Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

Transcript

I’m Myka Kielbon and this is The Slowdown.

I’ve been trying to change my relationship to some of my memories – mainly those tied to situationships, to the fits and starts of love. I’ve been mostly single in my adult life, continually falling into what I believe is love, only to feel like I’m having the rug pulled out from under me.

I have experienced a whole lot of life, and romance only forms threads of that life, woven into all the other moments. The threads are often short. They have loose ends. I’ve always been jealous of the length, the strength of other people’s threads.

I live in a tightly wound world. I often run into people I once made out with, dated briefly, or caught a glimmer of possibility with over a beer in a lifetime that feels distant, even if I’m standing in the exact same physical place. What I struggle with – what I’ve struggled with for years – is naming the importance of the relationships I’ve had with people that don’t fit neatly into a category.

Romance, and desire, and longing, pull us into odd positions. They pull us into dawn on the way home from another’s bed to shower before going into work, underslept. They pull us into books and movies we never would have known. They pull us into staring at the moon just to look for meaning. Even if the feelings are fleeting, these odd positions change us.

When the connection is gone, what we’re left with is jarring. The evidence – the chorus of a particular song or a whiff of a particular soap – is just one side of things. Another person’s memory of you, of that same moment, is out in the wild of their mind without you. And what’s worse? How they might remember it? Or how they might forget it?

Today’s poem explores an instance of unnameable uncertainty, tumbling through that small, loud tragedy of searching for the importance of another — which is a hard kind of hope.

Brooklyn is for Breakups
by Chen Chen

I fell down a wish & your goof skedaddled & I wish it mattered. 
I fell so backwards right into my heart 
like a great diver blessed by a different gravity 
& I wish it mattered a single second. 

A single sorrow can keep 
falling, did you know that–it can fall through stone, steel, 
your spine, any matter 

forever, just a small, small earthling sad. 
You could thread a sigh through the eye of it, but why 
would you. Not a boyfriend, lover, not 

even 6 months knowing each other, what was there 
to know. But my spine. 

Do you remember the bagels, my red jacket, your own 
unkempt mustache that morning of our eventual Let's 
forget about this. 

(You remember, but do you think about it) 
(Do I miss you or do I miss not thinking about those days) 

Seed after seed fell from my very much everything 
bagel & I thought I'd never run out 
of things to wish on, 

the dreams got stuck between my teeth, didn't you see 
them, why didn't we talk about that. 

I can't remember another morning so early. 
So early it sounded like night, 
like me calling for you across the avenue, calling you 
my friend.

"Brooklyn Is for Breakups" by Chen Chen. Used by permission of the poet.