I’ve had a fever in me my whole life. Buzzing, catching, stinging, even, just beneath the surface, a layer like skin. Soon, I know, it will burst forth, in me, out of me, radiate through my fingertips, my lips, the ends of my hair, igniting every crease, every breath, every part. I will be set ablaze. Unstoppable and humming. Sometimes I’m afraid of what I know I can do.

That you have probably no idea what I’m talking about is okay. But I want you to know this as well as I know how to explain because if in your mind you’re holding onto this barely there glimmer of a thing who could barely meet your eyes but loved you nonetheless, let go. That was a piece, real and beating and full of hope but just a piece, a glance struggling to meet its whole. I am more than that. What you know is a moment, one that had its purpose and passed quietly, as moments do. I don’t know what you imagine my life is like, and what I am like in it. Maybe you don’t imagine at all. But if you do, I think you might be wrong. There are times that I am barely alive and others where I am choking on the beat of my own heart. I’ve made playlists and bought condoms and for a breath not known where I ended and he began. I’ve begged for scars that will never really heal and tried not to lose socks between the dryer. I’ve broken a best friend’s heart through my own even selfishness, and moved on easily, detached, without real regret. I’ve gotten passport stamps and parking tickets and anxiety that turns everything gray. I have a storage unit in LA filled with shit I’m pretty sure I need none of, the rest spread between my aunt’s house in Pasadena, my dad’s in Berkeley, my mom’s in Richmond, and my apartment in Budapest. Home is relative but usually feels like wherever my face wash and moisturizer end up. I thought about falling in love with this guy I met here but decided against it because if I know one thing about myself it’s that once I let someone in they’re there for good and I was just too tired to deal with that on this job. I’ve been too tired to deal with that for awhile. I flew from here to San Francisco for one day last weekend to see Third Eye Blind play at the Masonic, and in June flew from here to Honolulu to hold my grandmother’s hand while she died. I’m emotional but can shutdown so fast it scares me. I broke my ankle a few years ago and have the pins and memories of a hot pink cast and isolation to prove it. I spend too much money on things I don’t need but I’m trying to be better. I’m impulsive/indecisive, giving/cruel, hopeful/terrified, and always feel more than I let on or express, to my own detriment. I started this season in designer boots and uncertainty, ended it in Converse, ripped jeans, and an eye roll. My parents are in California, my best friends in New York and Greece, my brother in Spain, and I am stretched between them, reaching out in all directions because this world is so much smaller than I’d ever imagined before I went out into it. I’ve scraped up my knees on a reef in Israel, given cab fare to a group of “dancers” stranded at the Black Sea in Turkey, and contemplated just jumping off a cliff into the Atlantic on the coast of Morocco to escape this guy whose hands went way too fast and who, when I would look back later, scared me a lot more than I could ever admit in the moment. I’ve procrastinated on my taxes, crashed various cars into trash cans and poles I should have seen coming, and listened to almost every Taylor Swift song on repeat. And through all of it, I don’t want to be your friend. Because that little piece, crippled by her own unworthiness and desperate fear of/desire for life, was very much in love with you and doesn’t know how not to be. That piece, small and scared, asking for permission and reassurance and someone to pull her into the world, is in me, is me, a part of whatever it is that makes me whole, full and alive and feverish with hope, still tied to you and the spark that was activated like thunder a thousand years ago or maybe yesterday. And that’s okay. I’m sure it will fade someday and maybe I’ll be sad it see it go, maybe I won’t notice. But today is the same. So I don’t want to catch up. I don’t want small talk. I don’t want to skim the surface because it will only make me feel hollowed out afterward. And I don’t know why you keep trying, every year or two, seemingly earnest. What’s the point? Maybe because you don’t like to lose people, maybe because you feel some kind of responsibility because you happen to be the first person to stick his penis in me (sorry). Whatever the reason, where you fit in the context of my life is not where I fit in the context of yours. So even though I am curious, it probably doesn’t matter beyond that, and might even be an unfair question to ask.

There is no need to respond to this, not for me anyway. It’s all okay. There is nothing to be broken. I wish you only the best, as always. So if you don’t know what to do with this, just treat it as a piece of writing, know that it’s more for me than it is for you, and feel more than free to let it go.