A L Y S A N D E R

Your anxiety is your resistance to the process, your last grasps at a control you are becoming more and more aware that you do not have. Your tiredness is your resistance to who you really are, the person you actually want to be. Your annoyance is your repressed anger. Your depression, biological factors aside of course, is everything coming to the surface, and you bellowing down to stow it away.

And your arrival at the conclusion that you cannot go on like this, that you’re missing out, that you’re off-track and feeling stuck and lost, is you realizing that you need not change your feelings. You just have to learn to lean into them and see what they are trying to tell you.

"It’s interesting to think about how we make people who used to be everything into nothing again. How we learn to forget. How we force forgetting. What we put in place of them in the interim. The dynamics afterward always tell you more than what the relationship did—grief is a faster teacher than joy—but what does it mean when you cycle out to being strangers again? You never really stop knowing each other in that way. Maybe there’s no choice but to make them someone different in your mind, not the person who knew your daily anxieties and what you looked like naked and what made you cry and how much you loved them."

3. You assume that when it comes to following your “gut instincts,” happiness is “good” and fear and pain are “bad.” When you consider doing something that you truly love and are invested in, you are going to feel an influx of fear and pain, mostly because it will involve being vulnerable. Bad feelings should not always be interpreted as deterrents. They are also indicators that you are doing something frightening and worthwhile. Not wanting to do something would make you feel indifferent about it. Fear = interest.

I said “goodnight”

but it sounded more like “goodbye”

THE EMPTY CLASSROOM

You taught me how to be alone.

And I learned my lesson, in your absence.

Dear Future You,

Hold on. Please.

Love,

Me.

Dear Current You,

I’m holding on. But it hurts.

Love,

Me.

Dear Past You,

I held on. Thank you.

Love,

Me.

THE ZODIAC OF ONE

When I look up at night, all the constellations look like you.