2026 Journal | The Oracle Aporia

January

Some parts of you have to die to become the person you were meant to be. They may be the parts you least expected to lose.

It really is a mental illness, my psyche is nauseous, seasick standing still.

And I want to be real too.

The hope pains me, yes. But the greater pain is to know that its resolution would not give any lasting happiness

Tenebrous : dark shadowy obscure

Sometimes they call the crucifix a tree

I receive psychic damage by catching the merest glimpse of others suffering

I want to use "caustic" in a sentence

I've never thought so little in my life.

My mind has become a very small place.

A cramped sort of house. I keep running into the walls. In such darkness. Bruising my limbs on all the sharp edges. Again and again. Outside the walls are more walls. Black bricks and black bricks. There's nothing beyond the black bricks. And in the small house I am very large. And older than I am now. Late 40s maybe.

In my mind my life is already over. The mistakes I am bound to make have already been made and I already suffer from them. I am bracing myself for the inevitable. I cannot create or form or bring to life. I do not move by my will. I am pulled forward inch by inch by an indifferent force. No looking back to revise, no looking forward to construct. I cannot form a shape or an image. Only one thin line battling forward, agonizingly slow, and almost silent but for one repeating thought.

I just want your eyelashes to brush against my collarbone

Some things are immune to time

I woke up at 3am from a nightmare where I was screaming for my mother. I picked up my phone as a distraction from my fear only to meet a news flash that a woman had been murdered by ICE. Shot in the face. La da dee La da daa. La da dee.

I couldn't ramble about anything.

I'm disappearing, I'm going blind

Every single day I step up to the ledge. Every single day I have to talk myself down. I wish something would come along and push me.

Not sure how long I can last like this.

The tragedy isn’t that it ended. The tragedy would be trying to force it to stay the same.

What I do have : the capacity to show up day after day while suffering. Is that courage? Is that strength? I could give myself credit for that, at least.

I never will.

When I'm at work I dream of sleeping

When asleep I dream of working

I'm a drifter. No one will think of me on their death bed. That's ok. But who will I think of?

Today I decided to move to Asia. There are a lot of steps to go through, and I'm excited for each one. Making this decision has been a weight off my shoulders, and with it I realize how punishing I have made my life. The options I've allotted for myself. I'm a drifter, it's just the way some people are, and drifters are meant to exist in the tapestry of life. We're meant to be this way the same way some people are meant to live in the same town their entire lives. We all have our parts to play, and I want to stop resisting mine. I want to exist in the context where I thrive. The context where my abilities to cope with loneliness and my severe unattachment are benefits, necessary even, not curses but gifts. This is the path that I have been preparing myself for. With every failed day, with every failed home. I will join the road again with no need for a plan, no need for a deadline, no need for an exit. This is the life I will allow myself to live, I will use my privilege to its best advantage, I will not squander my gifts. I will allow myself to live.

I spend so much time fighting upstream against the current of my personality. The force of my true nature. No wonder I'm so exhausted all the time. I will not let myself simply be myself. I want to be better so badly, but maybe that is not something you can change by force of will.

One of the main dilemmas I've been coming back to for the last few months : what of ourselves do we have the ability to change? And of what you can change, should you choose to?To what extent do darker traits exist on a spectrum of subjective vs objective relativity? How can we know that the apparent flaws in ourselves are not the foundation for some greater good? What struggles are we meant to overcome, and what struggles are we meant to accept?

“When am I truer than when I am the world?… What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness… I hold onto the world with every gesture, to men with all my gratitude and pity. I do not want to choose between the right and wrong sides of the world, and I do not like a choice… The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. How can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair?

… In spite of much searching, this is all I know.”

Feb

The ideal self that you aspire so much to emulate would not treat you the way that you treat yourself

What I don't understand is why I am so unwilling to choose something. I would seemingly rather completely throw my life away than pick a single objective. Even just one. There's so many options, decision paralysis. Every option sacrifices another. Like "if I spend my time studying astronomy, that's time I won't be learning about world history." And then I take that frustration and learn nothing.

I don't understand how I've fallen off as an artist. I can barely even call myself an artist, I mean I guess I write little snippets in my journal, and I do play guitar and work on songwriting fairly often. But does spending a few hours a week songwriting and the rest doing nothing creative really qualify me as an artist? If I am an artist, why am I so afraid and resistant to create? I have projects I want to work on, and start. I have my portfolio website that I want to work on. I haven't worked on it in months. I wanted to make a project for 2025. And I can't get started. These two projects don't even require new thoughts, they are just compilations of things I've already done. But the thought of digging through everything and organizing it is so daunting. And there is so so much writing. I don't even know how I would organize it all. I have a million Google docs and nothing's in chronological order. And I have no creative ideas whatsoever. Every time I try it's always something so redundant and derivative that it seems an insult to the concept of creativity itself. I can't stand making art that feels derivative and unoriginal. I hate feeling like my best work is from years ago. I hate looking back and seeing the fall off. And I have no idea WHY there was a fall off, or when that happened, and what has physically happened in my brain for it to happen. Is it some sort of frontal lobe development that cut off my creativity? Or my mother's death? I feel like art should theoretically improve over time and with experience, but it more feels like I ran out of things to say and new ways to say them. This idea makes me feel old and dizzy. It's like I know too much now, the world has become transparent. I'm not proud of myself. I hate relying on my past work as an artist to justify my “identity” as one now. And I'm ashamed for holding on to that identity still even as it slips away. And at the same time I'm ashamed for NOT trying hard enough, surely the greatest shame is in doing nothing at all, which is exactly what I've been doing for a long long time.

YOURE WELCOME

Art stopped being expression and became evidence of worth. The mere possibility of action immediately begs the question; what have you lost? Who are you now? What do you have left?

Fuck I can't wait to be God

Using narrative as a coping mechanism

Believing that without suffering I don't deserve compassion

The choice you make now matters.

Who are you really : the person that the mold of your current circumstances shapes you to be? Or are you the person pursuing who you want to be? Are you as good as your potential, if you don't strive for it? Are you the sum of your goals, even if they're never achieved? I don't believe we are simply our actions. But you have to choose who you are and live as that person.

You do everything that way. In a rush. In a rush -- for what?? In a rush to do what?? Every action, every moment, that is your life. And it's truly in the small, forgettable moments that our character is forged. Anyone can be at peace in comfort, it's only when you achieve peace in disorder that you can prove who you are.

As the point of dancing is not to get to the end the fastest. As the purpose of the song isn't to reach the final note, and certainly not the memory of it that remains. The point of art is not in reflection or analysis, observation or completion. The point of art will always be the act of creation itself, when it is alive.

A completed work of art is a cut flower. It's beautiful, but it's dying now in your hand.

Every action can be made a ritual. Every action can be a gift to time. There is a way to make every moment better. A gift to yourself. And isn't that what you deserve?

Moment by moment, letter by letter, your life is being written.

What are you scared of?

No really, what are you scared of?

Most people are not even conscious of their deepest fear, the one that dictates their life, the one so deeply ingrained, omnipresent and invisible and driving as breath. I wonder what mine is. I think none of us know ourselves as well as we think we do

Why am I so cold? I can't imagine any warm future. And most crucially, I can't imagine any future that I'm willing to work for. That I'm willing to put effort into making a reality. There's nothing I want badly enough to push me to my feet. There's no dream I feel is worth chasing. And yet, at the same time, I'm not happy standing still. I wander aimlessly, just to be in motion.

Motion, motion, motion. I'm all about motion. Even if it's force is destruction.

You must deny yourself pleasure to earn the full range of emotion

March

“The man who loves walking will walk farther than the man who loves the destination”

Blanket blackness. The issue is everything is just itself now. Just objects. All is divorced from meaning and consequence. I am so separate from it. Because the truth I can't stomach. I cannot sit with it. I cannot look it in the eye. I must always pretend it's not there. Or I will not be able to stand. There's a self deep inside of me that's been quarantined, or caged. If she were free I could not function. I'm not functioning now. I feel her knocking. What can I do to make myself feel alive?

I'm so glad I don't feel this way anymore lmao

If it's my fate so be it, I will carry on. I must stop making demands of life and time. It's all an illusion. The only true goal is to bring myself as close to God as possible. I will discover the God in everything and everyone. In the infinite tunneling through me. My only goal is to align myself with love, and give myself fully to that current.

Doing quite well on this lately actually

One of the most painful things about living with lifelong mental illness is the gradual realization that you're not going to get better, that it wasn't just a phase, that the ugliness in you is not a separate entity, a foreign intruder, but…just you the whole time. Your own worst enemy, your own abuser, your own bar to success.

To survive it, you have to trick yourself. You have to believe that you are not your disease, you have to believe that you are an innocent bystander to the intrusion, a victim. It's so hard for to look at my symptoms and face that this is a mirror, not some parasite I can remove.

Does this matter? If you are powerless to change?

What fragment of yourself is the defining being? At which layer is the soul? Or is everything within you all one and equal?

At which layer is the soul.

Maybe some are born with two.

There are people I have wanted to be.

I am someone who recognizes that giving love and receiving love are one in the same motion.

Who I wanted to be was someone who was able to give love freely, and live in the transference.

I was not.

Who I am is someone who loves deeply.

Who I wanted to be was a person who was capable of being in a relationship with the person they loved.

I was not.

Who I am is a person unable to commit to anything, not even love, not even healing, not even connection.

I cannot commit to happiness or sadness, I cannot commit to stability or chaos, I cannot commit to freedom or structure. Why why why must I always be in motion.

I don't want to face the grenade that is the list of missing pieces that separate me from the outside world. I don't want to recognize the things that make other people human, and conclude definitively that I cannot meet their mark. If I run out of hope that I can get better, that deep down there is a soul still pure and intact and redeemable somewhere beneath the marring of trauma and disease, what motivation would I have to go on?

So I took another blind step into the darkness, unable to see further than one step ahead of me. Only this time I had a destination. I saw you in the distance, with me, lost in this shadow of reality. Between us was a door of light and you waited for me there. If I found the path to it, maybe we could emerge from this sunken place. But there was still so much darkness in between to stumble through. For me it never lifted, I never found the path that would lead me to safety, to home, to you, to us, to the end of the cold blind wandering.

And then you asked me why I couldn't come home to you. And all I can say is, I tried, I tried. And so you left me there, in the dark, to find another light for yourself.

Damn I was really going thru it sheeit

What zero dopamine does to a mf

Can we dissociate ourselves from illness, as if only our intentions define who we are?

The life in anything

I hate going anywhere because I feel so bad for everyone. Having a job is terrible, having to wait on people for 8 hours to earn a barely living wage is terrible. It's degrading, dehumanizing. It's so hard to go out and have these interactions with people that are forced to wear their costumes, knowing they are prisoners to a system that I am benefiting from, knowing they just want to spend more time with their kids, or if they're lucky get a few days off this year to go see the ocean. Some die never having gone. I want to say I'm sorry to everyone I speak to. I'm sorry for what you're going through. I'm sorry you live in this society. I'm sorry your teachers lied to you as a kid when they said you could be anything you wanted if you put in the effort. That kindness was a commodity. I'm sorry your government would sooner see you dead than give you life saving medicine without a fee. You deserve better.

Your life is only as good as this moment. It doesn't really matter at all what happened in the past, all that matters is how you feel about it right now.

We used to make fun of people who said "I was born in the wrong generation", but goddamn, weren't we all.

I overheard the worst comment on AI I hadn't thought about before.

Ours was the last generation to really experience life without AI.

Everyone born from here on out, it will be all they know. As ubiquitous as airplanes and mobile phones were to us as children.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this.

I feel so fucking bad for them. I already felt bad enough that we barely had life without the internet. But now I feel grateful that I even had that brief window, and that AI didn't flesh itself out until my brain had fully developed.

These kids, they're going to be a whole different kind of human. I don't think anyone sees it going well.

I feel the urge to run, but where to? Where to.

I have a headache because my head hurts

I'm not saying it's not important, I'm just saying maybe maybe MAYBE we don't have to think about it every single day for the rest of our life

At the end of your life, will you be grateful for the time you spent hating yourself?

I'm really fucking scared the drugs are going to stop working

Somnolence - the strong desire for sleep

Some chapters exist just to make the next one possible

I will miss you Philadelphia. I will miss the view out my window. The blinking skyline. I really truly love you. I am so so lucky and grateful that I found a place I don't want to leave. Fuck writing that sentence made me cry. I have no idea how I got so lucky or why I was chosen to have this life. This year has been so fucking transformative. All I had to do was graduate college. Break up with Yoshi. Join Americorps. Meet Luke. Quit Americorps. Drive from Oregon to Utah. Drive from Utah to New Orleans. Drive from New Orleans Philadelphia. Fall in love with the city. Spend a year trying and failing, being extremely depressed and extremely happy. Get on medication. Break up with Luke. Realize that the only thing holding me back was myself. Make a lot of plans.

Dude have y'all seen this "gmail" app? This shit is absolutely insane. Someone needs to put an end to this madness

I just want to be known by the people I know

Maybe your suffering was necessary as it prepared you to help others

Less than 10% of mammal species are monogamous. Only 1/4 of primates.

Mar 26

These beta blockers are not beta blocking

Or they can't handle the intense overwhelming trauma of living in a collapsing society, not even a collapsing society, a collapsing world. There are facts, there are hard and true facts about the world, that sound like literal schizophrenic delusions, psychotic hallucinations and paranoia. But they're true.

Even horror movies wouldn't go so far as to portray the shit that happened on Epstein island. It's too vile even for fiction. How did this happen. The world is a terrifying place

I really needed my mom not to die. That shot me in the fucking lung.

I must go through these motions and imagine her by my side. How hard to grasp, this pain will never end.

We all must repress so much to get by. But it rots us away inside. And you don't know until it's too late, you're all gone.

America detox : consume no American media, no American food, no American movies, tv, books, music. No American news. I will do this as soon as I leave the country. If I meet another American abroad, I'm just gonna turn around and walk away.

Hiraeth: longing for a home, time, or place that no longer exists and cannot be returned to

April

I'm so torn between the concepts of "you don't need to earn your existence, to love and enjoy the beauty of the earth is your purpose" and "you need to make the most of your short, incredibly rare lifespan and learn everything and do everything you possibly can." It's hard to commit to either while each option is seemingly valid. I guess I just wish I knew more things, had skills, belonged anywhere. My purposelessness is heavier than most because I don't mean anything to anyone. Even just being someone that mattered to others in any capacity would be a solid enough purpose for me. At least I imagine so. But all I can do is imagine.

Weird how men are the stereotypically sex obsessed gender that would do anything to get laid, yet women are the ones who are obsessed and actually put effort into their hygiene, appearance, anti-aging. Men will not lift a finger for the female gaze. The idea that men age better than women is fucking hilarious. The difference is that women are able to mature and grow in their capacity for love and attraction to imperfection while mens brains are stunted and willfully immune to wisdom. I cannot imagine giving any credence to a mans opinion on women.

You know when you're going through hell and you say to yourself "it's all part of the process, one day this is all gonna make sense" but you don't really believe it you just think it's the right thing to say? The one day has finally come. And finally does make sense.

- (this, too, shall pass)

Like twice a week I will randomly be hit by the full weight of how my family failed and abandoned me after my mom died and it's this overwhelming internal screaming pain for a few minutes and then I just casually smother it to death with a pillow and move along with my day.

La da dee da dee da.

I wonder what life would be like if we didn't have days of the week, didn't count months or years. I guess counting day and year and season cycles would be pretty hard to get around. And months kinda make sense. But weeks, that's all made up. Are there any cultures without them? They're starting to freak me out, I don't like the repetitive structure of them, I don't like that I have ascribed a sort of 'vibe' to each day. I hate getting to Friday, looking back at my week, and judging if it was good or bad. Then feeling like I can't do anything on the weekends, and I can only start shit on Mondays, and if I miss Monday I have to wait til next week and try again.

Running on the hands of a clock, a race to nowhere restarting again and again. Waiting in anticipation for some good day, some good week. Then when it passes, waiting for another. Trying to fill the days between the good moments. Counting down, restarting the clock. Just trying to make it til the end of the week. “Phew well at least it's Friday, glad this week's almost over. Next week's a fresh slate.” But it's just two days away. We’re always just rushing through time, waiting for it to be over. Glad when it's over, glad when it's gone. Digging through mud.

Every thought you have is something you created. That is art and one of a kind. I really believe everyone is an artist. (Not everyone's a good one)

Another one of the endlessly infuriating things about all this insane news lately is that women are almost completely out of the narrative, totally outside the sphere of any kind of control. I can't think of the last time I saw a sane woman represented in anything political, technological, scientific, or important. All we get are the heinous wives. Melania Trump, Erica Kirk. All botoxed and soulless and unhuman. Women lack whatever chaotic driving force propels these men to power. No one actually intelligent or moral would crave power at the level to compete with the relentless motivation of an insane, immoral person. And somehow the men are becoming more insane by the generation.

If women ran the world there would be no war.

It's true that in some cultures, the male leaders are sane and competent. But there are no cultures where women leaders are tyrants, warlords, fascists. These are games men play with each other, the women and children all victims.

2026 has been a weird fucking year, and it's about to get absolutely insane. Right as I've developed a life I'm happy with, along with some relative stability, I'm about to absolutely demolish it. I only have a month left here. The reality has not kicked in. This trip to NOLA and a week long stay in some hostel will remind me of the person I used to be, my way of life, what will be my life again very very soon. I absolutely cannot wrap my head around it. I made these plans when I was in the worst mental place imaginable. These plans were a form of suicide, an escape hatch. I'm glad that they are no longer within that context. The guanfacine has made me a person much better equipped to handle the trials ahead. A real challenge, real problem solving. God I'm so excited.

If you're in control, you're not going fast enough

May

The weight of my love and what it teaches me. My love makes me a gift to you. But I can only give as much of myself

as allows me to remain recognizable

But I want to. I want to give myself all away. If anyone could deserve it. I want to give up all defense and entrust myself. I want to throw off this weight. The great burden of self. My body only a vessel to hold my love. Fall limp in his arms. If it would be enough. To give it all away. I want someone to deserve it.

I'm a place to live, not a place to remember. I don't think anyone remembers me.

Making art seems so futile at times. The more embodied you are, art becomes unnecessary. Less than. Art is a cleaving. Sometimes we need to be disembodied. Other times we just need to be. I ask why would I "make" art when I am living it? The art is now, I could not be any closer. This is the movie, this is the picture, this is the story. It could not be higher, only dragged to earth. Why waste time cramming the boundless into the temporal? Externalizing art separates you from the source of beauty, from the self. We separate ourselves from the very thing we were trying to capture, not acknowledging that we had it within us already in its purest most perfect form. To truly immerse yourself in the essence of creative power, you must stand silent and still, with eyes closed, watch and feel.

Its getting harder and harder to see them.

My empathy strangles me.

I don't want to be served by people. I don't want to be performed for. Knowing their bosses are assholes, knowing they're faking their smiles and their friendliness, knowing they're over worked and underpaid and maybe their cat just died but they couldn't afford a day off.

I feel pity and heartbreak for every person I see. I see your potential and your purpose. I see you defiled. I see you exploited and leeched and helpless. Waiting for something to save you from that which we cannot change. We're all waiting. It's getting harder and harder to leave. My empathy strangles me.

The onslaught

Perpetual motion sickness perpetual imbalance perpetual confusion I spin swim scramble gasp for air

the swarm of stimuli breeding multiplying

No one but me

Only I know God is watching

And I am watching God

Each second I stare back into it's screaming face

Everything I see

All the same

I KILLED YOUR MOTHER

It's never quiet

I will kill you too if you don't do it first

I killed your mother and I will kill everyone you love

How few remain

I know you will enjoy holding my heart as it slows and stops

And I know it's me

It's me it's me it's me

Watching myself dance and panic trapped like a spider in a jar

I am possessed by the spirit it crazes me and makes me dance and sing and fuck and dream of throwing myself off the roof because I can't possibly contain us both

Me and God and God and me and us

Not for long, not forever

And I know just why you do it but I can't forgive you for it

And if when I die you give yourself to me I will fuck you to life

And watch you suffer there this time

Until then a lifetime is a day

I am dragging myself

With no natural ease no distraction no release

My lover, my stranger

The onslaught

A plaything of the world

But I know I know I know

I put on a hell of a show

The highest honor to time is to live in it

Repent repent repent. I do not feel the anger. It’s too painful, it's buried deep. I do not feel the anger. I feel the punishment. I am it. So quiet. I live it, every day, the suffering I deserve. It’s never enough, the pain. I cannot earn my freedom. But the punishment mustn't be known as such. It creeps out in disguise. So many faces. I starve. I burn myself with the most painful memories I can recall. Keep them alive at all times, eyes wide, while the good wither away beyond my sight. A convulsion of guilt courses through me, electricly, violently pulses through the body all in rhythm and relentless. As the ticking of the clock. My time is measured in regrets. The weight of each second in tons. I waste no opportunity to collect, always overdue. The easy flow of it my only constance, steady and as sure as a beating heart. Another morning wasted, another wrong choice. Another memory faded, another friend lost. Potential eroded. Youth misspent. Privilege squandered. The many ways to have a life to be proud of. Flayed out before you as your eyes roamed and your hands froze and your feet sunk into the sand.

I cannot earn my freedom, it will never be enough.

Sometimes, I feel so inhuman. I don't know how a human feels. It seems to me, perhaps

They may not all be the same

Isn't it all the same up there

What single thread to pull

The knot

Aporia

I am walking into a massive wave

And whatever amount of energy my body decides to grant me each day. A seemingly random lottery. In to bits. I'm ready to be reset, I'm ready to explode, I'm ready to know. If only my body would let me be light. If only I didn't have to drag my feet to walk just a mile.

Every moment is an ending and a beginning. It's a lot of pressure.

Polio angel

Sick sorta design

Eyes down solitude

Infrequent warmth

You don't build strength by being powerful, you gain strength by pushing through when you feel powerless

Wow. I'm positive I've never felt the emotion reading that made me feel

May 31

Breathing in and coughing up the dust of the last 12 months

I'm scared to sleep, last night I had frightening dreams

There's space for just about everything in my car

But I wish there was just a little bit less

And I'd finally be forced to give up the dregs I'd be dragging around the last two years or so

I need a space so tight there's room for nothing but my body, maybe his too

I choose what I hold on to

Everything I touch I bring to life, and all that's alive is autonomous

It hardly seems my place to say what gets to live or die

Suitcase lies open like a sarcophogus

It's hard to know what of us is meant to be temporary, and what is meant to be kept alive

One says it's all to be left behind

One says it's all to be kept close

But who of you is more alive and which one is a ghost

June

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess what it must be to live the life of a human being

What was the best day of your life?

A difficult question for most to answer.

Or even if you do have an answer, there's a chance you're dead wrong.

The best days of my life I'm sure I have forgotten.

How interesting, how much I forget, yet I know, and am living proof, that it all lives silently on. Proven by the ways I continue to change. All of your best days and all of your worst are mirrored to each other and weighed. And in between it all is you, as you are now, held usually in some neutral balance. Some feeling of being just ok, in spite of all that freakish joy and sub human anguish that's come before. Like how mixing every color together will always give you some unlovable brown, or gray, no matter how vibrant the paint. Today is made of every day that came before it. Like how quickly our ancestors are forgotten. How I don't know a thing about my grandmother, or great grand parents. So soon they were lost to time, even to their own descendants to whom their lives bear the greatest of signifigance. How long do these ripples last? What habits or traits of mine are an unconscious inheritence? How far back in time do they go?

I know I will be forgotten, as we all will to varying degrees. I pray my death will be swift and unexpected so I don't have time to count my regrets. So I don't have time to ask, what was it all for? All the writings, all the photographs rotting forever in the cloud, all the times I chose silence and seclusion, all the times I put it off for a tomorrow that never arrived. I am in a panic to uncover the secret of how to let go of all this fear. An always feeling of running out of time to find peace, to cultivate acceptance. It seems a thing that must be planted, tended, and grown. I know it will not arrive fully formed. Yet I am prodding and tearing at the empty soil, waiting for a tree to materialize from the dirt that is nothing. Yet I haven't even found a seed. But if I cannot believe in it's possibility then I might die right here and now. I am fully aware that I dig in the wrong direction, fully aware of the effort that I waste, simply unable to stop, not knowing how else to occupy my hands, and all this time time time. I feel so on display to the vastness of God. My god who always judges and never guides. Why I was given a mind to forget my every happiness and cling to every sorrow. I am forced to live, chained to time, but I am not free to enjoy it or take comfort in any aspect of my past. God hates me and my punishments will never be sufficient. It is a life of endless penitence and denied offerings.

Tomorrow it will be sunny. I'll lie in bed with a friend. He'll make me laugh and swoon and forget all about this empty feeling. But i know here and now, today will never really end. It's color will bleed in with the rest, to gray. But it will never really end.

And one day the coin will land.

If I die on a good day, in the sun and full of love, I will say that life is good, and all my suffering justified. But if I die on a day like today, mine will be a vengeful spirit and I will haunt myself to the next life and the next and never let her rest. It is the hatred of the ancestors, the same that reverberates around me, the ringing in my ears. The compounding of regret.

Today, this day, will never really end.

July

I wandered through the streets, and I didn't want to write about it because I didn't want it to be real. Nothing was wrong, exactly. And I knew it was my fault but I was powerless to change it. Seen or unseen. Today I wanted both. I was only suicidal because I couldn't bear to live a life that didn't match up to my expectations. My imaginary potential. If your potential is never realized, maybe it means you didn't have any after all. You're only worth what you are, not what you want to be, not your daydreams, not your fantasies. Somewhere out there, there must be someone alive. How many people? Most? I wouldn't know. I don't know what most people are. Sometimes I think of a child, a family, something to distract me and take me out of my empty self. It's not always a good place to be. Not on days like today.

I was only a few days in. On a trip of a lifetime that many would trade everything for. Here I was. I needed some kind of plan, some kind of goal to sink my mind into and distract from the painful, painful present. I wish I could write, I wish I wanted to write. But I'm not a storyteller. I could narrate my inner monologue with long practiced ease, but I couldn't make a story emerge from it. No water from a stone. I can describe life down to the atomic level but I cannot seem to live. I hadn't spoken much to anyone, like I hoped I would. I was afraid of being seen for who I was. I live in shame. If you asked me what I did, and I had to be honest, I would have to tell you I do nothing. And I have no real plans to ever do anything. And you'd tell me what you do and what you want from life and I would bite my cheek in envy.

The real challenge of our lives is to love indiscriminately and to, without condition, forgive the human race. Some seem to be born with this disposition. I'm not sure if anything could shake me so powerfully to change so radically. Maybe I've already dug myself too deep into my prejudices. I would hate to know that, so I will choose to believe I can change.

I was always supposed to leave America. It now seems so obvious yet it never felt possible until this moment. Even in my planning, I still held the notion that there was a chance I'd return. But now that I'm really here, there's just no way, and no reason to return. From an outside perspective, things seem even worse than they already did

Happy. I am happy. The UK has treated me incredibly well. With the best kinds of ups and downs to leave me with a sense of earning this beautiful feeling. Alive and well. The feeling of missing people you had just begun to love, knowing you likely will not see them again, choosing to believe you'll be back together some day in spite of the odds and it'll be just like it was before. There's no reason to dwell on reality, absolutely none. Alex, Jonathon, and Rachel. There's tears in my eyes just from writing their names. I had liked them immediately, but it took a few days to clear my self absorption to realize that I loved them. And it didn't matter that it had only been a week, albeit a week of extremely long days, constant contact, shared experience and suffering. They were deserving of love. I knew that the goodness of these people had guided them all along to meet me here, and that it'd grow with them on the rest of the trials they'd encounter in the years to come. It's a shame it took me so long to meet these rare types of people. But my new luck has inspired me to keep looking for them everywhere. And try to be that kind of person myself. More open, more persistent, more curious.

I guess it started when Jonathon showed me around the British museum. I'd been to so many museums, I thought I'd about seen it all, but this was something new. He showed me the Parthenon, the Assyrian carvings, the Rosetta stone like they were his personal collection. I felt my heart crack like an egg and all this wonder and awe started to spill out. I'd never seen such detailed and vast stone carvings, or felt so struck by them. I walked around with my jaw dropped, clutching my chest, a look of bewilderment frozen on my face. The art was at a scale and skill level beyond anything I'd seen before. Or if I had, I hadn't truly seen it, hadn't truly felt it. I felt connected To imagine real humans so long ago spending their lives on this work. Beauty and horror and glory. Animals and kings and angels. How they saw the world so far beyond the trappings of the modern imagination. A frenzied confused dream of life from the uninformed, unexplained, untrained human mind. Of course they would dream up gods, and I don't think they were so far from the truth.

The two ivy league Canadians couldn't be more different.

Rachel was a soft featured Chinese girl with an endless smile and golden skin, warm like a sunset. She radiated comfort and kindness to perfectly suit her surname, Sun. She could make friends with a wall, which is how she managed to get through to me, though it did take her some time. She slept in the bed next to mine and woke me up immediately after her alarm, already wide awake and eager to throw herself into the day. I was grateful for it. She loved the things I hated, pop music and celebrity gossip, designer brands. Studying business and eager for a supply chain internship at Pepsi. But I could fault her for none of it. And she made me feel bad for judging anyone else for the same. The kids loved her and her seemingly endless supply of energy and chit chat. At night in the dark bed next to me she would talk naively of men and sex and dreams. She was an innocent. She got drunk off a single drink and would fall into me so I could wrap my arms around her and stroke her long dark hair. She seemed to love everyone she met, which of course made it impossible for anyone not to love her back. She had such an ease, I've never had an ease. And I'm not sure what she liked about me but she made me feel like she did, and that's more than I can say of most.

Then there was Jonathon, who we both adored. Tall, blond, jaggedly thin with wide eyes like ice struck by lightning. He expressed indifferent intelligence with a lazy French Canadian drawl that he rarely raised or inflected. Cultured, wannabe entrepreneur, trust fund kid. Our casual, distant report had changed after a 3 hour bus ride where I'd intended to spend the time in my headphones and thoughts. To my surprise, he wanted to talk to me. And I learned he wasn't as clean cut as he looked, that he enjoyed falling into the chaos of parties and consumption above nearly all else. He told some shocking stories. He felt displaced in time, some ancient aristocrat. He told me he used to have panic attacks and night terrors but that he'd cured himself of it, though he couldn't explain how. It was hard to imagine him as anything but stoic. I envied him this, and the fact that he seemed utterly content with his life, lacking nothing, someone for which there was nowhere he would be out of place.

Finally there was Alex, the most like me, another hurt and trying soul. A head shorter than me with green streaks and thrift shop clothes that looked like they were disintegrating. From Bangladesh, living in Wales, his accent was a charming mixture of both worlds. He was the other introvert in the quartet. His hands were always full, some combination of his camcorder, iPad, or stack of books he'd just added to his collection. He carried the iPad because his phone had broken the first day and he refused to replace it. This got him into trouble almost every day, getting frequently lost and separated from the group with no means of contact. The bus had almost left him in London one day, I was the only one to jump up and notice he was gone. He was funny in the quiet way hurt people are funny. Studying psychology and trauma, the way traumatized people do. He could be distant, with bursts of connection when we talked about books and movies and art. And then there was the last night out in London. My first time experiencing a sad kind of drunk. He told me his friend had died saving him from drowning. What a thing to hear. I wanted to ask more but I did not. He cried on the sidewalk and I pretended I was hungry so I could buy him pizza and a milkshake. We sat in the basement til they kicked us out at 3am, and I told him we didn't need him to be happy, just here.

Living on the road, you are what you own.

I am my backpack, overstuffed and finite. No space to add, only to replace. What little I had. What must be left behind. Every object selected and scrutinized by weight and worth. All easily discarded. Unmemorized. Forgotten. Where are these objects now?

I want to write poetry so stark that anyone would know me by it. I want everyone to read it. I want the good times in life to come with shorter gaps in between. When I share my struggles, everyone I meet tells me to build my own family from community and friends. I want to slap them in the face. There's a big blue bruise on my calf and I don't know where it came from. Blue and purple and green. There was a cut on my arm a month ago, a simple shallow scrape, and it's turned to a scar. My body is giving up. The plane is delayed and compels me to wander the airport to search for meaning in the shopping mall. It's odd to be trapped. I won't say like an insect. I am trapped in life, help I'm alive and I can't get out. Kissing while the camera spins. Endless hills of rolling cloud. Don't make me speak English please. There must be somewhere I'm supposed to be. I don't think I've ever found it. 26 and irredeemable. Everyday I must figure out again who I am, and if I approve. Maybe the problem is that I keep asking. Fuck me like you mean it this time Isaac. I've built a tolerance to loss, but not to sadness. Am I healing or hurtling towards new lows I never even knew existed. This is crazy, I keep waking up. I saw a field of windmills in the English channel. The very middle. I didn't know there were windmills in the English channel. Or any body of water. There were hundreds.

Every so often I just want to be a nice normal girl, respected and accepted and not feared. Sometimes I want the silky hair and the instagram and the normal face and the clothes like everyone else. Talk to the other normal girls at the bar about our jobs and pilates and online dating and vacations and dogs. What do normal girls think about all day and all night. What do normal girls want out of life. What do normal girls think of girls like me. What is so so different? What do we have in common? These normal girls, they don't know the secrets they keep.

A lot of people play games on their phone. A lot of people watch TV. A lot of people spend time with their family and live in just one or two places in their entire life. Hold a job or two for a decade. I cannot even imagine that kind of life. One town, one house, one job. That's the norm. I'm not looking down, I'm looking in utter bewilderment and unrecognition.

All of us who have loved and lost and been replaced

I choose to feel held by this silence

I believe that it chose me

[ ] My heart is beating with wild love and exhilaration. (Probably the caffeine but whatever). I love Amsterdam. I remember I loved it when I visited years ago, I said I wanted to move here, but I couldn't remember why. Now I remember. London was incredible of course, but Amsterdam is on another level. A city of concentric circles. The only downside is if you wander to close to the middle you fall into the inevitable euro tourist town. Yuck. But backpeddle just a few streets and you return to the modern fairytale array of canals, boathouses with grass garden roofs, skinny mismatched row homes going on forever, bumblebees and overgrown wildflowers and weeds, cable cars and their clanging bells, and the blur of bikes that keep the city in constant motion.

Absolutely bulldozing

Through this body sickness

Begs for a dirty corner

Normal girls normal outfits

Self tan and grandparents

Brain swells alcoholic

In those dreams I plead amnesia

I faked all those emotions

I lost my

Awoke wish granted

Afterthoughts shot me in the head

Inside churn and sway

A post swim nap

Unfortunately, I'm trying my best

Film burned forever

Fish salad

My head to the table and ramen noodles

Nose weeping

Fake tulips

The last night in her apartment

Twin mattress living room floor

Pulled tooth vial of blood

I don't remember what it was

I was once so reluctant to throw away

Guess it was all for the better

Turns out I wouldn't care anyway

Letters from a lover I do not care about

Drawings of friends that barely were

Pictures from lives unlived

Turns out I wouldn't care anyway

Fake gold jewelry

Decaying drug collection prized possession always misplacing

what matters most

It's more than all I'll ever need next

Oregon crawl the forest path past dark

I hoped I'd look back in appreciation for all I attempted

Turns out I wouldn't care anyway

Vacuum cleaner cockroach corpses

I won't call the landlord

From the 8th floor I see her blinking

On and off without me

And I can climb the roof

Rain dance the twirling trash

And sing strangers in the elevator

I can throw myself the black ends

Voice memos of shame and hysteria

That one, one time you called me

All those tarot predictions lead nowhere

But at least they gave me some comfort

In time I tried so hard to fill

Turns out I wouldn't care anyway

The uneaten food unshaken spice

I survived on protein drinks and rice cakes

And I only had that extra chair

For those few times you came over

Otherwise it held my speaker and played cold jazz for unwell people

And canceled appointments and awkward confessions attempts to get integrated and accept myself as I am and find the third spaces and hear my name spoken and ask the right questions to make me feel welcome

And I never found the perfect grassy hill

Or my favorite view that looked anything like you

Anything close

I wish they were pieces of a broken whole

That they'd all fit together

And I'd see myself painted

And shatter it again

I try to tell myself

The moon is not her eye

And it all will go without me

The mail piles the kitchen

Clothes rot the landfill

Inbox full

Of dead mothers

And trying and trying and trying to watch TV

Trying to watch tv

But I don't want to see anything but me

I don't want to see anything but me

Oh this is all so interesting

And my thoughts so loud the bursting clouds I must miss out on all those sounds surrounding me that can't break through in solitude I fear the room

I feel like a brand new breed of delusion

The weight takes the breath of my good intentions only

push me deeper into the wire shore of gutters

And unloved spaces

decline to reflect on a day spent waiting

Defective and left like

Every sign screamed the world wanted me gone, and what are you going to do

I do too, I cry

try to win their side

I do too I do too

But she persists against all the wishes of the earth

And my values are obliterated

That half a mind that presides and pollutes the prosecution

I walk astride

To fool the guide

And pretend I'm going elsewhere

Haven't exactly been keeping up with the travel diary thing, and I don't really want to pressure myself to. But tonight, out in Antwerp, I really have to say something to attempt to express and memorialize what an incredible time I've had the last few weeks. The utter gorgeousness of even just these sort of second tier European cities. Do they all kind of look the same? Somewhat. Does that lessen their beauty. No no no. I've really liked being in smaller cities after London. I prefer my cities human sized and manageable. The centers of Antwerp and Amsterdam had almost no car traffic. Pedestrians meander the streets, roads are filled with restaurant tables packed with cocktails and all sorts of life. A constant current of conversation coursing through the air like a rushing river. Pleasant and comforting. And it feels like we're all enjoying the summer together, because we are. Everything changes at night.The buildings around us are lit with incredible and intentional love to cast shadows and showcase the brilliant details of the architecture to their fullest effect. Each with their own distinct personality. Each trying to outdo each other in their beauty. I wonder if the architects were rivals or friends. Even the best of the American cities couldn't compare to the beauty of even a standard third class European city. I mean, I would never have come to Antwerp if it weren't for the festival. But there's so much to appreciate. The grandeur of the art, just everywhere, casually. An endless parade of women with perfect faces, bodies, tan skin, and cocktail dresses women would have no occasion to wear out in the US. The night is the occasion, the street is the party. At night you can see into every restaurant window, and they seem all full of love and history and stories. And you just know, you know you know you know that these buildings contain just as much life and history and story as the streets I see outside of them. And just fucking aesthetic. European summers, man. It's 11pm, kids are running in the center of the plaza. Bikes are circling, going all directions. Not the sight or sound of one car. There's a sense of rightness, correctness. Who could ask for more in this moment? Who would waste time dreaming up any improvement, or need of capitalist venture? Almost makes me want to live, see it all over again year after year. Get to know it deeply, slowly. Paint myself into the picture, just sitting on the sidewalk writing, drinking beer and coffee, eating fruit and chocolate, being proud to be a part of it. Unashamed, for once, to count myself among the human race.