have you ever felt unhinged and needed to write? here go another ten minutes, because i have to. maybe it’s listening to taylor swift’s new album that has me feeling empty, but i have a hunch that it’s a straw breaking the camel’s back. a lot of pent up emotion and anxieties that i’ve supressed, and now i feel untethered, unmoored. i feel untethered from my sense of self. i feel that i am yearning for someone that i can’t have, who is hundreds of miles away and who has this enthralling mystery to them.
i feel empty, i feel lost, listless. i feel like there is a lot of potential for great things over the next 13 months, but what if i don’t use it right? how can you live a life you don’t regret when someone has laid it out for you? Told you to please try. Here is your chance. Seize it.
But that’s a long time. Multiply that by like 30 days and that’s a lot of days to get right. Because I am a dreamer so I already dreamed all the dreams that would disappoint me. Walking through Brooklyn, going to comedy shows, biking around the Upper West Side. And now that dream isn’t full dust, but we’re just watching it wither. With a few more weeks it’s supposed to be gone. It will be too late. So many things, variables, have changed in these past few months and to recalibrate so quickly is vertigo, is something I can do but refuse to. I feel lost. I feel like all this optimism has draining away like a hole in a tire and I’m just standing there watching. Time is such a funny thing. It gives you hope as it steals itself away. I’m getting older and that always seems top of mind. It always seems top of mind because I am partial to nostalgia even though it’s terrible for you. It’s my drug and the high is so ephemeral for a down that is so brutal. Hits you in the gut and tells you that this is something you can’t “work” on. This is the past, and in ways, there is a permanence to it that separates it from everything else in our world. People, things, our dreams can dissipate, can expire, can change. But our past is not something we can change, so we come to terms with it through regret. It’s the only thing that’s certain. At least what happened. Maybe we misremember, maybe we forget details, maybe there were things that were never said, never communicated in that past, but it still happened and in a way I think I chase that. I want to undo things now, I want a second chance. But the second chance can only happen in the present, always marked by the past. Always marked by what happened before and that’s fine. The future scares me. Because I have big plans. But what if they don’t turn out like I had hoped? Then what? Do you just settle? Is that what settling is? Some version of the future that doesn’t give you justice for the past? Is settling just a sage defiance in coming to accept the world for what it is? And dreaming smaller so you don’t have to fall from so high?
I wonder how much it will hurt. Because I tried ignoring the bruises, pretending they weren’t there, and oh how my body is a garden now.
tenminutethoughts 