weekends are worst, because, without pattern or structure, without dependable contact with self and beyond self, you dwell, interminably. (or rather, I dwell, but let’s keep it impersonal, okay?)

contradictions: a haemorrhage of memories, and a hole that opens up inside you. or perhaps not. a rupture in the bloodflow, and an influx of nostalgia that starves you of oxygen, threatens to overwhelm you. I am not as I would like to be these nights. but I am as I am used to being.

elsewhere:

‘I have forgotten everything that was important
about those years except the fact I knew it
once.’

I don’t discard. I hate to lose. My space is sedimentary. (And too sedentary, but that’s another story.) And yet these gatherings of things, at moments like this, speak to me only as a testament to loss. Postcards from once-close-friends no longer remind me simply of the past, but of the hesitation, the calcification of recent conversations. There’s arthritis in my social bones.

And so, I have the chance to slough off my twenties not just like a skin, but as a life. A form of life. Metamorphose. In trepidation. As if all that internal bleeding were its own narcotic, its own sedative.

Do butterflies have caterpiller dreams?