37.

I don’t feel like having breakfast at this point. The orange juice doesn’t sound appealing, the yogurt even less so, the little croissants. I have a piece of dry toast, to see if it will maybe help with my hangover. I look out the window. Juli, to my left, eats a little bit of everything. He doesn’t say anything. I breathe in the steam from my tea. I look ahead, at the ocean, the sun. My head is killing me, the circles under my eyes are gigantic, and I’m carsick. I think about the long trip that awaits me, and on the one hand I feel like being alone, like being alone again, and on the other hand I’m afraid of being carsick, throwing up, feeling lousy, not seeing him again. He finishes his breakfast, looks at me, touches my hand. I look at him, I smile, weakly. He asks me if I feel any better, I tell him no, he says, screw you.

We fill up the gas, get onto the coastal highway, it’s a beautiful day. I look out the window, I’m on the ocean side. I roll it down a little, being closed in makes me sicker. I realize I don’t remember anything from last night, that after falling asleep, nothing. I hate that, it makes me nauseous. We get to the bus station, very fast, it was so close by car. Juli asks me if I want him to come with me, to get my ticket, to wait, I tell him no, that I’d rather he didn’t. He takes my bag out, puts it on the sidewalk, looks at me. I feel like shit, typical distracting symptom: instead of being able to think about this goodbye, my stomach starts to cramp up, I feel like I need to get to a bathroom as soon as possible, and in this way I make everything as short and sweet as possible. He takes my hands, he looks at me, but I’m inwards, I don’t look at him that much, I don’t want to connect, he asks me to take care, he says he loved seeing me, I nod, I don’t say anything, he hugs me, I stay stiff, tense in his arms, I barely pat his shoulder, he perceives it and backs away, looks at me and says, you’re such a shit. Never more apt.

He lets go of my hands, gets into the truck, and starts it. Vapor is released from the exhaust pipe, the truck rumbles and from behind my hair I can only see the bumper, and now that bumper is moving off into the distance, exiting my field. And that’s it. I pick up my bag and hustle inside the station to look for a bathroom.

I hear water running. There’s music playing far away, although it’s loud. Ceasing to function as I’m used to doing. Not going to bus stations, going with. Not saying goodbye. Is that still water, or are people applauding? There are tiny sheets of things coming loose from my teeth, I don’t know what they are, they could be bits of bread or could be my teeth eroding; since they already were before, and now they’re just dissolving, dissolving, and now my neck starts hurting. Begins. And later not being asked a thing, anything more. Ridiculousness. Not being anywhere. Not being here or here or here or here, and doing it all the same. Like inviting someone out for dinner, someone very special, and having them not come. And having them not ask you anything: not what you’ve been up to, not what you’re planning on doing, not to mention how you plan to do it. Just nothing at all. You don’t know what all this means, do you? Do you know what it means? Kissing is nothing and everything. Having things within reach and not knowing how to ask for them, how to get to them. An image of yourself that’s out of focus. A blurring of oneself, of one’s form, an outline. Resembling only scantly your own ideal, resembling yourself so little at times. Not wanting to let go nor being able to hold on, having it slip through your hands, through your fingers, like you, like your things, like your remnants, parts of something, of a friend, too, fragments of a friend who’s not there, who doesn’t exist. Being supposed to want to converge with the closest thing to the best version of yourself, and turning around, turning around and around the thing that isn’t there, as though magnetized, as though stupefied, as though magnetically drawn and repelled at the same time, like that. Finding yourself face-to-face again against a thing you can neither detect nor avoid. Me here and on the other side you. I carry that, enormous, in my arms, and I don’t see what, and I stay holding what isn’t in this way, stuck to a nucleus of something that defines a here and another here, that can neither be seen nor touched, that’s all.

It’s only later, on a bench in the sun, on the embankment, with a mangy dog at my feet, a friendly dog, a transition dog, that I can wreck myself a little when I reach inside my pocket and come across the smelly place mat, the whale place mat in my right pocket. The whale, the dog with mange, all broken. My mangy dog licks the place mat, rips it up, eats it in shreds, blue, of whale, of fat, of animal, seeking the stain; the whale, in the dog’s mouth.