It is not good for me to be back in my hometown. I’m only here for a few more days before I go to Tennessee and then back to California for a while, but even that is too much. Around 4 pm before the sun starts to go down, I suit up and get some crappy coffee and drive around the fields and forests where I used to live, all the while with the heat on, and I can smell the fires in the fireplaces of the houses I pass, and I feel all right then. But as soon as it gets dark and I’m holed up back in my grandmother’s house where I am alone and surrounded by her things and remembering that year Dante and I spent here during the pandemic, just us, and the two months before we left for Berlin last October when I thought we’d have a new life together somewhere, I start to lose my fucking mind.

Truthfully, I don’t really want to be alive anymore. I would be OK with something killing me as long as it didn’t take too long. It’s not as though I’m going to throw myself off a cliff or anything . . . but if I think about it for more than a few minutes, I don’t have any strong urge to keep doing whatever this is anymore either. I knew that in traveling around I was doing myself some good by seeing all my friends, and that much has been true. Because I am never in one place for more than a few days, I don’t have time to think about anything other than the logistics of getting someplace else. I’m never just sitting around sulking and looking at my empty apartment like I would have had I stayed in Berlin. On the other hand, I am delaying the inevitable, which is that eventually I’m going to have to go back to living a regular life more or less and one in which Dante isn’t in it. Even just saying that makes me want to die. I cry every time I see a picture of him, of which there are thousands in my phone. I can’t make it through one day without crying over him several times. I’m crying now. I don’t know. I reckon part of me thought it would get at least a little easier. It’s not true. It has only gotten worse.