I wrote about you. I hold the words on those pages like daggers, now. They puncture me in a dizzy, trembling gut as the radio directs me northward. It has taken me halfway across the distance between you and me, to San Francisco.

I do not know why I do this, but I am tired of answers. Answers have made a weapon of me.

It is your birthday, and I wish I got to celebrate it with you. I suppose that feeling should be done away with; I suppose I should move on, but I have not yet. A flawed month and a half locks me between everything behind and the unfilled thing ahead.

I think we knew that we were doing this wrong. That we were going too fast. But we did not care. We did not pause but to look in each other’s eyes again so that we may consider what we saw. I knew our gazes were dangerous from the moment that I pinned down that I had never felt this way before.

The equal opposite of that new high now sits in the passenger seat beside me. The passenger seat where I would have liked you to be. Every space feels more empty without the ambition to have you in it with me.

It is funny to feel this way after an episode so short and epicurean as ours was. But I comfort myself with the thought that, although suddenly aborted, it brought more love into both of our lives.

The language of the billboard signs indicates that I have entered the Bay Area. Every single one is about AI. About productivity. About “agents” and “workflows.” About means to hasten an end, because language is nothing more than a tool here, and tools exist to defeat themselves.

I feel like I do not belong, but some impulse has taken me to this place. I want to trace it to the end.

I choose to go to a scrap shop that I like by the port. The marine air issues an edgeless breeze across my face. The gulls circle overhead with their spiky calls. I have no new projects to start, and no purpose for being here.

I do not find anything that I want other than two old French books. One of them is a Catholic liturgical calendar, which feels like a specific sick joke of a find when one’s odd “relationship” with a Catholic girl whom you often flirted with in French just collapsed.

At the counter, the manager, an old man whose face spells regret, recognizes me and jokes playfully with me. He gives me the books for free.

Sitting among the clear blue winds, I open the liturgical calendar. I do not know French very well, and the sense of futility beckons to make itself known, but I read some of the pages anyway. I certainly misunderstand their contents.

The knowledge of confusion is upsetting, but I try not to get frustrated. I ignore the violence of the not-know. I continue to read.