It’s been more than a while this time, notebook. I reread because I didn’t remember where I left off.
It’s weird, not being able to remember your own thoughts even when you wrote them down. Sometimes it’s like Kat from Before is just someone I passed on the street.
I never found out anything else about Jocelyn Keating, I still haven’t remembered where I’ve heard of the Owl King before, I still don’t know what that key is for, I occasionally see someone watching me at the library and freak out about it, which is so much fun.
I have trouble sleeping.
And Z’s still missing.
It’s been more than a year.
I played a lot of phone tag with Z’s mom and I have all his stuff now, pulled out of university storage and sitting in boxes in my apartment. I keep telling his mom I can bring them to her but she insists I wait until after I graduate next May. Who am I to argue with a fortune-teller? Besides, Z has excellent taste in books so now I’m stocked up on reading material.
I don’t really talk to people anymore, I know I should but it’s hard. I was seeing this guy who bartends at the Adjective Noun for a while and he was nice but I kind of let it fizzle. I didn’t return a text once and never heard from him again and now he’s always generic bartender pleasant to me when I go in there and it’s weird, like I imagined the whole thing and it didn’t actually happen.
It’s like the photograph. I didn’t write about that here, but a few months ago I found a photograph online from that masquerade charity party. It was a gallery of images and one of them was a woman in a long white gown wearing a crown with a guy in a suit and it looked like they had either just stopped dancing or they were about to start. They looked like they knew each other. Neither of them were looking at the camera. She had her hand over his heart.
I didn’t recognize the woman but the guy was Z. There was lens flare and she was in sharper focus, but it was totally him. He was wearing my mask.
The photo didn’t have a caption.
When I tried to load a larger image to save the file it gave me a Page Not Found error and I went over and over the galleries again and it was gone.
I can see it, in my head. But lately I’m never sure I didn’t imagine it. I saw
what I wanted to see or something like that.
I deleted all of my social media not long after that. I shut down my blog. I stopped baking, too, except for failed experiments in gluten-free puff pastry.
I’ve tried to keep myself busy, though.
My Notebooks of Endless Possibilities turned into my grad thesis and possibly more than that so I came to Manhattan for a meeting (still here, back to Vermont tomorrow) and the second day I was here I got a text from an unknown number.
Hello, Kat. Northeast corner of Union Square, 1 p.m.
Beneath it was a bee emoji, a key emoji, and a sword emoji.
I went, because of course I did.
The farmers’ market was set up in Union Square so the place was a zoo and it took me a while to find somewhere to stand and I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for so I assumed someone was looking for me. Sure, following anonymous text instructions was sketchy but the middle of a crowded street corner seemed safe enough and, fine, whatever. I was curious.
I was there for about three minutes when my phone buzzed again with another text.
Look up.
I looked up. It took me a minute but then I spotted the girl standing in an upper window of the ginormous Barnes and Noble, looking down at me, holding up one hand like she was going to wave but she wasn’t waving. She had a phone in her other hand that she started typing on once she saw me see her.
I recognized her. She’d come to my classes a few times around when Z disappeared but then I didn’t see her after that January. She was a knitter. She’d helped perfect my golden stitch pattern. We’d had a cool conversation about overlapping narratives, too, and how no single story is ever the whole story. Sarah something.
She was there, then, and I hadn’t ever thought of her. Not once.
The pay phone next to me started ringing. Seriously. I didn’t even think those worked, I had them categorized in my mind as nostalgic street-art objects.
Another text buzzed my phone. Answer it. I looked up again. She had two phones, one was up to her ear and she was texting on the other. Figures. Never enough phones.
People around me were starting to look at me funny, I was standing too close to the phone for anyone else to get it.
So I picked it up.