i'll let you know when i get there

I absorb sadness (the soaking kind) Like a sponge Too full to wring What is a little more To add to the end of An unfixed dripping Tidal Swing Unanchored Stream of months Porous and poor Another year

When it starts getting darker early Layers and thicker socks And by 7pm I'm ready to give in Those liminal minutes That feel like an actual pull And my body feels heavy and far away My mind deliciously blank In those moments I am fearless I am most ready For nothing

Everyone got wider and a bunch of people got divorced and no one is really saying it in so many words but wow this has been a challenging decade and it's been awhile since anyone's felt especially hopeful and there's no real end in sight but we're too tired, now, to manage anxiety spirals so this mild depression can almost be mistaken for calm. 

I went away to bike camp for the weekend where most everyone was either ten years older or ten years younger than me. The older folks wanted to talk about bikes. The younger ones wanted to talk about AI and revolution.  turn turn turn

while I was infected for the first time, the world mostly kept on while I mostly slept for hundreds of hours  and took three days to finish a movie. I read nothing meaningful and thought nothing important and had no energy to care or worry about health or wellness at all (except for a few anxiety spirals that sent me right to sleep). a bunch of people got shot in America and  artificial intelligence continued to advance at a rapid rate and no one cared much or knew what to do if they did. that's all. more or less.

What a thing to crave-  catastrophe. When days shrink to surviving and little else.  Congratulations due for getting through. The simplicity was an odd, unexpected comfort.  Whereas now,  in some quiet in between or after, the questions announce themselves again. Regrets and wondering at purpose. Looking in the mirror for the first time, maybe, in years. Wasn't it somehow easier, then? In surprising ways? In 2020 when I saw no one and sang the Cranberries Empty in a hot shower twice a day. Took two hour walks to get to a mailbox and  swept up rollypollies,  heaps of them dead at the door, every morning. I didn't feel old or complacent and it wasn't a question of having settled  or having lost my spark  or much of anything related to a self at all. I was nervous about the world, alive in it, and little else. oh, to be

It's been, what, a week or so now and it seems distant again- unless I check the news. Twice in the span of a few weeks, looking down to see the words ACTIVE SHOOTER alive on my phone. Once was the first thing I saw in the morning, and I stumbled out of the room mumbling about it in a hushed, incomprehensible tone, doom-scrolled for ten minutes before the picture became clear, and then promptly fell back asleep. "What were you saying about his school?" he texted later. "OMG" he replied. Hoax.   It had been a hoax phone call.  But the kids had been locked down and dismissed and they parents remained actively rattled. The panic came back to me in strange ways throughout the day.   Needing to pause to catch my breath at odd times.  Muscles tightened for no reason. All that, and I was steps removed and an entire country away. Imagine. The second I was attempting to make my first carrot tartare, carrots cooked and ready to be diced chives and capers- (the way I'd...