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Everything soft, refracted, sealed an actor, a jealous man, a knife, the money the knife wanted, the boat the money would buy, and the man standing in the boat. Standing in the boat. What is the boat for?

At twelve this felt like death. At thirty it feels like the ocean.

You have to go through the void to find the garden. You have to lose the bubble to become the cup what was taken out of you is now the shape that holds.

And at the end I am lying on the road, my whole body given back to the air — breasts falling sideways, white skin, tufted dark, the geography of a self with no one left inside it.

If you will contemplate your lack of fantasy, of inspiration and inner aliveness, which you feel as sheer stagnation and a barren wilderness, and impregnate it with the interest born of alarm at your inner death, then something can take shape in you, for your inner emptiness conceals just as great a fullness if only you will allow it to penetrate into you. If you prove receptive to this 'call of the wild', the longing for fulfilment will quicken the sterile wilderness of your soul as rain quickens the dry earth.

C. G. Jung

The more differentiated something is, the more separation, and the more pain. But also greater depth.

The more things you experience, the more of yourself you distribute across the world, the more you stand to lose. Every era you inhabit becomes a room you'll eventually lock behind you. Every person, every place, every version of yourself, another thing to grieve. You would think it would be a good thing, to collect so many eras, to have so many memories. A hoard of treasure. But nostalgia doesn't work like wealth. Each singular memory demands to be eternal, and you know it can't be, and you know you still have to carry it alongside every other memory that makes the same demand.

If you have many clothes and they all burn in a fire, you are devastated. But if you have one piece of clothing and you lose it, you already know you don't need much. Your life doesn't collapse. You were already standing on the ground.

So does that mean you choose to live minimally?

You can be a small ripple or a large one. To jump from a tower means to fall to your death with the chance that you pick up enough wind to fly. To fall from a single stair means you land safely, but you never fly. To say we can choose is not to say there is a superior choice, only that there is a law governing the intensity of what we feel. Depth has a cost. Safety has a cost. Neither is free.

I know that for myself I am after the depth, despite knowing the heartbreak that comes with it. I think people like me learn to embrace the pain, the shadow—sometimes to the point of romanticizing it—because it is so intimately tied to the sheer euphoria of whatever its opposite is. You cannot have one without the other. They are not opposites at all. They are the same force, differentiated.

People who are addicted to love take all of the suicidal heartbreak that comes with it. Some of these people become drug addicts, so in love with the rapturous feelings of chemical imbalance that they are willing to fight through the abyss of withdrawal, because they know there is something so profanely sacred on the other side that it can be held, however briefly, in human hands. The addiction is not about the drug itself but the willingness to be destroyed for the sake of contact with something.