january 1st, 2023

acquainted with:

having a hand placed on my shoulder & starting to cry because the mercy of that
gesture feels at odds with the sense of culpability i feel for my immutable true feelings

tearing a person apart emotionally & being torn apart emotionally in turn because there
is no boundary between me & my tearing & them & their being torn... a bilaterality in
spite of the unilaterality of my role, dispensing or withholding mercy with impunity

metaphorically having a gun placed in my hand against my will & being ordered by the voice of personal
truth to pull the trigger even though it will practically impose every pain that I myself ever wanted to escape

somehow becoming emotionally wrung out & weary of continuing to perform
the emotional character of the situation, despite the feelings of all three
preceding paragraphs being completely sincere. feeling absurd for this

new year! ok

it is insane to me how committing to living one's own personal truth can entail taking the idiolect between you
& someone else, the microculture between you & them which may as well be its own person, & also taking the total
body of memories yet to be made between you & them, taking these things, & just strangling them while reaffirming
to yourself in each individual moment that you do want to continue strangling them, that that is what you want
to do. it is insane to me that living one's truth must surely be good in the end but that the process
can entail anything that on its face feels so uninhibitedly sociopathic

i have turned back on the most absolutely unparalleled certainty i have ever felt about romantic separation &
i have done it not so much out of honesty or romance or love as much as i have done it out of the absolutely
narcotic character of returning in the short term to conversational & temperamental normalcy, & this is
the mutually understood & accepted terms on which i will be in the relationship, & i am typing them
here just to display to you how absurd they are like i am waving a flesh wound in your face

i feel like a twisted up hose when i don't have the privacy i need for whispering to myself consolingly

i've never thrown up from stress but i think new year's day was the
only day i've had where i felt like it might have been possible

january 3rd, 2023

i am like an animal on a leash waiting to see my friend again. i resent
the passage of the past week of unseasonably comfortable weather

december 22nd, 2022
important night which concluded with standing in front of each other in the parking lot holding hands & saying each other's
names & the word "hi" in the usual syntactically barren mishmash of those three words with me visibly & audibly shivering

how did i accept just letting this be the lead-in to two weeks of estrangement

january 6th, 2023

my entire adolescence & pre-adolescence felt sufficiently defined by isolation that sometimes i feel like, no matter how
far into the past that time recedes, for the rest of my life each new real friend that i make will feel like the tentative
promise that it's "finally over," never just a new friend but a standing at the edge of some fundamental precipice

someday i would hope to write here something to the effect of, "today was so good that
i genuinely would not be able to tolerate reducing it to some verbal after-image of
itself & then burdening myself with its submission for other people's processing"

it feels like reality that one person can simply possess an innate capacity to make another person
happier than some other third person generally can. i feel like i will forever be unable to reconcile
this reality against the impression that it creates an unfair sense of hierarchy. due to this i feel like
i could stay in a loveless relationship for my entire life if the case were simply made periodically
that my emotional honesty corresponded to no more than trading a person in like a used car

january 15th, 2023

my friend said they drove to the old art gallery, not realizing it'd been shut down when the new one had opened, & then
they'd had to drive to the new one. i was confused, i thought, "what do you mean? we walked up to it & found it closed,
then walked to the new one...," & it felt like a very unusual moment of amnesia about what we'd done together. then i
realized i was completely confusing which memories i've shared with whom, like the boundary there was totally
permeable, because i only ever have one person in that singular position of companionship held above everyone else

january 23rd, 2023

a kind of quasi-survivor's-guilt felt at being the half of a romantic separation who does
not subsequently feel at risk of taking their own life, this naturally carrying the risk of

developing into a survivor's guilt that is anything but quasi

a circumstance without ego boundary, just the observation of a wealth of pain & a fruitless interrogation of why it's
assigned to one & not the other, how the mere presence of pain is all that matters, which perspective is burdened with
it shouldn't matter, the empathy congeals you into one except it doesn't because only on one side is the pain felt directly

january 24th, 2023

it's absurd & upsetting to me that my freedom to pursue my own wholeness can come at the cost of denying another
person their wholeness that would have depended on me. i thought wholeness was beyond me in the first place, that it's
unity with others, that part of my own wholeness is the wholeness & well-being of those i care about. but, it just,
contradicts itself, it doesn't work... why do we have to be fractured into isolated perspectives all to ourselves?

a certain person's Heaven includes me & it's absurd to me that i can - that i arguably must - take that
Heaven which could so easily be a lived reality & a lifetime, if i just complied, & instead relegate
it to just an idea, a potential, just like so many of my own Heavens are. that really hurts

that boundary between idea & actuality that can feel paper-thin but unbreakable at the same time.
to wield & manipulate that boundary with my own hands is a disquieting feeling unlike anything else

i do still feel convinced that i could have found Heaven in the guy i talked to on may
thirty-first 2020, & that i will not. but i don't have to think about him so much anymore

maybe i should sometimes, though. thinking last night about what he represents to me did really
help calm me down & let me fall asleep. it had been a while since i had thought about it all

sometimes a person has to stop & whisper to themselves & reacquaint with the ideal kindness & mercy that even the best
people in their lives might not really offer - that it might not be fair to anticipate anyone ever offering, because it's so
specific, so nuanced, so... greedy, so constituted by the moment-to-moment choreography of some figmental marionette

the draw of an actual person is never that they are ideal but that they are simply real

but those fantasies are still a truth, a fixed truth, my subjective truth, what i want,
what i'll always want at the end of the day, part of me, something to know myself
by, something i shouldn't let myself forget. something forgiving & good & true

january 31st, 2023

i hereby instate january thirty-first as international day of biting the bullet & terminating any relationships whose renewals are
founded solely on the pain associated with their hypothetical terminations rather than any remaining sense of wholehearted
mutual collaboration, & do it quickly before the temporal sunk-cost fallacy gets even a day steeper. this date will
send an annual ripple of lived personal truth & corollary psychological growing pains across the planet

february 1st, 2023

the relationship survived on negativity

which is to say: each time the relationship was renewed, this was motivated by the
negative. not the positive pursuit of something, but the avoidance of something

here i will follow a line of reasoning to the root of this negativity

to start off, we should ask: what was being avoided?

what was being avoided was the intractable pain he would have felt if we separated. i did
not wish to make this pain real, & i set my own needs aside so as to not make it happen

to find the root of the negativity, we must then find the root of this pain

the pain, & thus also the negativity, seems to have been
rooted in a general sense of despair about the world*

*for all subsequent invocations of the phrase "the world," we may think of this more as "the human world,"
the world as abstracted & bastardized & oversaturated by grand-scale industrial human activity

this is to be distinguished from the world in absolute, which we must believe is good, or there is nothing to strive for
anymore. every repulsive city is only a patch of the forgiving Earth that we have given a name & costumed as a city

the sense that the world is not worth living in without me. the sense that he feels alone in
the world without me. the sense that, in his eyes, i am sufficient as exception to the world

so here we find that the negativity had an objective basis, it was rooted in the undeniable characteristics of the world
which are seen as flawed, something it is not in anyone's power to change. the prolongation of our relationship was
a sublimation of this unchanging element, this constant. it was the chemical reactions catalyzed by pressure

this despair which the negativity was rooted in is also a similarity between the two of us: i am disappointed with the world too.
the world feels like a constant insult to me too. the world shoves cultural & political nightmare bilge in my face too. the world
makes me feel alone too. & the things in this world that don't make me feel alone feel like radical exception too

the world should be different, everything should be different. the only truly
just outcome is the alteration of the world rather than its continually
imposing on human beings the necessity to cope with it

but i think the more a person looks to the objective world as recourse to justify their inner lack of peace, the
more that objectivity will assuredly hold them exactly where they are. ultimately, we have to cope to survive.
& it's not that that necessity isn't frustrating. we shouldn't have to cope. we constantly negotiate with
ourselves about the extent to which we have to cope. we constantly negotiate with ourselves about where
to place the boundary between what we must strive to change, & what we must accept & rationalize

ultimately, my similarity is that i am disappointed with the world, but my difference is that i do not, in turn, feel like
i also need him to feel like it is worth living in... i can't say that he doesn't feel like exception to the world too, he makes
me feel less alone, that's why i've stuck with him for a long time. but ultimately i guess i cope on my own. somehow

maybe, in some perverse way, the fact that he hardly even wants to live speaks positively to his sensitivity, his refusal
to compromise, his idealism. he says he doesn't want to pick between resigning himself to the world or retreating so
far into himself that he ceases to exist to others. he doesn't want to pick between settling or deluding himself

but then, one does have to see a profound pessimism in the notion
that it's either "this" or death, that there is no other recourse

maybe relief doesn't hinge on delusion. that relief might not hinge on delusion is a matter of hope, i think. that
seems to be what it comes down to, we have to have hope. we have to believe that we can internally survive.
this belief is an operation of the spirit that we can always call on. if the world & its sickening state
must be a constant, maybe the spirit itself can be a constant too, existing against it

i wrestle with the negotiations too, i wrestle with that dichotomy between objective angst & subjective hope. i always want to come
up with expressions of optimism or silliness that are situated in the framing of my tiny life, instead of indulging the fear-driven
impulse to write expressions of angst about wide-scale cultural constructs & all that, day in & day out, out of a need for change,
out of the sense that maybe things will change just a little if i disperse enough ideas & sentiments into the wind

i am disappointed with the world too & i do want to exist as exception to it

i cannot flatter myself with the notion that i do unconditionally exist as exception to the world. but
i guess it is flattering that to even one person i exist so sufficiently as exception to the world

the irony is that succeeding in this is apparently burdensome, can apparently feel like responsibility, can apparently
feel like becoming a sum of qualitative value to be assigned to a position in life very carefully, selectively. if
the world is suffused with a general sickness & to someone you are an island in that sickness, what would be
more important than you? what could be more important than the shelter you can offer, beyond which there
isn't much to exist in or feel beyond a sense of wasteland... the stakes are practically life-or-death

what an incredibly nasty quirk of fate! that any such relationship of exception to the world should come together
in a form that is essentially one-sided instead of collaborative - that anything so precious should come together
only to self-destruct by way of the internal contradictions that it harbored from the first moment

of course i couldn't leave, of course i couldn't set aside my own empathy for that condition

i have no concluding thought to this post, there is no
conclusion, just the ongoing story of rationalizing life

maybe, generalizing from the principle that "hurt people hurt people, & this is why it is our common
responsibility to heal, material & socioeconomic factors notwithstanding," we could conjecture that all
of this is why it is in our common interest to except ourselves to the world, to the best of our ability

february 14th, 2023

connecting with people is scary. giving them emotional stake in what i feel, what i say, what happens between us,
makes me empathetically concerned. i don't even know myself well enough to know if i'm safe to place stake in. i feel
like my personhood which someone else values could crumble at any moment. i don't want to hurt anyone. ever. ever

everything has always felt vague. i don't really know what i want as a being. i'm scared that i was too alone for a
long time such that... that making sense of myself through self-reflection in others isn't even my default cognitive
mode. i fear that i'm always dissociated, that i watch my life like a movie, that i'm a thing that simply processes
what happens around me with indifference, & sometimes tricks myself into believing that i feel because
feeling nothing is a condition that registers as too sad to accept... (but isn't that a feeling? anyway...)

does being connected make me happy? is it easy to lie in someone's arms with a flat face? it's scary to express so much
sentiment that feels real as i say it, but then overanalyze myself in retrospect, ask myself if it wasn't all pretend
wrapped in a dozen layers of self-deception to make it feel real because if i don't wrap everything up that
way then i would have to confront that nothing is real, that i was only made to stare blankly
& sometimes to pine in silence for over-idealized loves that will never exist

i have a tenuous connection with meaning, although i need to believe in it, am incapable of losing faith in it, want to
feel it so badly. i had to construct all my meaning being deeply isolated but materially taken care of. & even then it
was still hard, i had to escape from my teenage nihilistic mindset. i hide myself in routines & rituals, they're where
my meaning seem to lie. when i stop feeling alone & secure & hidden in routines, i don't know what to do or
what to feel. i want to... try to explore art in this room as best as my attention span will let me ? i want
to feel the sun & my connection to the nature trail & the music i associate with it

if i romantically entangle with someone i am saying, "there is a .001% chance that the guy who talked to me about raccoons
will ever manifest in my life & with this romantic entanglement i formally rescind faith in it happening. but i also accept the
the risk of that .001% occurrence where he finds me again & he wants me & i just don't know if i would have a choice but
to hurt this person i am now entangled with because it would be an all-consuming emotional obligation that i wouldn't
expect anyone else to understand, no one else would understand the personal value i place in the way he spoke"

it almost feels like to entangle with anyone who doesn't make me feel quite that way is a mistake after having felt
that way, as if... as if that should be the measure by which i say "this isn't really really really real." i don't
know, though. it seems like it could be a mistake to postpone closeness eternally in anticipation
of something "ideal." love is simply there when it's there, & it is what it is. right?

do i have to let go of all my visions i've turned to for comfort in this same room for so long so
habitually & figure out what love actually is as some unfamiliar thing i have never even
had contact with ? would i even value it at first, would i have to learn to value it

february 15th, 2023

i'm very very un-confident that i am actually capable of feeling anything when hugging people,
i'm un-confident that the truth isn't just that hugging & holding people typically requires minor
compromises in posture which are less comfortable in a strictly physiological capacity & that
i experience only a drive to alleviate that but i suppress it & flatly endure the discomfort out
of the self-deception that i am doing something pleasurable & emotionally nourishing,
this self-deception being rooted in the sense that it feels too conceptually sad
to conceive of myself as some self-contained barely social being

i am scared that my loneliness is essential, objective, impossible to alleviate,
that it is like a shard of disease buried in me & regardless of who i find
it will change shape to accommodate their presence & persist

my fears can be boiled down to the idea that the reason i can feel so little when hugging people isn't that i fail
to really surrender to them in that moment but rather that i am undersocialized such that i never learned on
a visceral emotional level to construct personal meaning around the experience of surrendering to a person

suppose you took all of your clothes off in front of another person & all this meant to you was that you
didn't have clothes on, & that the reason you didn't have them on was that the present moment simply
happened to be an exception to the general tendency of social moments to ordain having them on

i have to retain faith in neuroplasticity

february 17th, 2023

a feeling which isn't very productive to dwell on but still lingers around me every once in a while is that i would be
more intuitively kind if someone had happened to exist in my life who did not, &, naturally, about whom nothing
is known. not that i treat this like an excuse to void my extant responsibility to be kind but there is still
the sense that life could have blessed me with better intuitive inclination had i been luckier

february 19th, 2023

one has to open up. they might find someone that'll look at them all day but they won't actually feel seen until they pry
their guts open for that person to look at. & it seems to me like an unforgiving process - every millimeter of that flapping
hypodermis that you peel back is just as uncomfortable as the last & you have to commit to just doing it continuously anyway

february 20th, 2023

i messed myself up spending too many years imagining people hugging me & projecting unbridled bliss on
the idea, tricking myself into actually feeling it at times. now i have to learn that just because a person
actually does hug me it does not mean i will fall into the Heaven i associate with that nonexistent
figure who simply understands me & corresponds to all of my honesties... i think that if that's what
i continue to subconsciously anticipate then hugs will feel more like just a strictly geometric process

i think a part of me does want to live forever in that tension of whether i might eventually
kiss some person, that tension which is dissolved once such a thing becomes commonplace

for it to be commonplace is supposed to be the goal, though. a comforting familiarity, stability, reaffirmation,
it's meant to represent these things. but a part of me does want to live in the tension before it first ever
happens. i do not like that that part is there but here i decline any denial of its existence

february 26th, 2023

today i spent time with my love & felt intensely sad for a little while. i think it was rooted in simply missing K, my
friend from elsewhere who i saw yesterday. this was a root feeling which branched into a couple of more specific feelings

one would be that it's simply, naturally, a little melancholic to find out how well you get along with someone
but have them necessarily disappear right after. which is whatever, i guess. life draws people in paths
that criss cross as they do & one just deals with that & appreciates what there is to appreciate

another would be that... maybe it's a bit hard on myself, but missing someone while in the presence
of someone else makes me feel a bit like i am devaluing the company of the person i'm with a bit

but maybe it was being with my love that made me miss K? because i guess i don't have the same brand
of humor chemistry with my love as i did with K, with whom i have a sort of humor chemistry
that i could have not foreseen the particular character of until i saw it in action

& it's not that this makes my love less. my love has their own qualities. but there was still this sense of
subtraction relative to yesterday, which just kind of... illuminates a sense of not being socially whole, of for
my whole life accepting only whatever rarities of interpersonal chemistry happen to come my way for however
long they do. i've never had a roster of people to spend time with who represent a total quality of interaction
that is more... rounded out. i felt aspects of me which could no longer quite express themselves

this made me afraid of... the idea that i felt i had found someone, found my love, until some new kind of
interpersonal interaction came along which set a new benchmark for how much laughter & dynamism can
occupy my day, & it... it's like, it doesn't necessarily have to be about K, it's just that... if i am now aware of
that benchmark, of that potential, it... introduces doubt. if i don't know that i want to be with someone my
whole life, then this would seal the ephemerality of our romantic connection & force the question: what
is the project of our being together? simply passing time in the less-loneliness that's available?

i guess my final point is that... i've conceived of myself as sort of inescapably alone for much of my life,
but sometimes the internet can illuminate the reality that there are people with whom profoundly affirming
friendships are possible. &, to my deep gratitude, it even sometimes facilitates experiences of these friendships

but with this it also exposes that my problem is not really that the world has no place for me. it turns out there are all
kinds of interpersonal suitabilities in the world, & what it all really comes down to is that there is just... no one here,
where i am. it's just cruel happenstance, & that hurts in its own way, to grasp all the possibility that never saw its
realization, just a blank page that left me having to try to build myself into a developed person autodidactically

in illuminating all those possibilities, the internet also illuminates their general... lack of
feasibility. people who could be great friends are scattered all over the earth & can learn
of each other in all their scatteredness but this still leaves them generally scattered

february 27th, 2023

this is largely the only place i can peel some of that hypodermis off because it's so "opt-in" & i am afraid of "overloading"
any individual person in interaction or setting up too great a debt for myself within already flakily understood interplays
of reciprocity. so i try to flay it all off to a very great extent here but the tradeoff is of course that it's all just cast out into
the ether, distributed, abstract, never really manifesting back to me except once in several blue moons, & even among those
blue moons it is only sometimes tangible, & among those tangibilities only sometimes affirming... & then what hurts is
that in those moments there is a sense that they represent reality, that it is a glimpse of a reality that one can imagine
otherwise being constant, & what tends to actually be happening is not the reality but, rather, the
reality's endless & timeless suppression by the loneliness & hiddenness

march 7th, 2023

i woke up in the middle of the night immediately thinking something that looped in my
head until i fell back asleep. looping because i wanted to write it down but i didn't
want to further wake myself with the screen light & cognitive activity

it was something to the effect of:

a person could hold another, squeeze them, reassure them that whatever grotesque or fearful construct in their
head that they might project & overlay over the situation at hand is unnecessary, that things are neutral, that
things are friendly, that things are only what they are. the fabric of reality bears no essential malice or
exploitation. its misalignment from human interest is common but only ever incidental, never conscious

what they possibly cannot do is impart something to take the place of that grotesque
construct. they cannot retroactively supply some long-inculcated vision, framework,
particular conception of gentility, perception of what togetherness is

their ability is limited to destruction of what shouldn't be there, without creation of what could be there.
in reassuringly sweeping away what shouldn't be there, they can only leave behind the situation in its bare
physicality, hoping that the person they comfort can take it from there - that they'll now be unimpeded in
feeling the situation as what it is to them, imposing a positive framework, friendly vision, gentle
conception. but the comforting person cannot themselves supply "what it is to them"

i am afraid of having no vision or of having one but losing sight of it for never having it felt seen
by another, never renewed in that way... no vision, only the bare geometry of people & rooms

march 7th, 2023

i think i can be kind but i'm also not confident that... i'm not actually a more blank... thing that doesn't viscerally "want" much at all, doesn't want to
be kind but still glorifies the idea or image of being kind in some more abstract way that puts no smile on my face but can still compel me to go through
the motions of kindness, just to contemplate or revel in what i have technically & superficially done, which may even have positive emotional or practical
effects for others but my impetus was not this but simply getting to see myself technically perform the actions which when viewed from the outside
constitute something good, i see other people do good things for each other & they smile & i know it's good, it's defined for me in dictionary
terms as good so i do something & as i do it i don't live for myself but replicate an exterior event which feels exterior to me even as
i am involved & that's all i was interested in, making kindness technically something that occurred, its draw on me was genuine
but only in that abstract way. & if this really is my essence then that's not how i want it to be because i want to live
my life actually situated in it, from a situated perspective but i don't know how i could be any different

i don't know what it means that i wrote this paragraph or whether it is a true description of me. i feel
sort of incapable of evaluating its truth. i don't know what it means to anyone else who reads it.
i was just capable of writing it & found some reason to. it was a perspective i was inclined to
generate & then put into words & now i can only regard it as a piece of expression by me that
exists. the overall notion could've passed through my head more ephemerally but i wrote it
down &, although i could delete it, i also could not truthfully say that i didn't write it

march 13th, 2023

i will love someone without lamenting the infeasibility of
their being the impossible degree of comfort that i wish for

two things that feel like they set the tone of my interaction & expression in a very fundamental way
are "thinking things without saying them" & "pretending not to know things that i do." these are both
extremely reflexive & they prohibit the kind of... uncensored, free-wheeling exploration of your
mutual reality that any conversation can be. & my reluctance to let that kind of exchange
be possible feels like why i anticipate feeling alone even in other people's arms

march 16th, 2023

i add a stranger from omegle on discord & spend over an hour sending them over a hundred hand-selected paintings
that i find particularly beautiful... have i put a very sustained effort into a kind display towards someone or
merely found an interchangeable audience for something i can find an unlimited one-sided drive for?

march 18th, 2023

i rarely if ever feel anything when touched by another human being, short of an anxiety that i mostly repress

if i have never felt anything from being touched by another person, then what basis do i have to regard that
as a problem in the first place? why fret over a phenomenon that i have clearly never had any relationship
to? how can i even value it? i must have just decided at some point that i might be missing out
on something. that is a silly reason to develop an enduring despondence about something

there is a part of me that would sometimes like to impudently decline to effect any positive change for myself, simply on the
basis of spite for the fact that any suggestion or encouragement in that labe must necessarily be beamed to me impersonally
through my laptop - as if i intend to bargain with the uncaring circumstances of life & say, "i'll do nothing unless it's
supported by the tangible human presence i've always longed for." i know that to listen to this impulse would just be
to explicitly embrace a vicious circle of isolation, though. you either change for the better or you don't, & the
precipitating factors are arbitrary. & probably the computer can be a genuinely restorative tool

march 20th, 2023

it feels to me like one has to eventually confront the terror of the idea that the end-all measure of vulnerability will never be
in acts that you simply want to do. it will always be like pulling teeth. namely, it would be telling someone all the thoughts
that you are most avoidant of disclosing. it will always be like pulling teeth by definition because if there is no avoidance
to overcome then it is not vulnerability. there are no workarounds. there are no shortcuts. no other agreed-upon language
of vulnerability - sexuality being an easy example - will ever substitute for the essential discomfort of self-disclosure.
coziness will always be an option & it will never get anything done if chosen without exception. by your own
hand you have to pull the pliers every goddamn millimeter that they have to be moved to get the tooth out

i am never direct & i never say what i truly think or want to say. in no situation in my life have i ever said everything. i think the
way things divert in my train of thought from "speakable" to "unspeakable" can happen so quickly that i genuinely don't realize
there was anything to say in the first place. it makes me frustrated & sad. it hurts to not even be able to... perceive the entirety
of myself, when regarding myself in terms of what can be made socially real. to not be able to perceive what is missing, all that
can never enter into the equation of my relation to anyone. preliminary to grappling with my obligation to pull out my own
teeth i must put in the effort to even see that they are there, as if my tongue is not resting against them every day

march 25th, 2023

in "the discord server" people talk about things that interest me & it is contrary to my sense of blank tv static
idleness but i don't read very much of it at all because there is too much of it & i just hang forever in that
somewhat maddening adjacency to fully visible & accessible social activity that i just can't keep up with