Gabriel Boyer

Hanoi is a mobius strip.

You think you are moving in one direction and then find yourself back round towards the intersection that started it all, except for somehow it’s changed in the interim. Like somehow you slipped into an alternate reality Hanoi. Or. There are parts of Hanoi that sing with remarkable birds and vegetation hangs out from every window, off of every balcony, and into these back streets, and there are parts of Hanoi that are tight walls of junk shoppery crammed with a river of angry motorbikes and their murmuring engines. Hanoi contains every possible version of Hanoi.

Or to put it another way. Hanoi is functioning as a stand-in for my mind at the moment and its many frustrations and confusions. It is what a broken mind looks like. A mind racing in many directions at once. A mind facing the inevitable end times and the games we play to avoid facing it.

We, the human race, are the greatest procrastinators. When faced with our own impending doom, our answer is always, “Not yet.” We watch the lava rolling over the lip of our front yard and think, “Maybe it’ll go away on its own.” We witness our neighbors in the furthest housing unit swept off into the sea and say, “It has nothing to do with me.” This is us.

Gabriel Boyer

I have lost my imaginary friend. She went out for a stroll and never came back. And other things have come to take her place.

Their paperwork was very official. They claimed themselves to be legitimate representatives of my imagination. We have on occasion been taxed with playing you in the early morning, they claimed. But in truth, these were things that wouldn’t play in the familiar ways upon the sprawling filaments of the universe my work station contains.

Sorts of things have hands where they should have eyes, and have eyes everywhere in between. Crawling insufficiencies and elongations of the lower intestine. The underthings—and the overdrive gone into overdrive. And everything in between.

I have been put into quarantine here in my suburban Vietnamese home. I have been in contact with a person who was in contact with a person who was in contact with a person. I have a cat who lives in my yard, and this is not a healthy cat. Old women scale the walls of my garden to chop down bananas and shout at me across the many leafy plants.

So, I’ve become reflective.

Gabriel Boyer

How does the crisis come? What is the moment? Who owns the disaster? And where does it lead?

There is no one moment when the things we saw become things that are seeing us back. There is no time coming when my own hands will turn to birds and begin fluttering about the pages of my face. There will never be a day when I wake with a single yelp and hop skipping from my bed to go do the two-step down to what paradise lurks on the first floor. I am not draped in the lights of epiphany. I know no answers, but the questions continue to evolve into ever more exotic questions every year.

I am the kind of half-assed loser who categorizes different vistas of bathroom tile as to their degree of ominous and/or disease quotient. I am the one who hyperventilates over video conferencing as the clicks begin to invade our connection. I wake on my firm sheetless mattress wrapped in a single fuzzy blanket to protect from the incessant attacks of mosquitoes whirring about the vicinity of my earholes in an otherwise empty room in rural Vietnam, where I now live, as in I rent a four-story house with other foreigners and work in the rural city of Phủ Lý, and generally speaking am haunted by the more unpleasant sexual encounters of my younger days while also ensconced inside of what hungry ghosts latch onto the already dwindling days gone by, hopes to come, and passion spent—and the body begun its long dysfunction unto death.

Enter the disease.

Gabriel Boyer

You know it might seem kind of trite considering how everything’s being exploded all over the place by the authoritarians among us, but—I woke up one day without a brain. The other morning I woke up and thought, Gee. Where’d my brain go, only to then have realized that—gosh. Someone’s going to be so upset with me. I should be out parading in front of the fascists and screaming in their faces in a tight-fisted squadron—but I got no brain.

What I mean by this is—wow. I actually just said that. I can say anything and act like it’s actually true. Wow.

Gabriel Boyer

As abyss has come calling on your doorsteps this holiday, and your openings are twisting into the most convoluted of holiday shapes in their efforts to disguise themselves as the non-sacred things that have replaced their authentic originals—as what we thought was a thing is now transforming into a much older more disgusting thing—as there is no more time left—as time is always running out—as we move without clarity of vision into places without clear contours where the weak among us can be feasted on by bodiless persons as if these bureaucracies could sing in the spirit of the stars, when these are paper card constructions, built of paper so as to maintain their fully paper empires.

Gabriel Boyer

So here’s a person without cares within the larger care-riddled world, and this person then takes on certain responsibilities. This person is known to have a very irresponsible outlook on life, and this person readily accepts a situation in which being careful and watchful are necessary requirements. This person moves a person they care most about in the world from her familiar environment and off to another less familiar environment. This person has the best of intentions, and we know how those can be paved to build roads that lead to places far from heaven. This is where we are now. It’s called Boston.

Gabriel Boyer

The first thing you incoherent erogenous zones should understand is that there is no apocalypse. The apocalypse already happened, you pleasantly subdued psychologies. There will never be an apocalypse if you keep this up my half-whored verb friends, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare for it like you would prepare for one of your notorious cyclical weddings or any of the other great beginnings or endings of you. It is in this way that your brains become peopled with new and colorful crustaceans of the cartoon variety.

Gabriel Boyer

You’re always off and away in the airy confines of your skull, like a sparrow trapped in the tiniest cage—that keeps burrowing deeper into the subatomic field in its effort to escape this unfortunate cage—and in general always searching for another crack to crawl into within that fifth wall delineates the back end of your brain. You got hands behind this aforementioned backdrop of your mental operating theater and they’re messing around with the flickering remnants of your dreams while your one sweetest hope is just to see the light over the hilltop at the end of this long night. You erotic ornithologist you.

Gabriel Boyer

I’m sitting in an abandoned department store on a Thursday night and listening to the Bee Gees and Danny Elfman and feeling very confident of the future that keeps rolling around and around before my eyes like a perpetual motion slot machine. The future is a snake trying to walk backwards. And in the eye of this storm of second sight, I can see so clearly how I will be married and go back to school, and my wife and I will have children, but will I become a warlord in the Middle East at some point in my later years? This has yet to be determined.

Gabriel Boyer

Have you ever truly lived, my pock-marked asterisk of a friend? Have you ever walked into a room and made out with the leading lady of your dreams? Or dove into the darkness with the eagerness of an action hero? Or been there to save the most important person in your life from what would otherwise have been the worst mistake ever? Have you ever openly wept? Or looked out from your hopeless meandering moment to instead be filled with awe when facing the incomprehensible absolutes of your life? That all who you love will decay and die before you, and that you will be one of these people? Unless of course you feel nothing, and then it’ll all happen behind your back while you’re always rummaging in corners looking for shiny objects to distract you from this ever-expanding horror. So. I’ll ask you again.

What about, have you ever truly died? You over-sized prawn-powered muttering device. Have you ever slipped into unconsciousness convinced that you’re never ever going to ever wake up again ever?

I say this in all seriousness as I simultaneously split my tongue with a straight edge razor and eye the dribbling blood with an inconvenient hilarity. For I have tried to do both of these unfortunate things—this living thing and this dying thing I mean—at different times but always in the same backhanded passive aggressive fashion. And all because of you.