[POETRY][12/30/25]Fake Journal Entry
by Veronika Kelemen
My brother is twenty-seven. I’m thirty. Krysztof is thirty-nine. He was living in a shared house well into his thirties. Anna, Stas, Alex and Krysztof all have Slack accounts. Mine lays inactive. The water on the west side made me look like shit. My luteal phase made me feel like shit, globally. Lots of people died in the Holocaust so I could think about myself all the time. And somehow I had friends who loved me all over the world. Surely it couldn’t be because I was beautiful or smart or cool.
In the dream I leave my yellow bag on the bus. In the dream my phone is about to die and I have to find my way home alone. Many of my dreams include some semblance of danger, she wrote ten years of therapy and $60,000 later.
A whole world opens up to you when you stop obsessing over whether you’re going to die alone. You get to obsess over other stuff instead. Eventually I bought the plane ticket. Many people have spent many hours agonizing over whether to buy a plane ticket. My best friend Lillian is in a Facebook group that consists of offerings for free housing all over the world, in exchange for petsitting, and we are always on the phone playing Schroedinger’s cat, whether it’s worth it to pay a grand to fly to Bali to look after a Shih Tzu for one sticky fortnight.
In the end I chose antidepressants over becoming the voice of my generation. If you’d rather be the best writer in the world than stay alive, then you don’t really want to get better. But I’ve still got my Columbia MFA. And I’ve still got my agent. And my book died on submission. But I only mentioned the first two things in my interviews with the AI company.
The good thing about my Columbia MFA is that people from The Program are always writing books about our time there, so I get to read about my experience from another person’s view. One of the poets just released a new collection and in it she talks about her dalliances with the poet boys, how they wrote her late-night emails. I didn’t have many dalliances at Columbia, poets or otherwise. One threesome with another nonfiction student, and one nonfiction boy who asked me on a date four years after we graduated, then ghosted me when I asked what time we should meet on the day of, then four months later replied to an Instagram story I posted in a bikini to ask me if it was okay if he jacked off to it.
My best friend Lillian and I went to Wi Spa and ate so much I felt sick. Even after a twelve-step program, I still can’t stop the childish anger and frustration I experience when I overindulge and feel worse, not better. Trying to sweat it out in the jade sauna, I was entertained by two men laying beside me giggling so loudly I thought that they could be children. “What’s your favorite color?” one asked. “Light blue,” said the other. They both burst into laughter. “You’re funny, Joshua,” the one who liked blue followed up, once their laughter had subsided. The exchange repeated again, with the question being about a favorite shape instead, and I felt a happy, warm glow, observing that in spite of everything, two men could still experience pure love and friendship. But when the exchange repeated a third time, I realized they were both just on drugs.
I’ve time jumped only once in my life, driving on the BQE with my ex-girlfriend during the pandemic. We were talking about what it would be like to accidentally flip the car and land in the Hudson, and suddenly I understood that it was actually happening, that we were flipping cartoonishly through the air, the Hudson smacking us unconscious, our lungs and ears leaking black black blood. And then I blinked and she was bringing the car to a pause at a stoplight. But I knew that somewhere else, we were both dead.
Years later, actually just last week, I needed new toothpaste. My girlfriend and I walked to the nearest Rite Aid, only to enter into a dystopian room full of empty shelves. The one employee working told us that they were closing for good at the end of the week, and they were packing the last remaining stock into boxes. We parted ways to each comb the store, searching for any remaining toothpaste. After five minutes or so, I paused. The store was silent. Surrounded by empty shelves, I heard no footsteps or music. I understood that in this Rite Aid, I was frozen, that bathed in the fluorescent light I belonged to a different life, that I had not brought any of my external relationships, thoughts, and feelings into the pharmacy.
There was no toothpaste, so I walked to the next aisle. And there was my girlfriend, holding up a tube. “I found it,” she said, in this life, this time.
Sometimes I think, there is so much good in my life that it’s probably fine if I’m not that skinny. Sometimes I look at a homeless person, blissed out and high on the sidewalk, and wonder what it’s like to not have to take meetings, attend exercise classes, or reapply sunscreen. Both are fine!
VERONIKA KELEMEN is a New York and Los Angeles-based writer. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Chair's Fellowship recipient. Her chapbook, As Above So Below, was published in 2020 by Choo Choo Press, and her novel Good Thing is forthcoming. She also co-hosts the No Matter podcast and hosts the Dear Diary reading series. Her next event, Around the Bloc: Stories of Love and Joy From the Eastern European Diaspora, will be held at the Wende Museum on January 17th, 2026.