Thanatophobia: Journal Entry 4
July 2, 2025
I wonder if I spend too much time caring about things I didn’t do, opinions I ignored, advice I didn’t listen to. I think about the decisions I didn’t make, possibilities and opportunities I no longer have, or never had. I doubt I miss them, I never had them. I think about the “what ifs” more than I care to admit, more than I think is healthy. I wish I knew though, knew how to forget live’s I’ve never lived, to forget people I’ve never met and lovers that I’ve never had the chance to love. Only a fantasy, not one that I want, just one that won’t leave me. A shadow, a duality in me, a liminal space in which only my mind and not my heart exists. I have love, I feel cared for, I like my life and what I have managed to create for myself, for us. Nonetheless, it fires inside of me, the need to ask, the need to wonder, the need to question. A worry, an anxiety, a hunger when I’m full. Why are things the way they are? A butterfly effect of sorts, stirring sugar into my coffee, now the whole world is different, now things are no longer the way they were… they are the way they are, but now they aren’t like they were before. A conversation with a stranger, deciding to switch the side of the road I walk on, they all leave behind memories that aren’t mine. The sensation of snow falling on my skin, a shoulder, exposed to the elements on a porch, a mountain cabin where he and I live full-time. The voice of a neighbour, a story I make up inside my head of what their lives must be like, how I fit into it, or don’t. Exerting a control that has managed to control me.
I imagine that’s where it stems from, the need to constantly reinvent myself, to grow, to change, to adapt, to avoid yet also to attract. I’ve died countless times, I’ve been born just the same. I’ve rid myself of that me, those versions of myself more times than I can count. Every person I cut out of my life, every health scare, every job I quit, every situation that arises where I must protect my family, it all alters my identity. Questioning intersectionalities, a complex, anxiety, a need to control my environment and reality. The more I do, the longer each version of me has, the less I have to start over, the more I feel like I’m not chasing after time.
I’m sitting in a chair I’ve never sat in, writing in a notebook I’ve never written in with a pen I spent fifteen minutes staring at as it hung on a hook above me at the store, before I finally purchased it. A twenty-four hour train ride, a tiredness I can’t shake, the stories of the city causing tingles and aches at the muscles of my calves, up my legs, to my lower back, and a tightness at the creases of my skin. A bed that’s not a bed because I’m objectively too tall. Sounds, scents, snores, and sensual exclamations float over me, a cloud, a breeze, a blanket making me too hot at night. A beautiful concept if it were my own. If the voices, the steps that rustle by, then shuffle, and then stomp through the halls were my own. If the lingering of a body’s vibrations on the wall I rest my back on was my own.
There’s a curiosity in me, one that forces me to check experiences off of my bucket list, except that I’m making it up as I go. That’s the reason I gave myself more days in the city than I actually thought I needed. A hopeful whisper, a quiet scream, an unavoidable and undeniable need to take back what was once mine. To take back what I’ve spent almost a decade avoiding.
I still can’t go into Ridgewood and Queens. A city with millions of people yet I fear just one, or two someones. Both the same, just different in the sense that they exist separate to each other, but they behave the same. Roots, from roots, from roots, from deciduous trees connected to other deciduous trees. A browning oak leaf, a bed of death and decay. I can’t see his face… their faces, there’s more than one face I refuse to see.
A cheater, a manipulative love, a manipulative lust, a malicious intent, a frozen dignity. I cheated too, we both lied to each other. Not every interaction with a stranger could be classified as cheating, you have to want that person, to consent to keep a secret, not one forced upon you by someone that forgets you’re a person. Then there’s a hand, and a thigh, an appendage of sour scent and spoiled fruit, misplaced, mismanaged, misinterpreted, although I don’t remember giving him leeway to interpret it. I wrote a poem about it once, about a body that’s mine that in that moment wasn’t mine. I remember the taste, the gumminess of his ego on my lips. The textbooks and laptop I left in my social psychology class. Twenty minutes too long spent in the restroom on the day of a lecture about conformational bias and socially perpetuated prejudice (it confirmed a bias in me, I switched majors after transferring). A “welcome back” from my professor as he shifts my classmate’s attention away from him and onto me as I drag my feet back to my desk and I begin to collect my things, a secret I now had to carry.
I wish it would have stayed a secret in the end. I wish I would have been able to make him feel as if I actually liked it so he would leave me alone, so that I could move on with my life. I wish I would have done things differently. A least I did. It’s not my fault, it never was.
His presence followed me thereafter. The glaring look of a man that takes what he wants. Random messages reminding me I liked it, no name, no face. A sense of urgency, a need to walk faster, look over my shoulder, avoid places I frequented alone if on my own. An energy I was draining from my roommates that couldn’t help but love me. Memories I never thought I would make sitting in a room full of straight men. I know they tried to be there for me, I didn’t know how to let them. Now we don’t talk. I miss them.
Threats of violence, threats of exposing hidden skin, plastered on subway tile walls in basement restrooms, a private catholic school, a future fleeting, a catfish, a little fish struggling, them I’m drowning.
Six months later, I’m back home, I followed directions, it’s Christmas, another message. “I wish you would have stuck around. I really liked you, we could have been really great friends.” - another faceless profile. Two-thousand miles between us. Three months of depression hit. I was never the same. All of this at the hands of a stranger. Even more at the hands of someone I loved, someone that was supposed to love me.
He was older than me, is, was… It doesn’t matter. He knew things I didn’t, had experiences I had yet to have. He said “I love you” too early. He didn’t say it first. I said “I love you” too early. I think a part of me wanted Daniel because I didn’t want myself. An odd compartmentalisation and projection. Compartmentalizing the trauma I’d experienced until then, ignoring how I actually felt about myself. Projecting onto him the feelings I did not feel for myself but was in need of, feelings I wanted to feel for someone else, feelings I thought I truly felt for him. Only now do I realise I was running both away from my life in Orlando, and toward him because he felt like a way out.
A first date at a park, another park. I’m now sitting in a park writing. Central Park. Stories move through time as bodies move through spaces. He moved me through space and time. A nervousness, an excitement. Musk, amber, and a slight siage of Aqua di Gio, Serbian masculinity. A deep voice as deep as his eyes. Blue eyes. An anger, sex, a sexual way of projecting it. He was soft at the same time. There was something about Daniel that made sense, that felt like what we had, we’d had longer than we were actually together. The first person, man, that I’d had a date in pubic with. A place with strangers, and passing faces, and conversation and chemistry moving us through time as our bodies occupied multiple spaces. He spoke about his life back home, Orthodox Christians, a family that had also grown roots, that seeped and tangled their way into his. Their opinion mattered to him rather drastically, I imagine it still does, I’m not sure how time has been to him or what physical or metaphysical space he moves through now.
I know he moved to Orlando where we met because in Queens he didn’t feel like himself. Holding hands, pressing lips together, the wrong lips, a woman’s lips. It felt performative and foreign to him… It was. In Orlando he smiled, laughed, constantly spoke of big dreams, his big dreams, dreams he told me were also my dreams. They became my dreams. He promised to protect me. He promised me a life I didn’t know I wanted and now have, just not with him.
He was nurturing the “real” him, he could be himself in Orlando, he was “out” there, his family would never accept him in New York. I fell for him. I fell for it. A story about a boy that needs someone to save them behind the scenes as he manipulates and works you to your face.
Three hours later and we’re lying in a field much like Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park, that’s where I’m writing this. A salty kiss, a hand sliding expertly between the waistband of my underwear and the smooth and cold skin of my lower back. Fright kicking in, also an anticipation. The unbuckling of his pants without me noticing. The scent of fresh laundry and a calm sweat, the kind that makes you not think. God, the way I loved the way he smelled. Even after we finished things, I wanted to take in his scent, I needed it, I didn’t function.
A hardness at my throat, drying lips, red cheeks, sweaty palms clenched into fists resting on his upper thigh and pelvic bone. His torso, a pillow for me to pretend to rest on, a dangerous, quiet game we were playing. His hardness, his hard way of being, another secret playing out in front of more strangers moving through spaces. The taste of his skin, it smelled like him… then I tasted him. A full circle moment. Starts and stops. Beginnings and endings. Finishing. A terrible chapter in my life beginning and ending with the gumminess of a mans ego in-between my lips.
