I have been writing a lot, actually, lately. It feels good. Sometimes I have long periods during which I write nothing. That doesn’t feel so good.

—

I’m sorry to everyone I’ve ever hurt. And I forgive everyone who’s ever hurt me.

—

Aqueous, I miss you. Sometimes you are the voice of sanity inside my head.

Directly below the sun
in an airplane bound for New York City
a pivotal moment can pass unnoticed
down the aisle,
the tepid ghost of things gone before
but not continued.

Arrested just at the moment of fruition,
the moment is interred like a dream
in the everyday objects
that surround sea change:
The fabric of the seats,
plastic cups, peanut bags,
criers of unwanted consumer goods,
imbued with lost potential and
staid happening,
the strange and modern carriers
of ancient rites:
lost promise,
mythical collapse,
aborted divine.

When the plane leaves the tarmac,
the pavement’s gasp
releases the essence of everything that could have been,
and yesterday returns, pregnant like sea air,
to the empty sky
to the paternity of Sol.

At length, when clouds form again,
into new lives the same rain will fall—
but the passengers on this particular plane
to New York City
will have long since leapt
over the horizon, into memory,
into the ancient chronicles of man’s search
for fairer Gods.

Road not taken?
Stories not written or finished?
Things meant to be that never happened?

—

A year ago I was getting ready to make my way to Alaska. What is the relationship between then and now? How does all of this work, how does it fit together? Does it?

Is it really as simple as “life makes no fucking sense, it will hurt and you should get used to it?”

—

Here I raise a glass to lost love, the saddest thing in a human’s life, and perhaps the thing that most colors every memory and every lonely afternoon. Nostalgia is just another word for “the people you decided to miss when you could have had them next to you all along.”

I am clearly tired of living this way. Please, can we hit 40 already, or 50, or whatever age causes us to slow down, give up on idealism and ambition, and have lives and families? God knows we could fucking use the break. And I think we’ll make good citizens, good parents, and good spouses, too, if we can just get there.

Someday…

is incredibly, incredibly complicated, even on the level of just a couple or a handful of individuals. That’s the trouble with sociology… it tries to work these things out in the gestalt, which only further (infinitely, even) compounds this complexity.

It’s like trying to predict weather patterns, only in these storm systems every raindrop has its own feelings, neuroses, and personal intentions.

—

It’s funny how at home I feel in New York. Much more than I did in Chicago, even though I think I like Chicago better. But this place is definitely like me in some way or other. I feel like I own it. It makes sense to me, it’s easy to navigate, I rarely have to think about the fact that I’m here. I don’t “think about New York” almost at all, in fact; I just live in it. That sort of thing can be very seductive.

—

As can others…

—

Despite my comfort with New York and the New School, every day right now is taking on an air of unreality, as though I’m living in some sort of suspended animation. I don’t know what I mean by that, but it’s the phrase that feels right.

I wonder what’s going on inside the deeper recesses of this head of mine…