I was telling my father last night that the old world has slipped away from me and I am living in an inverted one that looks the same but has a sort of sinister veneer over it. To which he said: “Um. Uhh.”

It feels like my doppelgänger stepped out of his fucked up world and put me in his place. I know these streets and I know these houses, I know these forests, and on and on. But the god dang cruelty of time has got in me and I am looking at it all with tired world-ending eyes.

On my grandmother’s kitchen table where I write every day is a little calendar. It is flipped to February 20th, 2014, which is the day she fell and never came home again. There’s a lot of little stuff like this all over the place. I emptied out her refrigerator, everything inside of it having expired two years ago. Who else was going to do this? Who was going to come around and take care of these things? There are newspapers from January and February 2014 all over the living room. . . . This house is a museum of a great woman, and of my childhood too I reckon. The appliances all are from the 1980s, and look just as new as they did the day she bought them. All the chairs and tables are the same. I look at old photographs and see a very small smiling version of myself sitting on the cream-colored couch that I’ve been kind-of sleeping and sobbing on for over a month. But my grandmother is gone, and so all of this feels so creepy and hollow. That’s what this whole town feels like to me now. That’s what I feel like too.

I drive by my old schools, and my old house. I go to places where things used to happen to me. Things aren’t going to happen to me anymore here. It has all been played out. The other night I drove to this field where I went the night I got my first car. There were fireflies everywhere! Now it’s the dead of winter and the field is empty and I’ll probably never see fireflies there again. It is all very Twilight Zone-feeling.

Man. They want to tell me that I’m alone, or isolated. I’ve been alone and isolated for years. This place gets in me like a god dang ghost and makes it all worse.