Dear San Diego,

It is as a breath, the wind betrays it, subtle warmth carried like a promise. The fields across the tracks standing on end with the snow a memory, the highway bare, this tiny mountain insane asylum pawing me as it has these last two years. Spring come early, entirely welcome.

I go to the theatre, work a shift, walk home. I watch with unending interest the comings and goings across the street at the Mountain, the living room and kitchen painted in the glow of its pink and baby blue neon sign. On occasion I’ll slip over for a drink, say hi to the girls, talk to Bill about nothing, watch whatever they’re showing on the television. Sometimes when I walk out I’ll catch Parker standing on the roof across the street, a blanket over her shoulders, waiting for me. We pretend not to see one another; we never mention it when I get upstairs.

Nothing changes here. It is an answerless place for me. I remain a shell; Parker remains a shell. I write in this journal for hours on end only to take a black marker to it afterwards. I have pages of such, as if government documents censured. I have written a thousand letters. I have made notes of a million things that I would say were we to talk again, but the truth is that they are pointless. The answers that I seek will never be given me because they would require her to betray herself, to admit to those things that I knew nothing of prior to that night when I got in my car and just started to drive. I talk to friends from home every so often, and every time I do I learn something else that I didn’t need to know. And yet it doesn’t alter my routine, the hours pouring over words that will never be conveyed remains constant, like a straight jacket, like an inverted muzzle.

At least there is consolation in the fact that I now know why I will never hear the truth. She hasn’t the character to be that person. She hasn’t the personal fortitude to even admit to herself her actions, let alone admit them to me. So I have Bic pens that have created a growing shelf of language that will never be read. I have a black marker that I use to go back and strike most of it out, as if ashamed of myself for even writing it. There is no semblance of love or loss in those volumes, only confusion, only manic Polaroids fading as if lost testaments. I begin with the same statement, and it is the one thing that I never black out – I can’t remember what you look like anymore. I read those words like imbibing stone eggs; for they have come to represent me more than her.

There was a kingdom that was my life once. It was a thing of fantasy, of willful ignorance, yet of hope that it actually existed. That was the prison of my self-delusion, one that employed a guard that possessed the most formidable of powers – the ability to make me believe that I was in heaven even though I was in hell.

Life is a trick. Death is just figuring out how it’s done. The in-between is the degree to which those around us appear to be skilled enough to pass off illusion as reality. We are all magicians, some good, others not, but all endlessly cutting our assistants in half as if to prove that we are not singular shows. Even if only in notebooks filled with one-sided correspondence.