originally posted on cohost (rip)

in an alternate universe,
one isolation writes to another:
a letter that no one will ever read
in a language that does not exist

where were you when you woke up this morning? i wish i could ask you this question, but you are so far from me now. i thought i saw you when i turned the corner, so i turned back, but i misstepped. what i would give to tell you what i see now. i didn't have the words before, they were all stuck, formless in my head. back then i tried to copy your vocabulary so that we could be on the same page. i was always one step behind you, and now i am too far gone to even see you.

we live in an unfortunate world. a world where poetry has not been invented yet. nobody has written about the way leaves fall off a tree. nobody has written the song about having an awkward conversation at a convenience store. nobody has filmed the joker dancing alone in a bathroom. nobody knows what anybody thinks is beautiful. the word 'beauty' does not exist.

and we talk to ourselves when we're alone, not knowing that other people talk to themselves, too. it's impossible to know what anybody else does when they're completely alone. we live in a world of prophets that speak in cryptic truths. unable to doubt and unable to reason. not for any fault of their own. it is simply the way that the world is: there is no poetry, all stories are private stories, and the truth is at once unknowable and completely intuitive.

i wanted to talk about these things, with you. i wanted to reason out the things we knew—i wanted to tell you what i was thinking, and i wanted to know what was in that head of yours. but it was difficult, because we had to create that language for ourselves. i have changed so much in the time that we've been apart, that i can only imagine that if we were to meet again, we would be incomprehensible to each other.