![]() I haven’t been able to write anything, for weeks, even though writing is ostensibly my only job. I’ve been too worried about money, and aging, the dying world outside my window and the small, shrill one inside my phone. I haven’t been getting up to play basketball in the mornings even though the weather’s good for it. I’m doing stuff I spent so long hiding from, and it’s going all right, I guess, but I haven’t been sleeping well, or early enough, or much at all. ![]() I’m doing ok I’m doing the hard things, or some of them, anyway. I’m not heartbroken now, and I haven’t been in a while, and I’ve never gotten used to it. I can still taste the old swagger of it, squaring up to heartbreak like a gunslinger striding into town, ready to fight a hundred guys. Sometimes I miss all the bad ideas that ever ruined my life. But sometimes I look backward down the long way into the underworld. I’ve spent years trying to shed that self, and climb up into the kind of clean and boring life that keeps other people safe, early bedtimes and clean floors. I lived in my mistakes long enough that it stopped being fun I stayed too late at the party. I’ve ceded the middle of the night when it blurs into morning to younger people who don’t yet know better, still living gleefully in their mistakes. I keep my calendar current I make spreadsheets. I wake up at a reasonable hour, go outside, eat well, get my steps in, call my friends, and follow up on plans. I want to put on my coat and my shoes and leave the party and go home before it gets too late, before the walls slide sideways and people start doing things that change the shape of the years to come. ![]() Bad love and bad choices are a chemical ride, a day blown out into the white gleam behind the technicolor. I know the throaty blue thrill of sadness, a rising chord and a held note, bridging the space between the long afternoon and the fast evening, and I know the spine-shiver of driving all the way home in a pitch-black winter night, unable to see beyond the perimeter of my own car’s headlights. I’m trying to grow up and get over myself, do the work of a life in its bargains and its building blocks, to stack one piece on another until the structure holds secure. I felt so bad for so long and I didn’t like it, I really didn’t I wouldn’t go back there for the world. Every instrument entered on key and every voice found the harmony, all of it forced to make up for whatever I’d inflicted on myself. I used to choose the things most likely to hurt me, on purpose, aiming squarely to get hurt, and it was terrible, and stupid, but it made everything visible object spark and gleam. Feeling broken-hearted is a way to feel young again, sometimes, and sometimes sorrow can light up every avenue that stretches downtown toward a vanishing point. It’s true that pain polishes the edges of the streets and the subway stations, and makes their colors and angles sing. I’m supposed to be past it I’m trying to live up in the light. ![]() I’m not supposed to want this kind of stuff anymore. Very grateful to this street-art advertising on grand & broome for giving me an image to use for this piece
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