road seems to go on forever. I like sitting on the curb exhausted staring in the nothingness and the potential and feeling like time has gotten extended. I don’t have any tricks. I’m just a thick thigh calamity planting two feet on the plank and instead of just walking it to the edge I want to ride it. I want to take you there and have you sit with me.
We’ll eat cantaloupe panna cotta and maybe you’ll go home and make it for yourself. It requires half a melon and coconut cream. Lime juice, zest and black pepper. Honey. For every cup of liquid add 2tsp of agar agar. You could fill it in a mold of your choice or use the empty rind. Let it set for 4 hours in the frig, longer the better. If the melon is good and ripe, if the morning is all starlings and long shadows receding, then it’ll seem more refreshing than it should be. It’ll startle you. Everything could be so simple, why isn’t it, why, why, why?
The next time I see you, we will have aged permanently and irrevocably from the stress of the present. We will speak over each other but not say anything too heavy. You can barely tell me who died and I can barely admit I almost did.
I haven’t seen you since I learned how to drive or maybe I have and I wasn’t driving but now I have driven and crashed a car. For now you’re safely in the passenger seat and I must remind you that to write in the second person is an unforgivable curse of whimsy, but you say, it’s all right and take the aux cord and put on Beach House.
Queue up a lot of songs we listened to when we met, a lot of concerts we drank weak lagers and shouted the words and it feels good. There’s a lot of locals at first and then you play the top 40. I remember this particular song vividly because I was inside of a Hot Topic, about to purchase a poke ball belt buckle that I sincerely thought put me in a league of my own and I almost crash the car from retroactive embarrassment.
Pull over and snatch the phone from you. I will put this album on and tell you it’s the only album that exists. That’s a lie and you know it. It’s the album I want you to know makes my heart quake right now. Two days ago I am curled up saying the same thing about The Halo Benders and playing “Virginia Reel Around” I always say this and it’s patently false but this album feels so good. On Sundays I make pancakes and listen to Otis Redding. I bump shut the fridge with the soft dent in my hip to “Cigarettes and Coffee.”
Here. This.
Otis Redding at the Whisky-A-Go-Go.
I get blue in the face shouting how punk Otis was-- wait for it, wait for it, listen to that.
They call me, Mr. Pitiful, cuz I’m in love with you.
I’m not in love with you but I am in love with this album.
I’ll play it for anyone who wants to hear it. You can hear my man’s sweat singing backup, bellowing harmonies from his skin. Otis says there’s pain in his heart putting extra breathe into the vowels turning them into the ‘o’ in hole. I love it. Love that for him.
The next time I see you, it’ll be hard to go to places we once or never did together because so many of them closed, forever. The next time I see you, I will stand six feet away from you out of habit. I have always been accostomed to distance for survival but now I measure and weigh everything including affection, in metric, to be more precise.
The next I see you, I will feed you. I will make you bittersweet black bread and a cabbage soup. I re-read Anais Nin and in this house of love, I will feed you caramelized onions, honey with hornets, figs, and butter.
I will feed you to watch you open your mouth and to see your teeth and tongue so close up.
The thing I hate the most about the second person is that it totally wants to fuck. It’s too intimate. I wanted us to feel closer than we did before and now I want to unconsciously couple. I wanted to address you, as you, and then you became everyone and no one. I’ve been so distant all my life, it felt good to try to go through the olypmics of yearning when in fact it’s not my love language. I have missed you for a long time and I’ll miss you forever; it won’t need an aux cord or a few days away.
Everything is suffocating close in the second person, you, the reader, imagine me, a romantic when in fact I am a gigantic lemur peering into the face of a friend. Imagine a lemur watching you eat and honestly having said this...I want to find myself in this situation. I wrote this to you as I heard the birds wake up on a night I couldn’t sleep.
The next time I see you I have a unibrow, a Tom Selleck mustache; all these years you thought I was joking about my endocrine reports, about my androgens, the hirsutism I daily maintain and now you’ll live my truth. I wear air max sneakers and I unfortunately look like I will give you a business card that’s just my soundcloud handwritten in blue ballpoint. Honestly it’s a long time coming but I delayed the inevitable.
Of all the YouTube videos I’ve watched I’ve willfully never learned how to do my own eyebrows. Stubbornly it’s one of few purchases and comforts I budget for; paycheck to paycheck, I hold onto these dollars just for this moment. I look forward to the sting, to the pull. So I save up and walk into the salon, hello my baby, hello my darling, kicking my legs. I ask my ragtime girl to pull out every single hair on my face, to take my lashes and even the baby hairs.
I’ll tip 200%.
We will make up for lost time. Hair by hair pulled from my face she tells me where she’s been.
I’ll have tears in my eyes, asking how’s her kids, telling her about you loners and how much I’ve missed you and she’ll say, hold right here, yes, this always hurts but never specifically which part.
Godspeed Loners,
Kelly
alone in my room is a once defunct and maybe weekly dispatch from the mundane from a local ficus. kelly is a writer, food himbo & serial hobbyist.
you can support a hobby or buy soil for a plant here.