Fuck Everyone But Us

We visit the places we lived before now, places we had not since traveled, as though they did not continue to exist just four miles or nine or three hundred miles away from us, as though the trees we did not pass did not continue to grow. And when we remember these places and return to them, like shutting our eyes to attempt to trace back a lost memory or a thought on the tip of our tongue, we find that they fail us, they are not the formula for regurgitating days any more than our scribbled long division can explain our fault lines. We are wounded by these changes, by the way the world continues without us in the room, the way the people we encounter have conversations we will never have no matter how they are reiterated to us, or we may not even know of them, more painfully. And yet they are still here, even if we have decided not to touch them, they are still here. This makes the decision an actual one, not something decided for us out of circumstance. This is what makes it more difficult, and for everyone more real when it does stick. It is not an act of courage to accomplish something that it is not hard to do, that it would have been impossible not to do. We replace places with other places. We begin to forget other places, the certain something of which was only certain, only something, because we did not know anything else.