Bronson Gao

August 9 20XX

Where

I DON’T NEED ANYTHING

It’s all extraneous. I think you’ve made me realize that: you, who I can go without naming, whose name has been worn thin on my mind. I can’t imagine you ever liked it anyways, the insurmountable baggage of inseparability, infantile.

It’s over, pretty much. It’s been done, and I’m preparing for how little I’ll feel when I get there, back home. This isn’t away-school we’re going to. And I can’t live where this key takes me, this place Angelica told me not to “fuck with for your own goddamn sake,” lights axed, darkness turned into a dead kinda dead.

This place smells like everything you wrote about. This place breathes with effort, skin of the counter swollen and bruised, whipped tight and rubbery like you—in the pictures on your sim card. The bone and saliva of this place has dehydrated to ossification, the wood panel dry, dark and cold in the animal room in the basement.

The fish tank smells of molded TV dinner. This world in this house-hole is the same, a microwaved superficiality masquerading as edible, livable, made of integrity and economic. Nobody’s ever gonna sell this place. It reminds me of the time me and Danny went to an estate sale together. The wallpaper was flaking off in patches; it had the emptiest basement I’d ever seen; I thumbed my hands through the clothes in the closet, every piece devoid of a meaning I could access.

I have more meanings here though. I made a crucial mistake I had to pay for, stopping at the drug store. Now I had to see what those eyes behind the blindfold saw. I had to know how “death is the key to fungal immortality, the image of expiration cemented squarely in the center as a lifelike, undying picture.”

There are two bedrooms in the house. What I’d imagine was Deadra’s room is—was—the pink one, with a Tony Hawk blanket grossly nailed over the window, minimal light accessible. It smells like death in here, what I’d smelled before on the side of the road, and in Angelica’s last resting place. Someone lived here, though, sleeping in the bodily waste nightly, sharing a bed and a body with the body that made her, all to the point of decimation.

I don’t sound like a friend, and that must be because I’m not, no matter if I say it. I’m just a fan, an asshole who owns all the merchandise. Maybe I’ll find some copper wiring to sell, or a pair of her panties to vainly look at until the pain sets in.

It doesn’t help me to think of myself in this way, and I left the house with nothing. I’d already checked the whole damn place, and anything relative to her—that would give me closure, a sensation, anything—was gone. I called Betty a few days ago, and asked, cheaply, if she’d come up with anything else I’d want. She told me I had everything.

Her journals were filled with drawings. The last one was dated May 28th, the last day of senior year. It’s an interior shot of a classroom from our high school, exhibiting a familiar cast of bored-looking young people: Zach Nedderman, who I saw Korn with; Sarah Fay, who I made out with at a party once; and Alexis Kilgore, who rejected Brian at prom last year.

You get to know everyone in a place like this. I’ve spent my entire life in Michiana, but that much you already know. The world outside of this place has been an empty endeavor, communicated mainly through descending spirals of highway to listen to music to, and the mention of a rare “Darlene from LinkedIn,” the scam artist in a dead friend’s notebook.

Maybe the outskirts of town is mortality itself. Maybe that’s the real end-of-life hallucination: driving far away enough to find the same things you’re afraid to think you’ll die in, but contorted to a fresh form of disgust. Maybe that’s where you become a Deadra Acosta, the rain pelting down as you stare at a blank image, the words failing to make any contact with You, or me, or you.

And I can’t say さよなら、even if this is just a fucking movie.