Sunday

There's a totally weird expression that says "if wishes were horses then beggars would ride." I suppose it means that wishing is futile. I would mostly agree, although sometimes I think about the wishes I'd make.

I wish I didn't worry so much about everything. I worry that I'm not good enough, that I'm not on the right path (or any path at all), and I worry about not getting to do the things I want to do before it's too late. I worry its already too late for some things. I worry that I talk too much and fail people when they need me. I worry that I'm not valued by my friends. I worry that I act too tough and that people are actually fooled by it. I also worry that they're not fooled by it. I worry that I'm not special and that I push everyone away and that I'm never in the right places at the right times. I worry that people think I try too hard. I worry that I do try too hard.

I wish I didn't wear my heart on my sleeve and spill all my secrets to strangers and expect so much from people. I wish I didn't need validation from absolutely everyone, like an insecure teenage girl.

I wish some people were a bigger part of my life. I wish I was young and innocent and pretty and delicate and that someone would take care of me sometimes. I wish I loved the right people and didn't spend so much time thinking about the wrong people. I wish I didn't drink so much whiskey.

I wish I knew what some people were thinking and why they do the things they do. I wish some people hadn't treated me the way they did and I really wish I hadn't treated some people the way I did.

I wish I could let some things go. I wish my heart was bigger and I was less selfish. I wish some people felt about me the way I feel about them. I wish I was a kid again. I wish I had gotten to meet my maternal grandparents.

I wish I knew some people better. I wish I didn't always ache to know the intimate things, like who they miss and what they're sorry for, and could just appreciate my relationships for what they are. I wish I wasn't so greedy for life. 

I wish I didn't need everyone in the whole world to love me to feel okay. I wish people still made mix tapes and that I had gone on the Great America trip in 7th grade instead of staying home watching movies. I wish I spent more time with people and less in front of my computer.

I wish I knew why some things are just broken, and don't work no matter how hard you try. I wish I had gone away to school. I wish I had a really good sandwich right now.

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”

—	C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Love is a Mixtape

"I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.

Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts."

To be known and loved

It seems like I’m always writing about the complications of human connections, and maybe that’s not so strange. Maybe the topic deserves the examination I give it, heavy and central as it is to existence. I constantly fear that my ability to engage in authentic, healthy relationships with people is stunted and broken beyond repair, so it follows that the capacity of relationships themselves would occupy my head space as it does.    

I awake everyday and complete the requisite steps of a successful life, measured out in coffee spoons, and feel vaguely like pieces are missing, as pieces are missing from everyone’s life. I long to be kind and uncomplicated and untarnished by the weight of time, but mostly when I look in the mirror I see someone over whom sadness has triumphed. Sometimes I think maybe this kind of life, this person, is the only person I could have ever really been good at being and other times it seems like I’ve just given up. I know I was made for more than the life I’m living and I reconcile that reality in small ways as best I can. My turmoil is mostly standard.

I come across things sometimes that illuminate in new ways the burden I force myself to bear, the battle between sincere and deep longings and the cancerous habits I cling to.

What great gravity is this that drew my soul toward yours? You have slid up to the person I wanted to be, the person I pretended to be. Should I show you who I am we may crumble.

I want to known and loved anyways. I trust by your easy breathing that you are human like me, that you are fallen like me, that you are lonely like me. What is this great gravity that pulls us toward each other? Why do we not connect?

I will discover what I can discover of you, and though you remain a mystery, what I find I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart.

I wonder sometimes if this is all we can really hope for, that there’s nothing to do except give ourselves to each other, then do the same thing tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, though we never seem to get what we need in doing so. Or what we think we need at any rate.

Giving without getting is a revolutionary idea. I’m not sure I know how to do it. But sometimes I feel like it’s the way things are meant to be. All I can do is hope that’s true.

The solitude of prime numbers.

Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers. Sometimes it seems they ended up in the sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Sometimes I wonder if they would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. Among prime numbers there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true density. Then, just when youre about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no can say where exactly, until they are discovered. Twin primes. Alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other.