Unsent Postcards

1. I drove an extra loop around your street today. I knew you weren’t home, but I circled anyway—calmly, windows rolled down, wiry hair rustling like the front yard bamboo. 

I wonder if your house misses me. The imprint of my feet sunk in driveway shadow, my voice riding your wifi signal over late-night calls. Do you remember the time I closed your garage’s gaping mouth while you were in Hawaiʻi—how I watched it for three days and nights before calling you? Or that picture you hung above your bed—my portrait, hands clasped over face, legs crossed seamlessly, inverted Claddagh ring on my middle finger? I slept above your pillow for years before I fell between wall and mattress. Before you threw me away. 

I don’t believe in ghosts—yet isn’t it funny how I’m never here, but when I am, I’m cradled along the curb of this cemetery, emptying myself as I whisper with the bamboo?

2. My dad still texts me whenever he sees your dog—really, I couldn’t care less about that white inbred thing—but with each unsolicited update, I imagine my dad passing through our park, his worn New Balances retracing every version of you to touch that sidewalk.

I imagine him turning the bend of manicured grass where we took homecoming pictures freshman year. The rose bushes where we walked our dogs on New Year’s Eve since you said we never saw enough of each other. The swings I sat on, earbuds in, swaying to the playlist of queer love songs you made me. That stone table hidden between perfect halves of the park where I waited and waited, and you never came. The metal post we circled as I told you I’d been groped at Great Wolf Lodge one summer. 

The last time, against the south side’s green expanse, as I said this has always felt like more than a friendship. We were seniors sitting on blue benches, and something had to give. You said I was incomprehensible and codependent, and my voice wrapped itself in knots as you unraveled me.

3. I have this recurring dream where the people I love leave.

You were in my house last summer. We had not spoken in months, but you lingered in my kitchen, between the overflowing craft cubbies and the table, hands resting on my brother’s empty seat. The wooden chair slouched beneath your touch. There were pencils and dog food and origami paper all over the floor. We tried to cook spaghetti from scratch. The water boiled behind us, its frantic murmur ascending. 

I stared blankly, throat thick, through rotting plums and wilting orchids piled high on the kitchen table. My new girlfriend stood next to me, and neither of us spoke a word. Across the table, you told her to break up with me. To disappear and never come back. You rattled off everything wrong with me, casually, like upending a salt shaker over a simmering pot. 

The water boiled over. My girlfriend walked out the back door, and I never saw her again. 

You are always telling people to leave. 

4. We were in civics class on the last day of high school. We were never not in civics class. (This time, it was not a dream.) I was pinning paper butterfly wings to my grad cap between Rodin and Schiele prints, inching periwinkle over nudity, fixing all the parts of me you’d touched. There was washi tape. Stickers in the shape of film cameras. Glue-kissed origami paper. Sunsets. Spliced poems. Pages of our favorite book—the novel that destroyed me, its pages I destroyed. 

I piled myself onto this polyester square, covered in assorted adhesives, again and again, until the tassel wouldn’t reattach. Carelessly, you walked over to my desk. You did not compliment my collage or recognize the shrine I’d built. You did not say I was pretty when I jigsawed myself like that. You did not say much of anything. 

You told me to use a safety pin to attach the tassel. We never spoke again.

5. I was in Socal last week, visiting nearly everyone I know except you. The weather was lame, but you would’ve liked it. It didn’t even reach 80 degrees. On the outskirts of UCSD, E and I sat at a table half-covered in pitiful shade. She said you hadn’t talked much this year, and I said you probably got busy with politics, but I wanted to say I expected this. We couldn’t help but be one-hour Walmart photos on bedroom walls. Ready-made and disposable. 

E and I talked for hours about high school breakups and twin-sized beds—about everything and nothing—my face bent toward the sun. My arms were already burning when she asked if I knew what love meant. I opened my mouth, but there were only pins. Nightmares and ugly dogs. I said I only love things I shouldn’t. 

There is so much I shouldn’t say, but I will say this: if I drove an extra loop around your house again and saw your garage door open and abandoned, I would ask a friend for your number since I deleted it last year. I would call and ask how to close the door since I don’t remember which button to press. Since some things don’t change.