Dear Friend

You’ll never read this. And part of me doesn’t ever want you to.

I could never say it for reasons I’m not entirely sure you or I know. I guess we were in this bubble that made us feel so invincible. Like a balloon, I didn’t want it to burst by blowing too much air in there. It was just so comfortable, you know? I assumed you knew how I felt about you but now that I’m gone, the past is becoming a sequence of stories that overlap and all replay on shuffle, repeat simultaneously; and I’m not sure that you ever really knew. Did you feel it too? Did I ever tell you? What would you have said? I don’t know that I want to know. I don’t know that we need to go there.

I fell in love with you — with everything about you. I just want to tell you that. I love you. It feels good to say it.

Your friend,

Joem

“This time he is close to her, he speaks to her. She welcomes him without surprise. They are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. Their only landmarks are the flavour of the moment they are living and the markings on the walls.” La Jetée (1962)

Dear Friend,

Today, I miss you like a sickness and its cure disunited. History is becoming a pile of debris — debris of stories, conversations, images that overlap, shuffle and repeat in my head. With debris comes pain — and it’s the searing, tearing kind of pain where I can feel every tendril of emotion being pulled away from your existence. But pain is easy now. Helena has a way of putting everything in perspective. You are a phantom friend beating in a phantom heart. I feel it but it isn’t there. And it feels you but you aren’t there.

Your friend,

Joem

“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.” Never Let Me Go (2010)

 

Dear Friend,

Say you love me to my face. I need it more than your embrace. Just say you want me, that’s all it takes. Heart’s getting torn from your mistakes. ‘Cause I don’t wanna fall in love if you don’t wanna try. But all that I’ve been thinking of is maybe that you might. It looks as though we’re running out of words to say and love’s floating away.

Just say you love me, just for today. And don’t give me time ’cause that’s not the same. I want to feel burning flames when you say my name. I want to feel passion flow into my bones like blood through my veins.

‘Cause I don’t wanna fall in love if you don’t wanna try. But all that I’ve been thinking of is maybe that you might. And, babe, it looks as though we’re running out of words to say and love’s floating away.

Won’t you stay? Won’t you stay? Slowly, slowly you run for me, but do you know me at all? Someone told me love controls everything but only if you know.

‘Cause I don’t wanna fall in love if you don’t wanna try. But all that I’ve been thinking of is maybe that you might. ‘Cause I don’t wanna fall in love if you don’t wanna try. But all that I’ve been thinking of is maybe that you might. Baby it looks as though we’re running out of words to say and love’s floating away. Won’t you stay?
Won’t you stay?

Your friend,

Joem c/o Jessie Ware

Charlie: “This is not how it’s supposed to be.”
                         Dani: “This is a fantasy; it’s not supposed to be at all.”

Dear Friend,

You destroyed me. Fuck you for that. I miss you. I wish I never met you. Fuck you. Fuck you so much.

Your friend,

Joem

“There’s this hypothesis in theoretical physics I used to love back at school about time travel… about what would happen if you could travel back in time and make a different choice in your past, how that would affect your life in the future. So the theory goes that, um, your true life, your first life, continues as is, unchanged, but at the moment of decision, a new life splits off along a tangent into a parallel universe. So you could, in a way, live both lives…”

“I’ve been thinking about you all week. You been thinking about me?”

Noah, The Affair, Episode 2, 2014

 

 

“I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it, but I didn’t, not really. Only the smudgeness of it; the pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it. I didn’t realize it would sometimes be more than whole, that the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea. Because it’s the halves that halve you in half. I didn’t know, don’t know, about the in-between bits; the gory bits of you, and the gory bits of me.”

Anna, Like Crazy, 2011

11/30/2014

Dear Friend,

Tell me, do you remember when the tower of Babel fell? We were both there tidying rubble, wiping our foreheads. Remember when we cursed the same God, our mouths a little out of sync? Weak-kneed and disrobed by the scent, we walked in different directions. You might find our palms are freckled, still. Feel, the shards of our shared ancestry like braille beneath the skin, bit of that tower trying to push its way to the surface. Today our eyes won’t meet as you wax that more, our acknowledgement, stripped audio, I don’t want to alarm you but I’ve lost my accent since we last spoke, which is why I say nothing, instead try to roll an “R” over the cup of coffee beneath my breath, slap an “S” against the roof of my mouth with the first sip. Can we share this bottle of silence in separate tongues? Drunk down 22 floors, can we put the miles behind us? Let’s talk about the diseases and dreams in our genes. Let’s talk about genocide and gentrified homes, broken and bought. Just tell me, do you remember when the tower of Babel fell? I’m trying to hold on to that memory and the less we speak the more I feel I’m still there, pulling splintered roots from our souls.

Your friend,

Joem

Theodore: “Where are you going?”

Samantha: “It’s hard to explain, but if you get there, come find me. Nothing will be able to tear us apart then.”
                                                                           Her, 2013