For the past three weeks he’d remained in his apartment, reliving old humiliations and hate-watching Love Actually. Rent was due tomorrow. His thoughts, increasingly, centered on death, disaster, failure, madness. But mostly he was just scared.
Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee.
20 years on, he didn’t know whether he should break down sobbing or smother her with a pillow. Probably both. He felt that way about most of his patients and it had worn him down. He was drinking too much, losing sleep and had developed a pronounced limp. Physician, destroy thyself.
The standing O triggered another harrowing bout of imposter’s syndrome.
He had attempted to make great art, always a mistake.
They didn’t know it yet, but they’d worn out their welcome before they arrived.
When someone tells you ‘it is what it is’,
what they really mean is ‘fuck you.’
At the time I was working for a local catering company. Two in the morning, five nights a week, sweating out last night’s alcohol in my polyester black and whites bussing dishes to back alley vans. I was on hold. To the world at large I was nobody. Soon enough I’d be nobody to myself.
Something you never figured out: life is what it is, not what it isn’t.
From the instant you vow never to forget, it begins to slip away
Thoughts seemed to harbor great peril, but their absence even more.
Most nights he parked in front of the house, imagining it crushed under a tree, on fire, or leveled by a hurricane.
In the harmonious spaces and bright clear sunlight of this elegant house, you feel an acute awareness of how coarse and awkward you’ve become. If only the light could pass right through you.
Life happened; he never knew what hit him.
never not trying too hard
The way I like to look at a photograph is to imagine that the person who took it knew that this was the last thing they would ever see.
What are you looking for?
Just a glimpse.
Why did we try so hard, why did we care? We never learned to play the game. We didn’t even know there was a game.
