re: new address

Dear,

Am becoming or have become sick. We will see how far I succumb to my illness. I assume it's Ivy's cold. On the phone with her mom today, her mom said it's because we're "bed buddies". I thought the phrasing & mild disapproval was funny. I assumed Ivy's cold was inevitable & had resigned myself to it, but I am not at all as sick as her. I'm just profoundly tired. I slept twelve hours today & was still tired all the grey day. My ears hurt, & my throat mildly, but I am not a phlegm-cough-artillery-unit like Ivy, nor a veritable snot-fountain; I am just extremely tired. At first I thought I was just depressed but it transgressed some sort of threshold that made me think I was sick. I can't identify the threshold, but life is full of them, invisible & important lines. When you're a child, sickness seems more definite, doesn't it? Like it has contours & that's how adults know how to take care of you, but really there are no contours & the adults don't really know. The fact that illness is identified through symptoms says that; they're just vague suggestions of a bigger thing. I wish there were some sort of number I could point to, something clear that says on this side you should exist as normal & on this side you deserve to lay in bed, but there's not. There's nothing in the world to tell us what we deserve.

. . .

I got a job, finally, on Friday. I got the phonecall while I was laying in bed. Substitute teacher Michael, thank God. A while ago, I told Ivy I didn't have a dream job after I thought I got rejected from the substitute jobs & she told me "Buddy, I think substitute teaching might have been your dream job." It put things into perspective for me. It's the job that lets me work as little as possible. I find fulfillment in that.

—

Wednesday, October 08, 2025

I'm learning that sharing a bed with a sick person makes you act sick. Ivy's the sick one & yet I go to bed before her & sleep alongside her into the late morning. I'm living like I have a cold. Maybe it's the lethargy grey sky.

Even my appetite seems diminished with hers, & for breakfast I poked at a slice of coffeecake with a spoon, the act of chewing laborious, before making us each SHIZUOKA HOUJI-CHA, 100% Japanese Roasted Tea. I reminisced about my June in Shizuoka with E as I poured the boiling water from the small stovetop pot directly into our cups, into Ivy's sheep mug & the Snoopy cup that E's mom gifted me when I left, both sitting atop a grey kitchen towel in case of spills (which are hard to avoid when you don't own a kettle). For a moment, the June sleeping on the Shizuokafloor seemed closer than the June spent teaching summerschool underneath the highway in Austin. The memory of it felt almost redeeming.

I went on a walk for only the second time since moving to Portland. It wasn't a hike through nature that has to be driven to first (by Ivy), which I have done plenty of; it was a no-destination walk through the sidewalk grey moat around my apartment. After nesting myself fully into the cold-lifestyle this past week, only venturing out for more library books & citrus tea / cough drops for Ivy's throat, I was beginning to suspect that despite the comfort, something in me was becoming stale, like a window needed to be opened. I felt like I should pace around, the way zoo animals chew on themselves, so I finally put headphones on & submerged myself in the surrounding concrete. Walking in the city long enough, I always get the feeling that I am somehow too far into it, whatever it is — (I think I mean my life) — and that I've passed the point where I can turn back. It's like walking through a one-way mirror or through some sort of membrane that has tainted you without your knowledge. I have always found the Last Free Exit signs along the highway unnerving, as if they are written specifically to me. In an email this morning I was told:

I always forget about how much the passage of time can erode things. Everything that seemed immediate & vivid at the time now feels like a life lived by someone other than me. The same kind of forgetting will happen to the days we're living now.

I walked past the newly encamped RVs along our street, past the emptied-out (now closed) grocery store & parking lot, past the bus tangle, until I reached concrete squares holding buildings in all directions, my only way forward waiting & wading through crosswalks. Then without warning, some sort of shroud fell over me — though it felt like I was seeing more clearly, like something was lifted — and everything looked like I was in Austin again, like I hadn't left & was walking back from the school. And I wondered if I really could change.

With nowhere to go, I just walked toward whichever trees had the brightest redyellow leaves, marveling that they were not detritus underfoot & aboveconcrete, something that is still novel to me. I walked until one of the concrete squares that held buildings suddenly became flat & mostly empty. It was a park, but it was almost devoid of any plantlife & looked like it was just a sculpture of a park, as if an artist recreated a park to scale solely out of concrete. It looked like a nuclear semiotics warning, like it existed to be inhospitable. Still, it was empty of any cars, so I walked in tight circles, it was a small park, & looked at the people around me. I looked so long at these people who lived nearby but who I couldn't recognize & I felt myself melt into them, subsumed by anonymity & a feeling of insignificance that felt like being beside the ocean, becoming conscious of how small I am against how big the world is. It made me feel not clean, but smooth like the concrete world around me. I felt completely one with my ugly surroundings & felt some sort of weird peacelikeresignation settle into me, like bile had receded from the back of my throat leaving me with just a stinging sensation, while simultaneously me felt splattered against all of the concrete & the features of the nameless people around me. I felt dissolved & then I walked home.

Despite the fact that I walked away from home for a while, wandering around was like turning a Rubik's cube in a variety of shades of grey, giving only some sort of illusion of progress, & I was much closer — only a few blocks away — without realizing it. On some instinctual level I must have known, because even though I walked so many forced twists & contortions away from the apartment, I was able to walk straight home. When you live in this city, nothing is far away, except for the mountains that become as flat as wallpaper behind the buildings.

—

Sunday, October 05, 2025

Ivy's been sick for the past couple of days & I've been met with the figure of her back in bed, curled slightly in the same shirt, Don't Mess With Texas in large font. Despite the text on the shirt, it's one of the few clothes of hers that we don't share & that is not originally from me — (it's from her brother.) It's one of my least favorite sleepshirts of hers, as when I lay my face against her back, it's met with the plastic feeling of the red-white-and-blue Buccee's graphic against my cheek & the sensation of lifting my face from her back is the same as peeling sweaty skin from leather car seats in summer.

More & more I've slept away from Ivy & toward the icon wall above our bed, waking up with my back against it, curled like ash, like my grandpa's dog beneath his prayer flags. The landlord forbids using tape on walls & painted them with some sort of antiadhesive, preferring thumbtacks. Only today, after my nap from against the wall, did I notice for the first time how the clear thumbtacks shine in the afternoon light like dozens of little icicles.

—

We finally have the moon for once! — Aw. — What do you mean? — That was sad phrasing. But it was also true phrasing. It's almost always hidden from this place.

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