break or broken

the best writing you ever did was after taking a multiyear break. no blogging, no fiction, nothing. you came back with ideas and motivation and in 2 years punched out dozens of stories and hundreds of blog posts.

your mind tells you it was a waste. time in your 20s, wasted. the writing isn't good enough, doesn't matter, anyways. no stories published, blog posts old and forgotten, some deleted out of poor quality or revealing info, who knows.

you squint and realize you haven't written fiction in years. you dream of a scifi novel, or even a melancholy short story. your blog is its quietest in 4 years. a break was good last time. but now you're 30. everything decays now. life is busier now. you're not getting better, not learning, so why not keep trying. write nothing, force ideas, stare at a screen. was the break important? was the writing even better when you came back? do you tell yourself that to justify abandoning your lifelong dream? you wrote before about how it's best to abandon it when you're young and won't be disappointed that it doesn't come true later on. you're still drawn to the screen, the black text on white background, the idea that maybe today it'll be different. it never is.

all at once/make it last

it's not uncommon to hear someone grapple with the difficulty of wanting to eat a good meal all at once, to completely entirely indulge, and yet want to draw it out and make it last. both have cons intrinsic to food; eating too fast is a quick route to physical discomfort, while at a certain point, too slow can cause the quality to degrade say, via, a cooling temperature or slow change in texture from when something first hits the plate. 

this is just food though, and while it's the most common application of said conundrum, it is far from the only. there's a desire to have everything and nothing, all at once and make it last. to live an entire life with the person you love right here and now, have it all and feel it all and taste it all, and yet a desire to drag it out, to not blast off this rocky vestibule and into the vast nothingness of death. and it's not even entirely something so profound. it presents itself in slightly different ways and different sectors but with the same sort of conundrum. the tears shed by emma on her last day at the high school newspaper were similar; a sense of finality, closing, the end of one stop when all she would talk about was how excited she was about college, and then it was here, it was now, and she was crushed. we talk about plowing through college to avoid debt and time and study and homework and yet the end feels like an impenetrable, unknowable object, waiting with just another cycle of future excitement and sad closing. we want it all at once; the degree, the knowledge, the experiences, the nervous makeouts, and none of it all at once, the closure, the ending, the job. we want the taste but not the bloating, the sunsets but not the chores, the love and warmth but not the separation caused by the likes of work or family. maybe that's the difficulty. it's not whether we eat the meal all at once or overtime. it's that every option comes with a tradeoff we don't want, a repercussion we wish to trade in for something else. and as you get older, more and more of these become a personal choice you have control over, and not a parent, or teacher, or peer. maybe we're all stuck staring down at the plate not having made up our minds. what would you like for dinner? i don't know.