Memorial

That loving a person means letting them change when they need to. And letting them go when they need to. And that doesn’t make them any less of a home. Just maybe not one for you. Or only for a season or two. But that doesn’t diminish the love. It just changes forms.

But I guess that's the thing: we take our memories wherever we go, and what’s left are the ones that stick around, and that’s how we make a life.

It’s hard to head home without succumbing to nostalgia, standing where so many versions of yourself once stood,

You’re taking up space in another human’s brain, she said. You’re a foreign entity. A parasite. That’s a lot by itself.

There are no wastes. Either nothing is a waste, or everything is a waste.

How often do you get to learn that lesson? That sometimes you just lose?

There's this phenomenon that you'll get sometimes - but not too often, if you're lucky - where someone you think you know says something about your gayness that you weren't expecting at all. Ben called it a tiny earthquake. I don't think he was wrong. You're destabilized, is the point. How much just depends on where the quake originated, the fault lines.

We didn’t actually decide anything, between the two of us. But a nondecision is a choice in itself.

we take our memories wherever we go, and what’s left are the ones that stick around, and that’s how we make a life.

We all change. We’ll all have plenty of homes in this life. It’s when you don’t that there’s an issue. That’s settling.

So, the next morning, despite everything, I’m at his door. My father’s door. And then I am knocking. Waiting. It’s hard to head home without succumbing to nostalgia, standing where so many versions of yourself once stood, one of a suburb’s magical properties.

I still hadn’t learned that there is a finite number of people who will ever be interested in you.

We watch them dissolve in the air. They move through the sky, all at once. And bits of them sift, until they melt away so small that the eye can’t see, caught in the bridge’s wooden slats or in the river or into nothingness altogether, until we’re the only ones who’ll take the fact of their ever existing at all on with us, until we end up losing those memories, too, although even then they’ll still probably be around somewhere. It isn’t very beautiful.

Ma would set her lips on my earlobe, whispering all sorts of shit in Japanese, enunciating in the most ridiculous tones, until I fell out of the chair from laughter, only having picked up like half of it, and it was only later on that I’d think about what she was actually saying, that it was all just the same thing, frantic and unending: I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!

We stepped around the tiny little truck he kept behind the bar. I'd never ridden in it, and I asked him why he kept the fucking thing in the first place, and Eiju asked if I hadn't seen Godzilla. Are you fucking kidding me?

There’s this phenomenon that you’ll get sometimes—but not too often, if you’re lucky—where someone you think you know says something about your gayness that you weren’t expecting at all. Ben called it a tiny earthquake. I don’t think he was wrong. You’re destabilized, is the point. How much just depends on where the quake originates, the fault lines.

Mike’s never promised me anything. Only delivered or didn’t. He always said that promises were only words, and words only meant what you made them.

Eiju asked why he had our apartment number, why my mother was fucking around. And Ma said that if only he could see himself, then he wouldn’t have to ask.