AUGUST 19, 2023 • OLD TOWN, ALEXANDRIA

I intended to find time to work out going for a hike along skyline drive, or attend a pottery class, or support your friend at competition. I’d gladly have gone out to sushi or tacos with you and your beau, though as I type this script I neglected to take the initiative to do any of those things. Perhaps across the continent a fun call could be had but that would insult the irreverent sublimity of being around each other, making jokes, and embracing the absurdity of just being. So, I will embrace my own absurdity.

In 2013, I heard the words “The metal wind blows only for you” and while I have always wanted to call a story “The Metal Wind Blows Only For You” I cannot tell you about when I heard that quote. So, instead I will call this story “The Metal Wind Blows Only For You.”

In 1995 I lived in the same place I would live in 2013, Fort Meade Maryland. I, along with a half dozen other friends, were playing Chrono Trigger for the Super Nintendo. In the game, the protagonist Crono wanders across time to save the world. During the summer 1995, we too wandered the landscape of Anne Arundel county, seeking a savior to our late summer days. In the digital countryside of Chrono Trigger there were waves of grass, rolling porcelain clouds on cerulean skies. It took ages of bike riding, hiking, and trudging through sandy river banks, but we found our own such rest areas in Maryland.

Eighteen years removed, I found myself back there, sitting on the curb where I once crashed my skateboard and I recalled the fallen trees that were as big as dinosaurs, drainage pipes darker than any cave, decaying ruins of aged army barracks. Those companions I’d long ago traversed the countryside with, now untraversable oceans of living between us. Some I still knew distantly, some gone altogether, others were novelty internet follows. It turns out someone who was your closest companion at one time can fade into “incidental Instagram comment” over distance and enough living.

In 2013 I found myself, curbside, ice cream pop in hand, seeing the paths I once walked in periphery. I hadn’t seen those felled trees in twenty years, over grown with viridescent greens under a burning blue sky, however the Maryland I occupied sat on that curb was different from the Maryland of nearly twenty years prior. The green yardage and blood red bricks houses had faded to sage and desert browns. The air felt less humid between my fingers as I adjusted on a hotplate concrete seat. I rarely talk about my time as a child on Fort Meade, I’ve told a few stories about a school yard crush, or anecdotes about trading cartridges and cards with friends, but little else. It isn’t that Maryland wasn’t formative to who I am today, so much as it wasn’t until my family moved fifty miles to Fort Belvoir that my critical literacy found bedrock. In general, I talk far more often about my time in Monterey California, or Augusta Georgia, or Vancouver British Columbia. While some of those places I lived at longer, as a child the one place I lived longer than anywhere else and shaped my childhood was Fort Meade, Maryland.

In a world where media consumption asserts itself as the preeminent attribute we define ourselves under, Fort Meade, Maryland would be where I made some of my earliest opinions some of which I carry to this day. For example, it was during a summer reading group that I decided The Count Of Monte Cristo was the best pieces of classical literature, or that Jurassic Park is a perfect film, or that Donkey Kong Country was peak video games. Joel and Patrick Walsh, and I played Donkey Kong Country interchangeably for hours until they moved to another army base. Twice a year I will play the entire game from title screen to end credits to test my muscle memory for every stage, every jump, every mount. It was while at the Walsh’s house seeing Myst loaded up on a booklet of 3.5inch floppy drives against the sounds of Eternal Champions on Sega Genesis that I made the registered decision to dedicate myself to Nintendo, a petty and intransigent brand loyalty I maintain NFL-fan-like to present.

That ancient Maryland folded into my experience of Maryland circa 2013, now some decade onward as I stand on the patio of an apartment complex in Alexandria Virginia, I can’t remember 2013 Maryland without also re-living the experience of 1995 Maryland, which some of those memories folded into 1989 North Kingstown, Rhode Island, and so on until my first formative memory at age two.

A few friends have asked what this recall is like, describing how the highlights of their days or months are more akin to a sticky note peeling off the coffee table. Alternatively, a few others have typified their recall as being prospective, preoccupied with living less in the then or even now – more envisioning their current labors yield in the future. For me, memory is like an ever scrolling social feed of my life, times with friends, time abroad, time alone. As you, reader, already know, no meal no movie, no meme feels remote to the majesty of living it. We post these things and relive them not because the events changes, the garden party and picnic with friends can never change, but you will. The turf grass and patterned cushion won’t remember you, the pasta salad recipe you got from a friend won’t remember you, the prosecco hangover won’t remember you. So, leaned against a rattan patio couch in the August dusk humidity, I know down to my insoles that for many, a lot of this proceeding will become fugue, never posted to recall. As I hunch over to appear smaller, I brace knowing that tonight, like every night before it will be inevitably folded into future and past events.

“(Washington) D.C. is a black hole” is a format of joke often made with a certain kind of government or policy employee, my life has planet like wandered around the gravity of the area in some orbit or another since almost my inception. Passing the paths of other like-orbited bodies in movement, sometimes for a long time, sometimes not. Sometimes seeing them far off in D.C. orbital system, sometimes they’ve found velocity to leave eternal. Before I would theatrically wave with raised eyebrows and an affable smile to a party of well-wishers, I was at the elevator entrance frozen in emotion from the registry that a friend who dotted my time here would be gone. That the cacophony of the espresso machine, the clinical smell of organic cleansers, the UV filtered daylight through the windows would all soon not be memories with my friend, but alone. I register that this loop of recursive thinking can and does burn my cognition out, so I stepped away from the elevators and convinced myself no one wanted or needed to see me.

In 2013 I waded through the grass of Argonne Hills development in Fort Meade, Maryland. I folded the waxed paper cone of my ice cream pop and tucked it into my pants pocket and let myself disappear into the tree line. As I stepped into the noon-day pale-green light of the forest I gave in and let it all come over me, every afternoon running with friends recalled as I stood where I once ran. In that moment and for all eternity I would be a specter, standing in the then-present trapped in the past, and now looking back trapped still. The forest of Argonne Hills doesn’t run off for acres, after a few hundred feet it stops dead against barbed wire fencing and CCTV cameras. Just on the other side is the sprawling campus of the National Security Agency whose shadow and reputation loomed like a Black Omen over even grade-school children. In 1995 we would see who would get closer to the fence line and hide away under the felled tree or drainage pipes and speculate what mysterious things, what super powers for good or evil, were being concocted there. In 2013 it all looked smaller, the me of 2013 knew all mysterious on-goings in the Black Omen were simply Microsoft Office products in concert, same as any anonymous business park in America.

I was willing to soak in this ghost tour for as long as my heart could bear it, stumbling down the desire path from Christian Loop onto Baker Street I looked down to one end where Sasha once lived. She, Phillip, and I would walk my dog Button together in the summer, before she moved, then Phillip moved, then I walked my dog alone. I turned eastward to Madden Court, the Stevens lived there. Their son went to private school, but every Halloween they gave out king sized bars. Southward was the 7003 block of Baker Street.

In 1995 Phillip and I wandered the neighborhoods, scored by rotary blades mowing grass, front lawn-ed baby pools splashing, concrete reverbs of Monica, Blues Traveler, Vanessa Williams. In 2013 it was all the same, though now the boom boxes were replaced by Bluetooth speakers providing Rihanna, Imagine Dragons, Mariah Carey. I crossed the single lane of Baker Street staring into a parking space vacant. Eyeing up the two story brick townhouse, a face-sized green leaf fell to the grass alongside a yellowing sibling. I shifted on my heel to hear it’s tender crunch underfoot.

I held a bag of groceries under pitch black cold and felt the leaves crunch under my gumsole boots. Clint explained to me how he planned to prepare dinner as he, his partner Jen, and I walked their groceries inside. Billowing clouds of air scattered golden street lights. It is Monday, October 30th 2006. The absolute last time I set foot on Fort Meade before I would live there again. Though, the story of how I ended up back on Baker Street in bitter frost under the October sky – that is another tale.

I stood there at the end of the parking space demarcator as these memories, 2006, 1995, 1992 blinked in an out before me. Fireflies of memory the size of dictionaries fluttering before me. Waves of radiant nostalgia under the summer sun, so much that I couldn’t sit in one time as they folded in on each other – the more time I spend in these places I once was the more I straddle then and now. Memories of Then blend with marginalia of the Now, and Now with marginalia of Then.

In 1995 we would sit at the Wheeler Court Basketball Court, next to where Lee lived. Lee would practice his fade away jump shot all day while Sasha, Phillip, Barret and I would sit and talk about books. When it became too hot we would caravan-like move to the picnic tables at Midway Commons playground, sometimes stopping by to see if Sandra was able to join us. Like fireflies these friends, these comrades in adolescence, inmates of the military industrial complex – they all would one by one blink out like fireflies, off to other pastures. Barret and Phillip’s friend Yusuf came to the picnic tables once and brought with him a peculiar flask. Yusuf had just come back from visiting his grandparents overseas all summer and bragged about his tan and all the games his grandparents bought for him during his trip. I recall on the occasions when my friends and I would have sleep overs Yusuf wasn’t a common presence, he would talk loudly about how things were so much nicer and better at his house, though he never invited any of us over. As we would pack onto a couch at Barret, or Phillip, or Lee’s houses he would often sprawl on the couch occupying as much of it as he could, keeping his shoes on in doors because he didn’t want to “dirty his socks.”

Under the gaping blue summer sky Yusuf planted an old army canteen on the picnic table and announced his dare. He would give any game of his to someone who could drink the canteen. Barret grabbed the flask first, spinning the cap off the top and taking a slug before promptly gagging. Phillip then grabbed the container, eyeing the auspicious green to black interior and gingerly set it back to the table with a quiet “No. Thank you.” The prior school year Yusuf offered me a snack, which I naively bit into trusting my friend. It was a rotten egg salad sandwich. I recognized the meta of his game, there was a catch, but I wanted his copy of Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers for NES. I locked eyes with Yusuf, standing with his back to the sun, his smile gleaming in the umbra. I put lips to the canteen and pulled. Acrid. Brack. Alkaline. Every taste bud and muscle of my esophagus clenched in revolt against the dare. With clenched teeth and jaw I put down no more than a few ounces and put the bottle back to the table. Coughing. Wheezing. Gagging. Death. As I folded by the hip and retched I let out a “CHIP AND DALE” and suffered. Barret characteristically asked “What the [redacted] was that?” Yusuf patted me on the back smugly, stifling his laughter before answering “The Dead Sea. We never shook hands though, no deal.” Thirty years later I sometimes wonder if Yusuf works in crypto.

In 2013 I stand on the sidewalk, community grass unmanaged, the ashen Douglas Fir picnic table now splintered, water logged, and splitting. Some particles of me and a saltine lake a world away are still in that concrete, somewhere. The places will never remember you, a dozen-dozen reading club meetings and other as many trading card games matches won’t and can’t be remembered in wood and concrete. So we have to. That is up to us to etch in the pages of memory.

In 2023 I stand in the elevator entrance of my apartment building. The tesseract of memory folding inward outward. Now. 2013. 1995. 1992. Now, I scan my recall, “Are there any pictures of us” for a future post online, or any digital memento of the past year. I chastise myself for not renting a car and going for a hike like you said. I ask myself how 437 days can pass so quickly. I ask myself if I am making a molehill of this, am I just an acquaintance to you – ”Sentimentality, what you do to me.” Is 78 minutes time enough to meet a life-long friend? What amount of memes makes a real bond? Can you call something your favorite coffee if it was doordashed?

In 1995 I am in my bedroom dancing to Seo Taiji and Boys. I was first introduced to them by one of the Walsh Brothers and got a tape-copy of their first album Seo Taiji and Boys. The songs are in Korean, it wouldn’t be for another sixteen years that I understand the song. I only recognize the empassioned tones of the singer crooning 난 알아요 이 밤이 흐르면 요! 그대 떠나는 모습 뒤로하고. In 2006 I am running the Air Force Marathon listening to m-flo’s fourth studio album Beat Space Nine, I understand enough Japanese for most of the album save one song featuring Whee-Sung that is in Korean, it wouldn’t be another five years that I understand the song. I only recognize the empassioned tone of verbal rapping “난 알아요 all them ways you move through” and Whee-sung’s bridge 꿈보다 큰 너만의 상상도. So many incidental parts of my life later proved to be touch stones, intertextual references in my memory. In 1995 I barely understood a schoolyard crush, much less heartbreak, I couldn’t understand the song’s house beat plea for reconciliation, merely that beat demanding I move. In 2006 I couldn’t begin to comprehend verbal using a song about being “Da 1” as his dissertation speaking as a Zainichi Korean to a broader Japanese audience. Both songs sounded good to me at the time. Years later with dictionary pages crammed into my brain and another round with DLI completed that the songs actual text unfurled – just in time for collective 90s house nostalgia. Two halves of tone and text making a perfect loop. In November of 2011 I would find myself in Philadelphia at a Japanese bar incensed their karaoke book lacks m-flo and Whee-Sung’s I’m Da 1. Rather, I sing, a duet, by myself. 巻き戻す色あせた記憶再生. The elevator dings and the doors slide open, I step inside and tap my key-fob.

For myriad reasons that you the reader do NOT have time to review I do not proselytize. It is a loud and garish trait that reduces all conversation into a win-lose state that is just exhausting to be audience to. Outlining how my memory works, or how I see the world, or otherwise please know that this isn’t a soft pitch to make you a copy of me. I don’t even want your idea of me to be more like the actual me. I say all this because, for some, their concept of what being is is a chain of decisions that brought them to the moment of reflection. For others, it is some intersection of tribes and identity. For others still, it is their passions and interests, which are kinds of tribes and identities. None of us are made from whole cloth though. None of us are born fully determined fait accompli to be the person we are reading this. Character, habits, disposition, so much of who we are is made out of improbable impressions, choices, reflections all coming from what goes on outside ourselves as much as inside ourselves. In a media ecosystem so commodified and preoccupied with monetizing cultural nostalgia we don’t often consider the potency of nostalgia going on inside ourselves, or what is felt by others around us. I blink. The stainless steel doors part entry to the 6th floor and the glass walls of the apartment club house.

Welcoming the darkness of these ideas to root into my thoughts, in 1992 my teacher marked on my report card that I “am quite gifted, but all he wants to do is play video games.” In 1995 at a parent-teacher conference a counselor told my parents I “have good friends and relationships, but all he talks about is video games.” In 2006 my performance review remarked my only motivation was the work itself, not promotion, or award, or professionalization – only the puzzle itself. There’s nothing heartwarming about me or my life, even if there’s a gentle caring version of me in your memory, that’s a version so distant from the actuality as to almost be classified as para-social.

Across the sprawl of Maryland and Virginia I’ve been to so many townhouses, so many condominiums, so many complexes that all of it becomes diffuse together. Is this Rockville or Arlington? Am I in Bethesda or Reston? Herndon or Silver Spring? My Teva slippers skid against the concrete tile, I find a seat on the backing of a rattan patio couch, despite the pale yellow bulbs the sky is an aching dark orange from light pollution. I cannot, with no thousand thousands of words give you this night – even if you were there. I cannot grant myself what it was to be there because I’m not there anymore. These silly moments interspersed in life can and frequently are avalanche heavy for others. Auspiciously leaning in, sharing “work stories” curated to be safe for audiences. But everything about right now feels like training wheels being wrenched off. Hours later I will stumble back, our building lit up Luray Cavern stalagmite-like, shivering in the summer dense air from dance sweat and spilled beer all over my pullover. The whistle of the wind through brownstone canyons. Any memory, any digital memento, any souvenir cannot ever be enough so right now I do what I have always done, embracing every neuron to forge memory into nostalgia as it happens. So nostalgizing in real time I lean, I banter, I drink, and open myself up to every feeling and iota of the new so even as I draft this hours later, wistfulness overwhelms me to the point of putting digital ink to digital paper.

I stand in my Pythagorean-cave studio, window ajar, and listen to the creaks of courtyard doors, of dogs and their keepers on a walk, of the recapitulation of summer. We spend our lives now, a single eye turned unblinking towards “then”, constantly, unceasingly pondering where the Now and the Was demarcate. This is the Wittgenstein curse we all share, whose nostalgia so encompasses the totality of everyone else’s lived experience as to be a “perfect?” Who amongst us walks through life feeling in the now precisely as we imagined we would feel Now but Then? And the more I think about this the more I simply do not want to be me. I want to be how you remember me. I want to be the para-social version of myself that does not exist outside fleeting thoughts of me you have. This is a feeling I have experienced since I can remember feeling, this desire for being a nostalgia of me you have that it runs a vein through all of my own nostalgia. I am there on the 6th floor patio in a faded red pullover with specks of sea blue paint dried in. I am there in 2013, folded ice cream package in pocket, standing in front of a picnic table. I am there in 2006, leaning on a kitchen counter talking Lebanon after dinner. I am there in 1995 on the basketball court as Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know blasts nearby. I am every-when I have ever lived constantly, so in coming back here to start anew – of course I would run into myself. Memory only ever remembers what we demand of it, it can hold onto a sight or a smell or a tactile sensation, but it can’t keep everything. Memory can never compare to the now, that’s where nostalgia comes in. Nostalgia kintsugi fills the gaps of our memory with ache for the then but it can only do this for what you remember. You can never have nostalgia for something not already part of yourself. Like kintsugi, the bigger the memory the more gold foil filling the fractures formed by the passage of time, the heavier that memory becomes. And that is why I can’t seem to lose those last 13 pounds.

As I stood in the elevator banks and eyed the grout on the tile I asked myself a question I have reflectively asked since I first overheard a conversation from my parents about my cancer screening – “If I died now, how will people remember me.” On the perimeter of the apartment complex, there’s plaques about the former residents of this neighborhood. Proving the exception to the rule, the only time places can remember us is once we are dead. Across all these times and on seeing Vivian’s packed boxes I asked myself, knowing the places we see cannot remember us, do the people we encounter knowing full and well we will never see them again deserve to be nostalgized? Within a year she will have sufficient velocity as to never return to the orbit of D.C. ever again whereas I cannot seem to avoid its gravity from even the other side of the world. Listening to her plans, she already has more than enough cause to resist ever coming back again, whereas I, in some cosmic farce, have gone back here again and again and again. And now I see that return or not, she changed the orbits of myself and everyone else here. Back here, yet again, looking out across the Potomac no different and so similar as I am, I imagine my own epitaph: [REDACTED.] In 1995 my great grandmother, eyes teared, clutched my hand in bed and squeezed my fingers before patting my head and asked me to get her a glass of water. I would never speak to her ever again. In 2006 a coworker, red eyed and puffy, told me to never stop seeking the “so-what,” before starting his commute home. I would never speak to him ever again. One bad day of my life I heard the phrase “The metal wind blows only for you” and I can’t forget this phrase. It finds me when I sleep, or when I see particular headlines, or when someone asks about specific foreign policies. My childhood wasn’t by any means tragedy prone, death didn’t mile-mark my adolescence any more than you or anyone else, though I remember crying when I reached the end of Maniac McGee. I remember crying when I found out I would never say goodbye to Sam. I remember crying one Christmas morning because my father was deployed and I really wanted him to be there even if it meant I didn’t get any presents. In the face of finality, a metal wind blows for you. For the majority of my life I felt so much that I was a failure at living that I obsessed over what-ifs, I was transfixed on the idea that a minor deviation in my past would alter my present. That in a sense I failed my childhood and that failure stuck to me. In coming back here, again, I realize the moral I failed to see was much kinder to myself than I am capable of being. That failure or success, you or I can always go back in nostalgia and find grace for ourselves and others.

My years long obsessions with what-if served as an emotional purgatory. By coming and going from this place and finally confronting where I was, where I am, where I eventually would be again, I could be free. I was free and found the courage to reach out to old friends and see them again, from Maryland, from Virginia, from Pennsylvania. I would revisit the past without being folded back into it. A short list of people I knew still lived here that I wanted to see came to mind. One of them was Amelia. Amelia first introduced me to shoujo manhwa. In high school she would ask me to find her Korean movies like My Sassy Girl, or Japanese manga like Fruits Basket, and inevitably everything she asked was on the cusp of becoming popular. My sophomore year of high school, as I moped around the halls with my headphones on, she slapped me on the back, pinched my chin to lift it up, and told me to stand tall and not stare at the floor. She always punctuated her sentences with a glowing smile. After I got my learner’s permit, she taught me to driver’s side parallel-park. She taught me how to play Dance Dance Revolution. She taught me how to win at Dance Dance Revolution. She dual-wielded in Time Crisis. She showed me boba tea. On a list that could be counted with two hands, she was one of few friends I had in high-school.

Amelia was killed by a reckless driver while taking her daughter to day-care in August of 2021.

As I stood at the ends of my nostalgia, I felt the gates close in front me. Now, all I can ever have of this friend, is the shade of her I have carried for years. All I have of Tutuma, of Frank, of Amelia, of so, so, SO many other people that I will never see for the remainder of my days is my nostalgia. And, sitting in that dry-heave heat of a realization, I realize that that is all we can ever have. I realize that is why I brought you through all this with me. So, some single neuron in your mind can remember them if only as a line of text, and they can still be. So I can still be. In this season of my life I realize I will never win a mid-court shoot off contest, I won’t ever see the surface of Mars, I won’t end climate-change, but I can driver’s side parallel park, I am really good at Time Crisis, I am always seeking the “so-what,” I will always offer my friends water. All of this, all these daisy-chained words and jokes and confessions, this is all a splinter of a sliver of myself. If I can’t ever feel the totality of my interior, there is no way I will ever feel ALL of feeling. So I offer all this pain, this love, to add to your own nostalgia. To tie this to you reading this, to this season of your life, to your nostalgia of me.

Blinking on the obituary page for Amelia I realize that any illusion of being out of nostalgia was only that. Because as I type this I feel new ones forming and old ones expanding. I have nostalgia for being sick from a Moderna booster and playing the DS edition of Chrono Trigger in bed with goldfish and sprite. I have nostalgia for playing Breath of the Wild on Halloween while Neo rested in my lap to feel safe from fireworks. I have nostalgia for eating fist-sized mandu in Jeonju with the Squid. I have nostalgia for making jokes in a gas station mini-mart with Diane and Vivian on the way to Diane’s competition. I have nostalgia for sparkling wine and cheddar chex-mix with Vivian and Atlas. I will have new nostalgia for the rest of my life until all that is left of me is the nostalgia you have for me. I was never trapped inside this place because every single one of these moments folding in on themselves enhanced the others. Nostalgia of course can only exist from what is part of you, it can only exist from places and people you love. If I accomplished anything from this then parts of my own nostalgia were shared with you and now we share that, if that is true then my gratitude to this roaring ache is somehow louder. The night Vivian plopped into a lounge chair next to me and introduced herself I was awash in fear and regret for being back in this place, questioning if I were worthy for it. A year later I am grateful for coming back to this place where I had not present for so long. I am grateful I could learn this about myself. I am grateful I could tell you this story about my own nostalgia so that part of me can be shared with you. I won’t serve you some cliché like “I will always treasure our times together” because you already know I will. I love every manifolded memory and the people and the places in them and that means you too. And, I want you to know you can feel that too.

As I began drafting this essay, another friend found me. He reached out and we were caught up on lost time. I told Rafael about coming back to Northern Virginia, to Alexandria. I told him about driving down Route-1 and seeing how so much has changed and how much is stuck in time. I told hime about our old high school. I told him about how Springfield Mall is zombified and all our old third-places are in disrepair. Rafael, as old high school friends are wont to do, brought up mutuals from our time together. Bryce didn’t go to the same high school as Rafael or I, but he was part of a small click of five of us after graduation. Twice a week we would get pho, go to the movies, then go to one of our houses and play video games until we actually passed out with our controllers in hand, before waking at dawn to go to our summer jobs. Rafael replied “Yeah, Bryce, they said he died in what was it? A catastrophic car crash?” After a long silence he asked me if I remember LP. I replied “Of course I remember LP, he drove that Mazda 626 with the loud exhaust. His license plate was DRGNBOI.” Rafael replied “Yeah man, he got arrested for, what was it, grand larceny? Evidently he broke into a school and stole 50,000 dollars’ worth of computer equipment. Last I heard he was in state prison. Glad we didn’t end up like him.” But I already knew that, because it happened a year after graduation, when we all were still hanging out together, but for Rafael, LP was a high school friend, not from adulthood.

So as I sit and type at what is generously past my initial life expectancy but can’t help but feel that opaque specter of death loom. I think about Tutuma, about Frank, about Amelia, about Bryce and I think about how they are amberized in my nostalgia and I think about what parts of me were amberized in them, in you. As I type this exact sentence nostalgia tessaractedly folding, I recall being three years old in Rhode Island spelling “O L I V E S” in alpha-font refrigerator letter magnets, followed by “T H A N K Y O U” underneath. These constitute the first ever words I wrote, my first spoken words irrelevant, these were the first words where I manipulated the outside world to be SEEN by others. I recall that linoleum floor and orange countertop as my grandmother poured olives into a lime green Tupperware bowl and sent me off in a diaper and wonder, are these the final words I will ever compose? Recalling high school friends and my own myopic anxiety?

Once or twice a year a dream finds me when I sleep, but it isn’t really a dream. It is a memory of someone I knew. In my sleep, they are crying and pleading, but no one listens. Some unseen person in the dream says “you can’t run from this or through this, the metal wind blows only for you tonight” and then the person I knew was gone, erased, mist. There are some things we cannot persevere and no matter of effort, of begging, of crying, of bargaining will make that wind cease. There are some headwinds that flesh cannot persevere, they take us with them. That metal wind can blow for us nearly-octogenary in bed, it can blow for us amid a long struggle, it can blow for us while we commute, but it reaches us eventually and our sprints will not succeed it. Eventually, the metal wind blows only for you.

That phrase has stuck to me for a long time, because of course it has. God, everything has stuck to me for so long. More and more rarely, a different nostalgia finds me in my quiet hours. Before I could write, or speak. This memory of meat over charcoal, of Crowded House, of pine needles floating in the pool, and floaties on my arms and waist. I can hear my mother and father. I can hear my uncle and aunt. I can hear my great-grandmother. I am home because I am with loved ones. I am home because I am safe. I am home because I am alive. There is no nostalgia before that because there is no before. Before that moment, I was a tabula rasa. But I am not then. I am not in 1992, or 1995, or 2013. I am right now. I will ALWAYS be right now.

Thank you for reading. Good night.