You know how years later you have no idea what tasks you were worried about getting done on a specific day, a day that has since dissolved into an emotionless un-nostalgic solvent that you stashed away in your mind’s darked locked cabinet of old beakers and lost experiments?

Here is what I’ve been worried about today.

1. Folding the clothes scattered on my floor and thrown in laundry baskets.

2. Cleaning the bathroom.

3. Walking to the grocery store to buy something to drink. 

4. Reworking the murder mystery so that people who weren’t there can go through it by themselves.

5. Continuing the novel I’m reading.

6. Writing down the things that happened last week.

7. Looking up words from some stories I read recently.

8. Exercising.

9. Cleaning out my car. (A considerable task.)

10. Getting a shift covered on Wednesday.

11. Going home to watch football with my little brother, whom I miss a lot.

Writing all this down makes it seem like a lot less, but add in thoughts about relationships in all the cracks, doubts about where life is going, and a twenty page hour-long wikipedia rigamarole that started with the page on what a ‘muddler’ is, and it adds up.

But I read a story that made me feel a lot, and afterward I looked out the kitchen window at the swaying shadow of the backyard tree against the garage, and I stood in the silence of the wind shushing the world, and I thought, the things I am now seeing came from nothing, and so have I come from nothing to see them.  Then I noticed the security light was on, and I wondered how that was possible if there was no one around to activate it.  Maybe it’s the tree’s branches, I thought.

Worryworryworry – beauty – worryworryworry.  Such are the lives we lead.  But in that moment, do you have someone to whom you bend your knee?  I wonder, is that all that separates people?

“Don’t talk to me of possibility. This is all there is.”

Would you have acted differently if you had thought an infinite God loved each person you talked to today?

Loves and sorrows – they all pass away. One lesson always being learnt is that, whatever happens, the heart must deal with a constant influx of feelings as the old sagas become mere memories, either nostalgic or painful.

People have thousands of emotions each day but they crystallize as icicles in public settings. We have to be silly and open and ask questions around them to start to make them sweat.

I leaned against my car in the alley and put my head down. The picture of defeat. They came up to me and asked if I was sleeping.

You are your own cinematographer. Whatever scene you are in, you direct the camera shot by choosing where to stand, what to glance at, how to pan your head across the room.

We necessarily create – what we say and do is something in the world, a new reality that we had our hand in bringing about. When you get up in the morning you must ask what it is you want to create. When you go to sleep you must question how you influenced things, what having you around did to the world.

Think deeply about people. I’ve started wondering why I don’t do this recently. When I watch Mad Men or read a book I try to make connections across different scenes and different things the characters say, to try to see something deeper about the person, something true that illuminates who they are. Some things that are true about you can only be communicated accidentally, because it’s something you would never say, or it’s something that wouldn’t sink in if you did.

The reason people don’t think deeply about each other is that it’s not what other people do. It especially is not what other people do about us. We notice that other people seem to not mind our presence, but there are lots of questions they do not ask us, and lots of places they do not go that would help explain us, so we must not be a very big task to them. Because all that would be very difficult and no one really does it.

Earlier I reclined the seat in my car and took a nap on a side street just as the evening was coming on. It had been very warm in my car so I had rolled the window down and I could hear cars passing every few seconds. My arms were crossed across my stomach and I was only partly there when a breeze rushed through the car like a spirit wind and I was suddenly in a place in my life I had not been for centuries; it felt cold, and I knew things I had long forgotten. It was the early morning of a cross country meet when the dew is still on the grass and the tents are getting set up and the sun is too bright to look at. But it’s chilly and you know the day silently holds a world of pain and battle ahead but for now it’s quiet and you feel both confident and terribly nervous, but it all feels good and you know it’s a good thing to be alive.

In a thrift store a man who was perhaps forty grumbled next to me about the way the jeans were set up. I gleaned from the old woman that talked to him from another aisle that his name was Roger. The woman pushed a cart with a small sandy haired toddler sitting in it and I saw him learn the word ‘elbow’. I’ve known the word ‘elbow’ for a long time so I didn’t think much of that, but when Roger talked to the little boy much later as they checked out in front of me and referred to the old woman as ‘grandma’ I realized it was his mother, and I felt a sudden shock of sadness that they were out shopping together so late in life, that I felt like I couldn’t be that close with my mom.

Maybe you will never know your deepest assumptions, like how you can never see your own organs directly. I’ve renewed the realization that deep in the heart of my assumptions is ‘me’, that I rate everything that happens against how much it benefits that body which is deeply my own. Whatever I have been saying and doing, there is a dark and musty cell deep within the structures of my life that directs me to think about what I’m owed, what I want, what will make me happy. Friendliness is sadly compatible with deep selfishness.

And so I walked out of the coffee shop where the barista had turned the lights out while I was reading, and I didn’t say goodnight because I was upset. A voice in me told me to let it go, but instead it became a scene where I became a little colder, a little less empathetic, a little different than I was before.

I would have acted a lot differently.

They laid down in the alley pool together. Not together holding hands, but just enough to have meant something to each other as strangers. A longer grip on the door on the way into work, a slightly tipped umbrella, a wipe of the brow while hunched over: we look for any sign in the eyes of a stranger that they might one day love us.

That cardboard box we wanted to save forever in the basement now has frayed edges, and we never remembered to find out what makes our coworkers sorrowful. Now their lives are as remote as newspaper columns, and I find a crow more chatty than my neighbors. Animals are the only ones who believe in my loneliness. I can only wonder if others imagine the same things I do when I think of the Roman Empire.

We try to invent more desserts, the myth that things will never end, and to complete something is very unhuman. We would rather linger in hell forever than to think that something could be over. I closed your car door and the vibration of the concrete curb made me forget the freckle above your left cheekbone. But there is no place for the erotic in society. We daily die in a thousand lies, all of them blank faces with silently sweating eyes.

Society was never to my liking and Gus said I call society that which is impersonal, but I never told him I let them be impersonal because they are not to my liking. We camped together in the Badlands once and now that we’re back we just pretend to have a friendship. My pretend friendships destroyed my ability to love years ago. You can only love if you can think, for joyful creation can have no night-time mistresses. If it were true I would pretend for you for years; as is I get swallowed by dark stagnant puddles that never knew your name.

Wet, everywhere, wet wet wet. People don’t think the sky is falling down anymore, but we fail to notice we die just the same. You never find out that you die, you always just knew; so we never even notice the sadness that comes with it, how everything is different. Our normalcy comes with not having been alive before we’re born.

Males think there is just talking or there’s being at war, and we are always miserable when we’re not at war. But I found you and discovered there’s something in-between; you taught me how to live, and rescued me from the belief that we’re nothing if the world forgets us.

I couldn’t believe in those who decided to divide up the world according to their thoughts, that through partitions we could one day find a beautiful unity. So we lie in this puddle and I don’t think in twos. The rain is dropping on our faces and we’re not holding hands, but I hate society, and something about you makes me finished in a sad way, a way that lets me know every stranger would love me one day. To mention the task is not to complete it. But I know I would never listen to a song instead if I could just come here and lie with you.

Do you know the storm winds inside? The night I made out with Betty Sue until three AM and James Dean came on the television screen in that musty apartment for the fourth time? I love my mother very much but I can’t tell her because she taught me you can only love people in your prayers. That is the same reason I love her and it is that farness that makes me feel at the same time an incredible warmth, a true and final love, and a heartbreaking distance, the one that made me listen to music instead of people.

So I know you are over there with entirely different raindrops on your face, and your childhood was set on an entirely different part of the planet, even if it was next door to mine. I feel sadly done completing the beautiful project of satisfied loneliness with you. In being apart I would find you more a part of me than if we were never to part. For you’ve given to me a warmth even in my anonymity, and it is around strangers your life finds its hold in mine. If only this puddle grew deeper we could drown in it, but even that betrays your childhood like an awkward and desperate future reminiscence never could.

These feelings inside are finally made complete through a love in death’s face this world’s temporal sky doesn’t understand. Don’t throw me a line and I promise I won’t throw you one either. We’ll be brave in a poorly understood unison, just like the saddest humans to realize they had never truly seen one another. But it’s this turmoil in knowing your love but a truthful admission of silence owed to you that lets me know that the closer we get to others the more we have to suffer.

‘Oh, darling!’