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.

1 year is 3 decades

there's no way to put anything other than the end as the end. there are no postscripts or epilogues that can continue ad infinitum. there is always a last word, a last period, a last page.

for almost 30 years each day that was supposed to celebrate a beginning felt a little bit more like celebrating an end. and it wasn't a good end. it wasn't a heartwarming conclusion where someone walks off into the sunset, or vanquishes the enemy, or learns, laughs, loves. it was just an end to nothing. a tiny, barely luminescent flame finally extinguished.

but i suppose, like all things, environments can change. what for 20-odd years was one story was replaced by another. a new narrative, a new cover, a new ending. the ending isn't soon now, it's  not a cold, grey sunday in february of 2019. but that's where it began. it wasn't a sunday, but it was cold, and it was grey, and that didn't matter. maybe it never did.

she told me that i wasn't turning 30. that i was really only one. that what had happened was a life i no longer lived, a person i slowly shed. and she was right. i was so fixated on the story being the same, on the end being plotted out in outlines and notes and mental constructions, that i didn't realize maybe it could change, maybe there would be an epilogue, maybe the epilogue would be longer than the story, maybe there was a sequel, maybe there was just more, more, more.

because someone cares now. and maybe i don't, fully, maybe i will never quite view my body as a sanctuary, or temple, or something to protect and cherish. but someone else does. and as she whisked you away from place to place, feeling to feeling, smile to smile, on a day i knew, knew, knew would be my last, no intrusive thoughts entered. just the warm water on my skin of a swimming pool, the sound of my favorite musical, the taste of her lips on mine, and her smile, so bright it showed the rest of the story for me, lighting the way, piercing whatever grey nightmare a michigan winter had thrust on us.

the things you didn't carry

it hit me while driving to work this morning on a friday. it's hit me before, i suppose, but it's surprising every single time. mornings before work were usually sad. i'd drive to elvis depressedly or sufjan stevens or waxahatchee or flatsound or teen suicide or normal state and mope and stare ahead at the blank canvas of a flat landscape dotted either by grey winter clouds or grey crumbling roads, and that would be my morning. and then my evening would be the same. leave work, drive, sad music, home, sad music, white carpet now grey from dust and so many spilled drinks i cant keep track. grey grey grey. everything.

i drove to work today happy. i listened to happy music, i smiled at one point. i've had mornings like this before, but in the last year they've become more common. they used to be relegated to days leading up to trips to far away locasles. now they're relegated to days. the evening before was wonderful, the weekend ahead will be wonderful, and the things i carry on my shoulders seem a bit lighter for once, less suffocating, less heavy. i drive to work with eyes focused not on the grey right in front of me of another cold, snowy day, but on the time when i will be done with work, on the time when i see her, on the time when we can hug and laugh and share in each other's lives. i don't really know this feeling, it feels like i am shedding 20 years of not having it. it's relearning a bike i did actually forget how to ride. it's relearning me, relearning life. i sang the last few lines to a song that played as i pulled into the parking lot at work. the falsetto i can't reach with my limited range spewed "you're stuck in my mind, all the time." nothing truer has been said.

excerpt like a promethean curse

a small chalkboard stand at work is, belatedly most times, adorned with a supposed 'inspirational' quote or idiom weekly. this blog has, at times, taken idioms and deconstructed them in purposely obtuse ways so as to have a pseudo-ironic, deprecatory posts. the stated goal, then, of each elucidation is different; the former, to inspire achievement - the latter, to inspire a sort of perfunctory chuckle or reflection on the silliness of the english language. in the end, however, both the black chalkboard and the white background result in the same foregone conclusion; nobody reads either, nobody is inspired by either, and all continue their slow march towards death.