february 3 qed
I wrote a lot of words and then I deleted them. Then I wrote some other words. I deleted them too. Eventually I wrote a post about how simply existing after you make big changes in your life is both exhilarating and excruciating. I didn't delete those words, but they are not in this post. They didn't fit.
I was nowhere today. Nothing felt good or right or comfortable. Aside from one thing at work, nothing went right. In short, I spent an entire day feeling hollowed out, empty, inert.
Some of this is depression and seasonal affective disorder (or something like it). Some of this is about the state of the world and the state of the internet (the degradation of which helped the world get this way). Regardless, today I am Chabon's ageing prizefighter. Today my heart beats only because it can. Maybe that's okay for some people, but to me it feels like abject failure. To be clear, "some people" are well-adjusted and objectively correct. My way is bad. But it's my way.
Way back whenever, I would have been embarrassed to write any of this. Way back whenever, when blogs were more or less just online journals (like this one sometimes is) and not cOnTeNt, I wrote a post about whatever was going on in my life at the time, and along the way included some words about a couple of my best friends. When I reread those words a year later I was mortified. I felt stupid, lame, juvenile, untalented, exposed, exposed, exposed. I deleted it but what I wanted to do was set it on fire. The words were too honest and so pure that they looked saccharine and overwrought and I hated with a violent passion that the best thing I was capable of (love) didn't look cool and beautiful on the page and maybe that meant that my life would never be cool or beautiful on the page —— or off it, really.
I think about apologizing to that Dave every now and then. I wish I could go back and tell him that it's okay that he is the way he is. That it's better to be that way than to not be that way. I want to tell that him that if people didn't get him or didn't accept him, that was most likely about them. And I want to tell him that on February 3, 2026, he will spend an entire day feeling hollowed out, empty, and inert, and that the evening will be more of the same, but that he will eventually go to sleep in a loft apartment he would think is insanely and indescribably cool (and exactly the kind of place he hoped he'd live in) next to a person he once promised he'd stare the sun down with and
that
you
simply
cannot
ever
give
in
to
hopelessness
and
despair
because to do it once is do it always and that's just not how we play bridge. That's not how we say cricket.
🌲 gonna pick
🌼 go yourself
🌱 touch up and
🌳 grass try
🌷 now again
Be good to yourself.
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