6.1.16 / Zach Mandeville / Brooklyn NY

Storybrook Complex

The place where our thoughts live is a sprawling, modern apartment complex. The type that's put up near freeway exits, with well-tended walking areas and close proximity to nice grocery stores. The type of apartment complex with a generic, but evocative, name like "Storybrook Complex".

(I am trying to make my feelings clear, but I feel like this metaphor already got too dense too fast. I should clarify: the place where our thoughts live is a metaphor, but the grocery stores and freeways and apartment names are not. They are just buildings put in for context to help give weight to my overall point--which is that, metaphorically, there is a corner of a room within a giant complex of rooms where I still think about you.)

The places where our thoughts live are well-furnished, with a decor best described as eclectic. We don't get to choose the memories that decorate our walls, we can only choose to be comfortable with them. Useless trivia, quotes, and facts from past hobbies are all hard-bound and collected on a bookshelf, organized by the conversations they are good starters for. A stereo with no volume control sits in one corner, alongside a collection of unmarked tapes. Each tape contains choruses and riffs but no complete songs and no tracklistings and each day a new tape plays on repeat. Our embarrassments and anxieties have woven into a tight, wall-to-wall carpet that covers the fears we laid down as hardwood years before. The kitchens all have new counters and modern appliances.

I gave you my earbuds so I could play you a Swearin' song. We stood for a moment on the warped wood pier. I watched seagulls land on the barnacled covered piles, I watched the tide rush out from the muddy, litter-strewn shore. I watched you listen to the song, anxious to see if you liked it. I keep these three minutes as a keepsake, a small ceramic statue in my cabinet of nice things. Do you still keep this in your place too?

In the place where our thoughts live, we display all our passions in bright orange pots on our balconies. They grow strong and wrap around the railings, blossom into bright flowers a few times a year. I can see the passions wrapped around other railings, but otherwise I don't know my neighbors too well. In the place where our thoughts live, our thoughts keep mostly to themselves.

I say we keep to ourselves, but these walls are thin and when it is quiet we can hear the TV's playing from our neighbors rooms. And sometimes, when we're lonely, we open up our front doors to let each other's thoughts pass through. we compare layoust and square footage, appreciate each other's keepsakes, see if we have similar books on our shelves, write the names of the songs we know on each other's cassette tapes. I don't know your apartment number anymore, otherwise I'd try to visit. In the place where our thoughts live, the buildings are laid out so confusingly and it seems like they move around every day.

We are on a ferry to Anacortes on a misty, gray day. Auklets bob in the water, camouflaged so perfectly that as the ferry approaches it looks as if the waves are breaking into birds. You are wearing a garish purple windbreaker and not talking, and there is annoyingly somber saxophone music behind us. I think I want to be alone, and I think I want to hold your hand, but I know I don't want this in-between. And now, what do I do with this memory? I've put the others into storage, but this one I can't seem to take down from my walls. The longer it's up, the more beautiful it seems.

In the place where our thoughts live, we are continually redecorating with objects that grow and shrink before our eyes. In the media center by the TV I used to keep a whole shelf of our home movies, all the epics we made about what the future would be. I thought I'd have to dedicate a room to our films, they seemed never-ending. But one morning, my thoughts woke to find the films had reduced themselves to a single, artful short: a charming, early curiosity. I bought a bunch of couches so your thoughts would be comfortable whenever they came to visit. These couches are now keepsakes on the same small shelf.

It is 3am and we're walking to your place after a house show. There are no streetlights this far out of town, but you brought a hand-cranked flashlight. Giant pines on either side shine a bright green that slowly dulls as the charge fades. We step deep into the shoulder, close to one another, seeing nothing. I can hear only your breath and the crank of the flashlight and the rustle of pines before the night bursts into light once again.

When we ultimately move out from the place where our thoughts live, what will happen to all of these scenes? What becomes of these rooms I've kept so well-decorated? Will anyone want any of my things? Before my thoughts leave fully, they'll open their door one last time and we'll give away everything. We have to. It's unbearable to think that there won't be in some room, on some wall, some picture of you and me.

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