My Computer


September 28. 2026	It was the most perfect day of my life, and someone else was happier somewhere. The trees on the college grounds near where I used to live, was I choosing to walk forward even then? Only it was so far back, I couldn't tell I was moving. But somewhere in the edging towards September trees, in the clearness of others, in the shape beyond the mirror, the one when I left the bathroom, the shape appearing behind conversations, viewpoint of the eye of the church parking lot, You are not here and I cannot call you, or invite you to watch the sunlight glinting off streamers, or an iridescent butterfly on a string pulled by a child, the sun, the wind, the grass, the sharpened tongue of my black shoes -- the thought of going home, to eat, to shower, of evening coming, your cheekbones inches from the blue tablecloth, your eyes towards the floor, hollows under your eyelashes, soft perfect air coming through the window, as you came and started to cry in one motion. Made perfect because I am unfulfilled, because my friends are somewhere else and their beauty is hopeful, more complete, light glints from the kite in the air and is extinquished, I miss you and cannot tell you, some part of us holds too long, languishes, does not move into the next second, I wish to have never written this, and to have instead gone directly to you, how are you looking now at the horizon? A perfect day holds me separate, I stay longer and come once more, how much does each pleasure carry? was it this time or the last time that I will remember? my friends hold each other and would say, how could pleasure ever be wasted? how could pleasure ever be wrong? I leave the sun and go inside, lose touch, things are as they always are, in my ordinary room, would I like imagining you here? would I like you really here? would I like being certain, believing I was safe forever? would I like knowing it will always end before I want it to?
September 24. 2026	Capital Fantasies I was in the backseat of a car on the highway and could see into the wide windows of penthouses. They made me dizzy to look at, so high above the ground, the white interior seemed a mirror of the white-snow sky. The tall front windows met at a peak like the entrance of a church building. Within each penthouse was a Christmas tree that reached almost to the arched ceiling, glittering in the back corner with silver and red tinsel. Some homes had two trees, opposed on the left and right walls, close and far from the windows. A few homeowners had mounted the tree outside the room completely; standing it on a small post like a flagpole, suspended in the empty air. The buildings swayed slightly in the cold wind, and I wondered how secure the trees were, my stomach turned with worry. We drove to a small store with a low Western roof, like the building which always accompanies an old trainstation. Inside was a long counter and two young cashiers. We had come in looking for a gift for the museum director. The cashiers looked out at us with somber and pitiful expressions. We looked at each other and murmured quietly, no one really wanted to give him a gift. The cashiers suggested a few items turned oversaturated colors by the fluorescent lights, but instead we left as a group. We entered the penthouse of the museum director. It too was a white, empty room with a glittering tree. The director came to greet us and I noticed his usual bushy mustache, pinched and curled at the edges. He smiled with his eyes and seemed geniunely happy to have us, rushing in and out of the room trying to bring in plates of hors d'oeuvres. I felt a far away embarrassment for him. At some point he handed me my present. I don't remember unwrapping it but remember the realization later, the confusion in my room, why had he given me some kind of sexual instrument? The ask seemed straightforward; I imagined his searching, pleading eyes, and his gift appeared in my hand as though by divination. I first checked inside, at the sticky, mucus-like contents. Sure it was gross, but it undoubtedly meant more to him, and what else would he now expect from me? I felt apprehensive, it felt inappropriate. But perhaps it was really the right thing to do? To gift him a sock of my come -- was it degrading or liberating?

September 11. 2026	His Fixation The murmur of a plane lights the red bow of some ship, emerging red-green and splitting the middle crawls black, what was the vision really? He searched for the fabric to make it, out of some tree or another, there is no wood that polishes green, he looks mistakenly out from sleep, finding no one was watching.
September 11. 2026	I push my grandmother down a windowless hallway. Worse than a hospital, the walls have the tinge of concrete. Black streak marks appear in every doorway. As I push her, my grandmother acts like she's walking, dipping her pink sneakers up and down as though into a puddle. She had asked to go outside, and the 'transman caregiver' my mom told me about comes to wrap a belt around her, hoisting her into the chair. My mom tells me that she often thinks she's in a basement, and will ask to go upstairs. It must be the dark hallway, reminding her of the bottom of her old house. In the parking lot, I ask her where she'd like to go -- down the road or around the lake? She hesitates and I think she might not answer at all, then she says faintly, whichever is easier for you. I realize that we cannot really go around the lake without wheeling her down a steep grass hill. The promise of the worn edge around the lake feels cruel to me, and the small loops we make in the parking lot, the lake still the same distance away it was from the porch. I wonder if what she really wants is to be pushed through the grass, all the way to the cold edge of the water, to submerge her pink shoes. When we go back my mother puts lotion on her arms and shins, the skin looks like paper, as though it is barely there at all. When my mother leaves I stand and she reaches out for me, hugging me to her. I can't tell by her questions if she thinks I'm me or my brother, but it's clear that she loves me. I smell her hair and through this sense the moment is placed, backward and now. I'm comforted as I leave that the trans guy comes out to take her inside, that her last days will be spent with someone more like me than many others, more like me than even what she knew of me. They speak to her as you would a child, where are you off to? but on the porch I saw a tear fall, and when my mother says it's nice in the sun, she asks only, sun? and is right, as we are only under clouds.
September 11. 2026	My parents leave me in the dining room at 8:30, having not seen me in almost two years. They both look frightened. I leave a few minutes after, the highway outside the house is darker than I remember, the few cars that go by seem not to see me. They don't move for the shoulder, spinning close. The views in the lit windows are more intricate than I remember. A basement filled with cardboard boxes and red crimped edges of Christmas decorations. A brick building in town with large cooling fans on the back porch. One barn tall and thin, someone has left a computer on upstairs and the screen switches from green to grey. The town appears foreign to me now. The empty houses haunted with what I no longer know. A lit house with wide windows and nothing inside, white walls and cold light switches. I go by the old apartment of a friend, it is September and school has started. My cousin is a boy and works at Target now. A man was found dead in his car behind the grocery store, after killing a family in Oregon. Foothills rise on the horizon, how had I forgotten their silhouettes? Holding us all in. The only time my father and I laugh we are talking about the dead man. Was it his car? They said it was abandoned. Yeah, it became abandoned when he died. I don't think it works like that. [laughs] Houses spotting the roadside remind me more of towns I remember from the southwest. I see the people behind the wheel and I no longer guess what they're thinking. Far down main street an old man is playing the piano outside the music store. He is singing something incomprehensible to no one in the dark wind, between the lights of the bars.