Dear Lana,

I want a cigarette. Unfortunately, I don’t have any, and I’m too lazy to walk to the nearest convenient store to get one. So, here I am, writing as a substitute to smoking. Lame.

Lana, I went to my college again today to return some books. Normally, people would say such a trip would be nostalgic. I guessed the buildings seemed familiar. I personally thought it was traumatic. Each crevice of Locust Walk always reminded me of some memory I didn’t want to remember. That got me thinking: is trauma the opposite of nostalgia?

I studied English in college, so I guess that means I learned how to English. I’m not sure what I learned exactly. I wrote a 15-page paper on Romantic subjectivism or some shit in Jane Eyre that got an ‘A’ at one point, but I’m not sure what exactly happened in Jane Eyre. There was a character named Jane Eyre, right? Did they fall in love with Heathcliff, or was that in Wuthering Heights? Wait, was the love interest called Rochester, or is that just a college? I’m not sure, Lana. All the books just mesh together in my brain, and I’m not convinced that I actually read anything at all. In fact, I remember more about the Sparknotes I read forThe Kite Runner in high school than whatever happened in Jane Eyre.

Sorry, Lana. My thoughts are a bit scattered today. I’m not sure I understand the point of reading anything anymore if I just forget about it all. I read War and Peace for my Tolstoy class a couple of months ago. I’m pretty sure I understood what happened in the story, but I’m also convince that I’ll forget what happened a couple of months from now. After all, I don’t plan to be a Tolstoy scholar, and I will probably never read War and Peace again in my life. So, if I forget about reading it, what’s the point of reading it at all?