snatches of journal entries from october and november
4 oct. — it’s fall. need to write a full, detailed entry, but so tired tonight. the moon is sharp as a crystal, edges so whetted they could slip between my teeth. i saw the last of summer thunderstorms this week, seething white downpours giving way to fleeting rainbow arcs. the air is cooling, woven with smoke and damp.
i’ve been journaling a lot in my head. i feel very keen and awake, like i was sleepwalking before. i feel like i was always unconsciously living toward some imaginary end, dreading the long span of the rest of my question mark-shaped life, but i don’t feel that way currently. it’s been an odd shift in vision. turns out i might be onto something with this cocktail of intermittent therapy and 10mg of inconsistently taken lexapro. or maybe it’s something more spiritual and existential relating to the gradual formation of my fullest self. but probably not.
this week i was writing love letters to the rhythms of kansas city, trying to embrace being where i am. trying not to over-romanticize moving on to the next action. shedding some emotional deadweight as i leave apathetic friends in my rearview. trying not to give into the cloy of nostalgia that draws me, always, back in.
31 oct. — it’s halloween. the night stinging and singing. crisp like teeth into a cold apple.
i still have so many corners of the earth to upturn. i wish i could describe the natural beauty of asheville; i found myself thinking about how time waters down our memory, that all we retain is our impression of how somewhere can make us feel. i remember being perturbed by this notion even as a child. it would keep me up at night, possibly because i was skittishly skirting the edges of some larger existential realization.
the smokies, with their ridged spines like slumbering beasts, furred with amber and copper and pine, hazed with blue off to the horizon.
i’m sort of drunk, so i’m tired, but i’ve been wanting to journal for several days now. i’m not quite sure where i am right now, here at the last gasp of october. i’ve been tentatively easing into myself, accelerating in my self-certainty. i spent so long choked with self-hatred and habitual misery, self-flagellating because i didn’t know anything different. i feel like there’s finally some warm light beaming out of me, self-compassion for all my old weathered selves. sympathy for everyone i’ve been. maybe that light’s been there all along.
29 nov. — at the same time, i find myself brittle with a lack of conviction. self-sabotaging out of boredom, apathy, laziness. i’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. not in a morbid sense, really—just more of a heightened, peripheral awareness. the inherent nature of an impending winter, i guess.
this year has been so weird. i’m almost 26, still so uncertain. knowing myself, later on i’ll ache with nostalgia for my twenties, but i can’t say i’ll miss this debilitating sensation of being caught between two, possibly three, possibly infinite states of being.
microcosmic 