others

two weeks ago i woke up and was convinced i saw you in the bathroom mirror, hands fleeting & hair wild & happiness startling. a strange color was gleaming in your eyes, a wild blue like pebbles cast into a careless imprint left behind by the storm that cried outside the still-open bathroom window. wild blue like you were sorry enough for disappearing that you unearthed from yourself the ability to return. i just stared at the mirror with some foreign feeling like shock, or disbelief, or denial. i thought that you had convinced me to give up.

it's been so long since i've seen you, i said to the mirror, as i reached for the glass, trying to chase away that space between our bodies until i forgot we were still supposed to be swallowed in this strange social distance—six feet apart. my fingertips jerked back and my eyes darted away, down from the mirror to the bath rug instead, its blue plush reminding me of your wild blue eyes again. and just like that, i was back to looking at the mirror. thinking about how i'd hoped to hear from you again sometime, even when this all ends- especially when this all ends.

this morning i wake up and stare into the same blank mirror and realize that there must be an entire avenue between me and you, a road hammered with holes here but thick with knotted overgrowth there. are you there? i want to ask, because some days i swear i hear you laughing in the kitchen as i learn to cook the fourth new dish of the week and other days i am left reaching into the space and time of weekends that bend and blend into weekdays and still, i cannot find you.

i wish finding you was as easy as asking myself a question and hearing the answer echo across an empty bathroom on the tenth floor of an apartment building—sandwiched between the rooms and lives of a hundred other people who cannot hear me. i wish i knew where you went when you left, or why you left, or how long you were planning to leave for.

the next time i see you standing on this long, lonely avenue, i won't cross the street to avoid facing you, i promise myself, curling my fingers into a fist and hoping your fire will appear behind my straightening shoulders. the next time i catch your smile seeping through my lips, or sense your anger rising up between my ribs, i will have learned enough about the world of an empty body decaying in empty space to know that i would rather find you and feel something than hollow on, holding onto nothing.

i'm going to hold on to you. i want to hold on to you. because rage is not the disease i thought it was and selfishness should not be a sin, because even my most startlingly beautiful laugh blossoms from your being, because holding on to you is—will

always be—holding on to the hardest parts of me.

— you & i, by anne

We sit two meters apart, or just about. You in your wicker chair that you’ve dragged onto the threshold; me on the scratchy corridor carpet. I think that this is the distance we would have kept anyway. I think about everything I could say. I think about how you won’t remember if I tell you. How you won’t like it anyway.

How are you, then? Spoken like a confession. I can see right through you; I already know the answer. I can see into your apartment - the clutter on your desk, the dishes piled up in the sink, the dust on all your trinkets. You’re sorting out your things, aren’t you? So you won’t be around forever. I’d always thought of you as permanent, like one of your ornaments. Like the vase of fake flowers, and the golden crucifix, and the stones from the beach. I want to scramble to your side and keep you rooted here.

Forget I asked. Let’s talk about the TV. The nice weather we’ re having. Or maybe you can dig up a story for me. Take me back to Greenland, where the strawberries tasted sweeter and everyone was happy. You have so many stories, but you only ever give me the same handful, recycled over and over.

Tell me about that TV show you watched: the one about the monks who never spoke a word. Tell me about the way every other sound was amplified: the birds, the footsteps, the breathing. You talk as if you were one of them. Meanwhile, all I can think of is the clean break between silence and peace.

Peace: length some kind of ceasefire. I wish that you’d stop holding God at arm’s length.

— grandma's shopping, by hannah

I have stuck my polaroid on the wall.

It is mostly black - six long and low rectangles of a glowing off-white recede into the centre

from the top left corner. The windows to Moscow, China, Everywhere, Berlin.

All my favourite mementos of us are packed away

somewhere far from here. All I have at home is

this failure of a picture with the exposure all wrong.

It’s supposed to be the East Side Gallery

under the clapboard tunnel scaffolding which protected it. Only all you can see are

Those lights, wedged in the juncture between the wall and the ceiling.

If this is all I have of you right now

I’d like to pretend the picture’s of something we saw earlier

during that wet black evening. S tanding below the bright suspended S-Bahn,

We had watched the train take people home.

— see you later, by mila

Loneliness is said to be an extension of being. The uncertainty of the world around us is a paragon to the womb we came from, and the quietness of sleep is a mirror of the grave yet to come. We are thrust into this life as single beings, and it is in solitude that we slip away.

It is often preached that hurt is a prerequisite to an everlasting love. That you’ ll have days on which you’ ll just have to deal with it on your own. That the person you love will sometimes speak words so sharp that they end up wounding you forever. That, to hold on to the softness, you have to be willing to wade through the emptiness.

Why is it that I cannot get one without the other? All I have ever wanted is to feel whole. All I have ever wanted is for you to see me, for you to really look at me, for you to tell me I’ m doing a good job. I want the sunny days to not hurt my eyes and I want to stop feeling the ache of winter all the way into my bones. I want to hold your hand and I want to pick flowers. I want someone to make me happy for once.

— the unbearable ache of not being seen, by niha

— untitled, by tóia