reincarnation

somehow instead of saying "as a treat", I've started using the phrase "for morale", as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.

“August evenings are especially stricken with melancholy - as if the ghosts of all past summers came rushing to haunt my heart”

“I used to believe that the best writing had to emerge from a life that had been carefully sculpted to produce the perfect conditions for creativity: long stretches of uninterrupted time, days cleared of logistics and obligations, dentist appointments and school lunches and cardboard boxes waiting to be unpacked. But eventually I learned that no beautiful writing comes from an impossibly perfect world; it all comes from this one: cluttered, obligated, distracted. After I came to accept that beauty comes from the imperfect mess of living, rather than the impossible ideal of an unencumbered life, it asked me to stop seeing life and writing as antagonists, locked in combat, and to start seeing the ways that even the logistics and obligations of life might ultimately feed into the compost heap of creativity, and certainly that the obligated, beholden life is the only one from which we work – that so much beauty has come from it.”