Backdating: April 16

Let your dress sense come back — more than that, cling to it. You're not it, so grow it or make it all up and be glad you still got it. Lend me your headphones, crank the speakers. I can run the radio all night alone, dance behind the control board, turn out the lights and look at all those oranges and greens we'll never touch.

Will we never touch? Will you listen? If I can't make friends, I'll remove myself, and you'll feel only the FM reverberations on your subcutaneous secrets. Hear me from the basement, here now, now I'm leaving. Who's reading?

I wanted you to be more than a check mark, boy, but what can I say now? I wanted to put a song on for you, for you to feel far away, but somebody stole all the Sufjan out the stacks like they all knew that music between us just isn't the same as music out loud, like they knew they could suck a little faith from the air.

My roommate just walked in and told me to turn off the song that was putting these words together for me. What are your demons like, love? Like memories, like medicine, like the Nazgûl? Mine are human form, or the lack of, all of them driving me indoors alone and silent. It's my manifestation of the malaise, the Tulane malaise we live and drink to but can't quite shake. I'd seek help, but we each so live the sickness we've turned opaque.

Sebastian, this is for you to feel which I know you can. Whose blood do you wait for, and how do you know when to give into sunrise? Do you lean on the numbers, but wait for light, image, and colors? Is the world scrubbed bright and awful when you finally step out the darkroom?

What was it like to ride away, to forget the airport décor, to clear out missed calls and go black screen for takeoff? I don't understand, but I do it myself every day. We couldn't very well have talked by then, but I spoke because I know we have something to say to each other, I'm sure we do. Whatever say you, to which I say, "I win you over eventually. It's in the script."

I want to see the photographs we took, you the silent protopro and me racked with the guilt of leaving my SLR untouched all semester. We were sick in bed together, watching films, because I am never going to drink all this tea by myself. We're on your precarious balcony sofa, watching this crazy lightening together, wondering if it's our own signals blinking through the towers on the levee. Drunk bonfire kissing comes later, a mistake between real friends or an extension of everything real friends are supposed to be about. How it could it have happened? You know it hurts to be found out, but not as much as it hurts to get lost.