journal entry — Sunday, October 19th 2025
I requested “Slipfast” in the dining hall on this sunny morning. I’m drinking coffee, reading Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law and relaxing. It feels nice.
The thing is, when we got to the “just let it all burn down” line at the end of the bridge, I was once again reminded of how nostalgic I am for last winter. Of course, tell her that and she absolutely would not believe you. She spent those months crying every day and every night, in school and in the car, and on the bathroom floor and in bed and at therapy and everywhere. Innumerable tears make for a paradoxically memorable haze in retrospect.
She watched Grey’s Anatomy and listened to Role Model, she made the potion and went to Fruity Yogurt. She wrote letters in class and at church — they existed in an ionized space, tasting of iron like blood, between her mind and the paper; she wrote not always in words but in singular letters, sometimes even just punctuation. She could look down at the serial killer’s notebook of acronyms and immediately translate it, or know exactly which words were meant to fill every space between comma and errant comma.
Curled brown hair and trips to Panera, hands tucked inside the slowly pilling sleeves of a gray November-earned championship meet sweatshirt, and reluctantly folded-over, cozy borrowed sweatpants. I wonder which shoes she wore. It’s escaping me now.
Anyways, the point is that I am always going to miss things that meant little to me when they happened, and I am always going to feel a little sick when I remember the worst times, the hardest times to survive. Some of that’s guilt and sadness that I can’t save my sweet younger self, that she had to go through it all, and go through it alone. But most of it is just that magic. I don’t know what to tell you except that raw emotional memory doesn’t differentiate between really good and really bad. It’s all just real. True. Formative.
I’m not sure if I would call it gratitude; I’m not sure if the warmth of remembering pain is driven by the knowledge of its legacy, or if it’s just the feeling of total release, phantom blood running from your opened arms and hot salt tears pouring down your cheeks. Body temperature, when you find it outside yourself, is an addictive thing. And once enough time has separated you from yourself, she becomes an external source of that beautiful blazing feeling. You summon her image and she engulfs you in her vulnerability, vasodilating to the point of spatial expansion — her frame is shrunken but her presence is larger than life, and you don’t know what to make of your simultaneous protectiveness and idolatry except to let it all pour into the ever-flowing, ever-rippling, ever-expanding pool of love for life. Love for a life that is no more. Love for a life that proclaims itself not to be worth living.
And that’s how I’m feeling. It feels warm and a little cold. I’m apprehensive but it’s safe. It’s safe to say I can find a reason somewhere in this.
The Dilemma Of It All 