It’s been a long day, entre-nous. My dreams are toothless, gold, and the quiet unnerves me; I’m worse for wear. We’re all sinking, making covenants with the idea that we’re not struck down by uneasiness, which is always compelling. What’s something fantastic? I wouldn’t know–there is no bigger picture. I’m a person with many crimes, countless undiscovered, and time’s run out on most of them, which is fine by me. You can never wholly trust that things will stay the same, that people remain the same, or that ideas will endure because they never do. It’s a pretty impressive subterfuge, and I more or less wheeze in admiration at the cleverness of it all. Twenty thousand miles have passed since my last self-iteration from the week before last, and strengthening the resolve to toughen gets weaker by the hour. Surviving is the same as living, no matter what they say.

I swing wildly from a state of sheer and inexplicable ecstasy to inhabiting Sylvia Plath, who was writing early dawn, getting into petty disagreements with herself before her babies woke. Writing is a dangerous pursuit. I’ll try to try again, to rise like Lady Lazarus, scrawl on millions of white filaments, peel off the frost of midnight, and make my own glitter of seas. I lift seashells to my ears and watch the light turn blue. But that was yesterday. I hardly remember life before, when living was viable momentarily and I could bank on death being a farsighted deviation. It’s been a long day without you, my friend. The past and its false aide-mémoires are a solid diversional strategy.

I bend beneath the shyest springtime wind and lukewarm intrusions of attention; every unwelcome incarnation unravels like a long survey piece. I don’t have time to weigh the alchemic gains and losses of blue life and sapphire death. I miss some people. Those that warmed lifeless cockles with restraint and quiet notions, but they’re now out of reach, and it cannot be helped. It’s a daily reminder that grief needs to be transactional, that grief is not transient nor contingent, and that grief craves language, even if that language is simply an acknowledgment of not having adequate language. I have a passion for emptiness and non-existence, but it’s scant compensation when the emptying is done without your consent. I thought the passing of time might make this easier to write, but agony and its voyage south is unrelenting. Sweeter times materialize at most when you’ve started to die. I’m almost completely nocturnal now.

Struck down by psychological uneasiness and the pointlessness of living, we browse in lost places, under blue cups, fainting prasine leaves, sweet days of discipline, and philatelic messages from the afterlife. I’m constantly reminded of the extent to which belief systems, ideologies, or even experiences can be progressive or syncretic at their edges. It’s really the core of existing that’s rotten in some sense, so I make it my business to draw outward to the edges, toward pools of incandescent light. Yet moving in this light, there’s no wind, a sequence of stillness to stillness, of breath, small, quiet gasps issued by mouths, unmoving. Here, in an adroit chronology, Persephone returns to her mother, her Other, measuring her feelings against Satie, Virginia Woolf, or Tom Waits ‘Sea of Love.’ It’s a likeness that repeats in nature, her chrysalis, jellyfish chandeliers, her winter.

That being so, I’ve learned to hold fast to nothing; everything slips through my fingers, algal blooms, ghostly mirrors, kites—a pavilion built on faults de la terre: itself, a kind of rigor. It’s a rhythmic stutter, my refusal to serialism and anything else that might touch me, the collusion between verbatim and the corporeal that wraps me in foam and material loneliness. I’m so alone. I can’t attach to emotion, and I can’t attach to the people around me; I’m stuck between disparate seasons sitting on an em dash because I can’t bear the pain of letting go. If there’s a libido at work here, it’s in the pleasure and pain of inexistence.

Sometimes the smallest of events have the most profound and disabling denouement, and sometimes I don’t know what’s bothering me until I sit down to write and find out. Through force of habit, I persevere, but when daily interactions are ill-at-ease, smoked out by jasmine and quicksilver gas, the whole soul is sick. Permanence is artificial, suspect, and ultimately corrupt, but it’s also true that there are people out there with the heart of a lion.

Stable or mature versions of surviving exist; there are ways to go on, but I decided against them long ago.