We entered the museum as if it were a weather system we had agreed to walk through together, a soft front of color and steel and suspended light. MassMOCA held its breath for us, or perhaps I imagined that it did, because I wanted the world to feel arranged. I wanted the afternoon to feel curated, as if every installation had been placed there to prepare us for something I believed would last longer than it did. We walked beneath enormous beams and into rooms where sound hummed like distant machinery of the heart. You tilted your head toward a sculpture that looked like a collapsed constellation, and I watched you the way one watches a painting they cannot afford but stand before anyway, memorizing its textures. I mistook observation for understanding. I mistook your presence for permanence.

There are museums that feel like sanctuaries and others that feel like abandoned factories of wonder. This one felt like both. We wandered through corridors that opened into impossible volumes of space, where art did not hang but hovered, where it did not end but extended itself across floors and into rafters. You spoke softly about color, about the patience of artists, about the way something unfinished could still be whole. You said that we could have a wedding reception in one of its corridors, the one with all the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling like a new kind of mobiles. I nodded as if I understood. In truth, I was arranging you into a narrative I had already begun to write. In that narrative, we were a pair framed by light, two figures crossing polished concrete toward an ending that shimmered with certainty. I was always composing. I was always directing. I thought I was living.

Outside, the sky had the pale clarity of a page that had been erased and rewritten too many times. We returned to the car with the quiet satisfaction of people who believe they have captured a day. The road unwound before us like ribbon. Somewhere between one mile marker and the next, I began to narrate our happiness internally, the way a child narrates a storybook to themselves before sleep. I imagined how I would remember this: the museum, your laughter in the echoing halls, the way your hand rested on your knee as you watched the mountains recede in the side mirror. I did not yet know that memory resists direction, that it refuses to remain in the shape we assign to it.

We stopped on the way back to New York at a place neither of us had planned but both of us welcomed with the relief of discovery. The Dr. Seuss museum stood like an invitation to abandon proportion. We stepped inside and found ourselves among colors that did not apologize for their brightness. The walls curved into impossible lines, and the air felt sweet with the permission to be foolish. We wandered through rooms where language playfully rhymed, where creatures smiled with improbable patience. I remember the way you laughed; you laughed not politely, not softly, but with the full-bodied surprise of someone who has forgotten the necessity of restraint.

And then there was the garden. We walked into it as though crossing into an illustration that had been waiting for us. Statues of familiar characters stood in postures of permanent delight: a cat balancing possibility, an elephant lifting a clover of invisible worlds, figures suspended in the math of childhood. We sat among them as if we had been granted temporary citizenship in a book we once read aloud to ourselves. The late afternoon light settled on everything with the gentleness of a remembered lullaby. For a moment, we were not adults figuring out time. We were not people carrying histories. We were two children rediscovering the simple astonishment of being seen.

You leaned back and closed your eyes, and I thought: this is it. This is the picture. This is the afternoon that will confirm everything. I framed us in my mind the way an illustrator frames a scene, ensuring that I stood somewhere near the center. I believed I was the protagonist of this story, that I had arranged the sequence of events so carefully that it could only resolve into stability. I mistook the symmetry of the moment for the truth of it. I misunderstood time, believing it to be a series of preserved rooms rather than a corridor that refuses to stop moving.

What I did not see, or refused to see, was that you were not a supporting character in my picturesque narrative. You were the axis around which the story turned. You were the one carrying chapters I had not read, seasons I had not witnessed, questions I had not asked. I was so focused on preserving the afternoon that I failed to notice the subtle shifts in your gaze, the quiet hesitations that revealed a future diverging from mine. I loved the story of us more than I listened to you within it. That is a foolishness I continue to study, like an artifact I cannot return.

Now the day exists only as a completed book on a shelf I cannot reach. I revisit it in fragments: the echo of our footsteps in vast museum rooms, the improbable geometry of Seussian statues, the feeling of sitting beside you in a garden where childhood briefly returned to us. I understand now that stories end even when we do not consent to their ending. I understand that I am living in the afterward, in the long corridor beyond the final page.

Still, sometimes I walk through my life as though I am moving through that museum again, pausing before installations of memory, trying to learn how to look without rearranging. I am slowly learning to accept that the story we inhabited has been written and completed, never to return. And yet in the quiet moments I feel the faint echo of that garden, where we were young and falling in love again as children, and I wonder if living now means learning how to carry a finished story without trying to reopen its final chapter because I am its only character.

I am afraid of succeeding at the one thing I have worked for long enough to call it a life. This fear has a shape, and its shape is an arrival. To arrive would mean that the years of preparation, the hours of quiet labor, the small and stubborn fidelities to language and thought, have produced something that stands upright without me. Success would mean that the work can breathe on its own, and if it can breathe, then it can also leave. If it leaves, then what am I but the emptied hive after the swarm has already chosen its direction.

There is a crisis in this realization, and it is not dramatic. It is clear, almost clinical. I have spent so long building toward a future in which my work might be seen that I did not prepare for the possibility that it might actually be seen. Visibility is not merely exposure; it is a demand. It asks that I accept the distance between what I intended and what others will understand. It asks that I surrender the illusion that the work is still mine. Fame, even in its smallest and most provincial form, threatens to become an ego trip, a bright narcotic. To bask in it is to mistake the reflection for the source. It is to believe that I am the center of the light rather than a brief surface that catches it.

If I stand at the threshold of a possible recognition, I’d feel precarious. What I have made cannot remain in the careful custody of my intentions. It must be released, and release is a form of disappearance. The pages must go where I cannot follow. The ideas must be interpreted by minds that will not ask my permission. The sentences must endure or fail without my supervision. To let go of what I have created thus far is not an act of modesty but of necessity. If I hold them too tightly, they remain drafts of myself rather than living works. If I keep them near, they suffocate in the warm and private air of my own approval.

There can never be a prodigious literary person in the way the world imagines one. Prodigy implies completion, a kind of monumental certainty. But literature is not monumental; it is migratory. It travels beyond the author, often outliving the circumstances that produced it, sometimes outliving the author entirely. While we are alone with these severe, sober, and difficult ideas, we cannot know if we will be present when they find their readers. We cannot know if the words we place so carefully will ever land on a mind that needs them. We write toward a future that may not include us. We labor in a present that cannot promise any reception. The idea of the prodigious writer collapses under the weight of this uncertainty. There is only the working writer, the solitary worker of sentences, moving through doubt with a kind of disciplined hope.

In the mind, these thoughts remain imperfect. They gather like unfinished architecture, scaffolding without walls, blueprints without gravity. Inside my head they are luminous but incomplete, full of potential but lacking consequence. It is only when they are externalized—pressed into language, given a surface—that they begin to acquire form. And even then, they are not complete. They are simply more available to completion by others. A reader finishes what I cannot. A critic reframes what I thought was stable. A stranger misreads a line and, in doing so, invents a meaning I never intended but cannot fully reject. The work becomes a field rather than a monument, an open space rather than a closed structure.

I may not be around to see whether any of it lands well. This is not a tragedy; it the condition. The distance between creation and reception is often measured in years, sometimes in lifetimes. To write is to accept that the arc of one’s work extends beyond the arc of one’s presence. It is to plant something in a soil whose climate you cannot predict. The crisis of potential success is therefore a crisis of relinquishment. If the work matters, it will matter in ways that exceed my control. If it fails, it will fail without my ability to correct it. Either way, the work must leave me.

I think of bees, whose survival depends on a weird paradox: they must move extremely fast in order to remain still. Their wings beat with such intensity that hovering becomes possible. Motion creates the illusion of suspension. Stillness is achieved through relentless activity. This is the model I am trying to understand. To remain grounded in myself, I must continue to move—writing, revising, releasing maybe—at a pace that keeps me from hardening into ego. If I stop, if I bask too long in any small recognition, I fall. The hover ends. The gravity of self-importance pulls me down.

So I move quickly, not toward fame but away from stagnation. I move to keep the work alive, to keep myself from confusing the work with myself. The hive hums because each bee performs its task without claiming the honey as a personal achievement. The sweetness belongs to the collective, to the ecosystem, to the future. Likewise, whatever I produce must circulate beyond my name. It must become nourishment for someone I will never meet.

In this way, success becomes less a destination than a dispersal. The work travels outward; I remain in motion. And if there is any stillness to be found, it is the stillness of a hovering body, wings beating so fast they become invisible, sustaining a position that looks like rest but is, in truth, a disciplined and continuous effort to remain light enough to let go.

I can explain the objects of my interest carefully and exactly. I can tell you what a story does when it tightens its fist. I can tell you why a certain book or manuscript survives its transmission or copy and another dies. I can name the theorists, theologians, the histories, the stakes. I can also explain baseball statistics, film framing, classroom dynamics, institutional language, the weight of a syllabus. I can describe things until they become legible, and kind. What I cannot explain—what feels like it has quietly slipped out of my hands—is why I ever reached for these things in the first place.

There used to be reasons. Or maybe there were only stories that functioned like reasons. Narratives I carried the way other kids carried gloves or lucky socks or underwear. I believed that desire pointed to somewhere, and that interest was evidence of a future. Now my pursuits feel like objects I keep polishing long after forgetting who gave them to me. I move from task to task with fluency, competence, even grace, but without a center of gravity. I am very good at doing things without knowing why I am doing them.

As a kid, I believed in baseball with a devotion that bordered on theology. The diamond was a geometry I trusted. The rules were finite. Improvement was visible. You practiced, you got better. You can scale by the number of hours committed to the diamond. You didn’t need to explain why you loved it; the love was obvious in the body—in the dirt on your knees, the ache in your shoulder, the way your attention narrowed until nothing existed but the ball leaving the bat. For a while, I thought I would be great. Not metaphorically. Literally. I could imagine it: the stadium, the name on the back of a jersey, the future opening instead of closing. A play I remember to this day is when a ball came straight to my face when I played second base, and I could see the seams spinning because of the anxiety I had about how this ball, should it struck me between my eyes, would possibly end my future of this sport; but without thinking I caught the ball and tossed it back to first for the double play. Before I could think of what happened, the inning was over and I was jogging back to grab my bat. We were the bulldogs, and I wish for instead to call ourselves the handsome Dans.

But I was also a child who could see endings too clearly. I watched other boys grow taller, faster, stronger. I felt my own limits present themselves early, like a horizon that refused to move no matter how much I ran toward it. I understood that athletic greatness was not only about love or effort. It was about luck, bodies, physics, timing. I could see the version of myself I would become if I stayed: competent, maybe admired locally, but capped. The story already written. That vision depressed me in a way I didn’t yet have language for. It felt like mourning a life that was still technically available but already exhausted.

So I stopped. Not dramatically, only quietly. I traded cleats for books, practice for study. Academia offered something baseball could not: an illusion of infinite extension. There was always another idea, another question, another credential. No visible ceiling. No obvious end. It rewarded thinking the way baseball rewarded repetition. I learned quickly how to be good at it. I learned how to perform seriousness. How to turn curiosity into discipline, and how to turn discipline into identity.

And for a long time, that worked. Being academic became a kind of survival strategy. If I couldn’t be physically limitless, I could be intellectually endless. If I couldn’t trust my body, I could trust abstraction. I told myself stories about rigor and vocation and calling. I learned to explain my interests so well that the explanations began to replace the interests themselves. The language did the loving for me.

Now I am years into a doctoral program, and I am still here, still producing, still trying to meet expectations. On paper, the arc makes sense. But inside, something has thinned. I feel like someone who has been walking for so long that stopping feels more frightening than exhaustion. I am not burned out in the simple way. I am estranged. I can no longer access the original hunger. I only know the motions that hunger once justified.

When people ask me why I do what I do, I answer with fluency. I speak about pedagogy, ethics, aesthetics, inquiry. I sound convincing that I almost convince myself. But the truth is quieter and more unsettling: I don’t know anymore. The reasons have eroded through use. Like a word repeated until it loses meaning. Like a field overplayed until the grass refuses to grow back.

What frightens me is not failure. I am good at this. I know how to continue. What frightens me is the possibility that continuation has replaced desire entirely. That I chose academia because it delayed endings, and now I am inside an ending I can’t recognize. That I escaped one visible limit only to inhabit a subtler one: a life organized around explanation rather than belief. It now sometimes seems like a weird miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on doing this for years on end. They could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seems admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

Sometimes I think of that kid on the baseball field, already grieving his future before it arrived. I want to tell him something hopeful. But I am not sure what I believe. I want to say that choosing thinking over swinging a bat was not a mistake. I want to say that the reasons will return. But honesty interrupts me. All I can say is this: I learned how to be very good at surviving the loss of reasons. I learned how to keep going. And now the work is not to explain why—but to sit with the ache of not knowing, and see if something new dares to begin there.

I go to the movies the way some people go to church—not for answers, but for scale. I like the act of arriving early, the small ritual of choosing a seat, the way the room exhales when the lights dim. There is relief in surrendering to the size of it all. Movie stars loom larger than life, faces impossibly magnified, pores and expressions turned into weather systems. On the big screen, they are not just people; they are surfaces onto which I project longing, courage, beauty, failure. I don’t want to meet them. I want to see them, unreachable, radiant, held at the correct distance.

I prefer small theaters, the kind that smell faintly of dust and old upholstery, where the chairs creak and the aisles feel too narrow for urgency. These places feel cutting-edge to me, not because they chase the new, but because they resist the obvious. They show the unpopular, the strange, the films that don’t know how to advertise themselves. A revival screening of Victor/Victoria. Something translated, something out of season, something that makes you wonder who else thought to come. Often, the answer is no one. And I tell myself I like that.

For a while, I really do.

The movies are a camera obscura to me, a darkened chamber where the outside world is inverted and projected onto a single luminous wall. Inside, everything slows. The ordinary laws of proportion give way. A face becomes a landscape, and a landscape becomes a feeling. I sit still while light does the work of translating reality into something legible. In a camera obscura, the image is real yet displaced—faithful and strange at once. That’s how films feel when they’re working on me. I watch deserts, city streets, kitchens, lovers standing too far apart, and I experience them as if they’re both distant and intimately mine. Upstream Color showed me orchids and lust upside down, and I wanted that.

The pleasure comes from knowing I am protected by a darkness. I can look without being seen. I can feel without needing to respond. Like a camera obscura, the theater teaches me that perception itself can be an event—that simply watching, attentively, can be enough. For those two hours, the world is reduced to light passing through a small aperture, arranged just for me. I am allowed to be quiet and porous. I am allowed to let the image enter me without explanation. The hurt, I think now, is that I’ve learned this lesson too well.

I am good at doing this alone. I have mastered the solo date. I know which seat avoids the flicker of the exit sign. I know how to unwrap candy silently. I know how to linger through the credits without embarrassment. There is a competence to it, a self-sufficiency that looks, from the outside, like peace. I can tell myself I am independent, reflective, devoted to my inner life. And all of that is true. But it is not the whole truth.

What I don’t say out loud is that I keep rehearsing solitude until it starts to feel permanent. Perennial. I return to the same theaters, the same kinds of films, the same posture of quiet attention. Sometimes I am the only person there, sitting in a room built for dozens, maybe hundreds, of bodies. The theater looks best when the lights are off, when its age is hidden, when the chairs—older than I am—are relieved of the burden of being seen clearly. In the dark, everything is forgiven. Cracks disappear. Time loosens its grip.

But when the lights come up, I feel the absence more sharply. There is no one beside me to lean toward, no shared glance that says, Did you see that too? No murmured comment withheld out of courtesy, then released into the night air. I leave carrying the entire experience alone, as if insight were something I must hoard rather than offer.

I wish I could extend this enjoyment to someone else. Not as a performance, not as proof of taste or intelligence, but as an invitation. I want to share the way a scene rearranges me, the way an old film can still feel dangerous or tender. I want to sit next to someone and feel the risk of proximity—the possibility that my interior life might be visible, or even welcomed. Instead, I perfect the art of keeping it contained.

There is a quiet grief in realizing that I am stuck watching these same movies alone, returning to the same dark rooms, telling myself this is enough. The films change, but the pattern doesn’t. I am faithful to the experience, but cautious with the extension of it. I know how to receive. I don’t know how to offer.

I go still. I keep going because the movies remind me of who I am when I’m not guarding myself. They show me scale, beauty, contradiction. I saw Best in Show with my Mimi, and even at that age (8?) I was understanding the humor; we really enjoyed that one. Why does that one stick with me? They teach me how to look. And maybe I’ll trust that the pleasure I feel in the dark isn’t diminished by sharing, that it might even deepen. Until then, I sit in the glow of the screen, alone but paying attention, hoping that learning how to watch is also a way for learning how to reach.

When I was young, I used to wonder how paper was made, not in a scientific way, but in the quiet, distracted way a child wonders about ordinary miracles. I would hold a sheet up to the light and think about how something so thin could unapologetically be, how it could be folded and unfolded, written on, erased, torn, and still be itself. Paper seemed to come from everywhere—books, notebooks, envelopes, homework assignments—yet it carried no trace of its own origin. It arrives ready to receive whatever I place upon it. I admired that, and I wanted to know what it had been before it learned how to hold.

Later I learned that paper begins as pulp. Trees broken down, fibers loosened, structure surrendered before a new one can form. The violence of that transformation surprised me. Paper is not born gentle; it becomes gentle after surviving pressure, heat, water, grinding. It is made strong by being reduced, by being taken apart so thoroughly that it can be reassembled into something flexible. I think now about how I resisted that kind of breaking. I wanted to stay intact, impressive, unbent. I didn’t know that strength could come from yielding.

Paper has patience. It waits. It does not interrupt the person who approaches it. It does not demand confidence or clarity. A trembling pencil is enough. Ink can hesitate, bleed, smudge, start over grossly. Paper absorbs uncertainty without judgment. When I was young, I wish I had known how to do that, to let the world leave marks on me without deciding that each mark was damage. Paper does not confuse being marked with being ruined. It understands that meaning arrives through contact.

Artists know this. They choose paper not only for its surface, but for its temperament. Some paper drink pigment greedily, some resists it, some buckles under water, some stays firm. Artists learn to listen to it, to collaborate rather than dominate. Charcoal rests differently than watercolor. A line drawn on paper is both fragile and decisive, capable of being erased but never fully undone, somewhat indelible. Even erasure leaves a memory, a soft bruise in the fibers. Artists trust paper to remember for them. I never trusted myself that way. I believed I had to get everything right the first time or not begin at all.

Writers, too, have long depended on paper’s quiet endurance. Before screens and clouds and backups, paper was the witness. It held drafts that no one else would see. It accepted sentences that embarrassed their own authors. It carried crossings-out, marginal notes, arrows pointing nowhere, beginnings abandoned halfway down the page. Paper allowed writers to be incoherent in private so they could be articulate in public. It made room for failure without broadcasting it. I wish I had learned earlier that incoherence is not a flaw but a stage. That clarity is often the reward for staying with confusion long enough.

Diarists perhaps understand paper best of all. They turn to it not to produce beauty, but to survive days. Paper becomes a confidant that never interrupts, never corrects, never leaves. It holds grief without trying to solve it. It absorbs joy without needing to compete. Diaries are not written for history, yet history keeps finding them—proof that ordinary lives mattered enough to be recorded. Paper gives permanence to feelings that felt fleeting at the time. I wish I had believed my inner life deserved that kind of shelter.

Paper is portable. It travels. It passes through hands, across borders, between generations. Letters survive fires and wars and time itself more often than the voices that wrote them. Paper outlives intention. It continues speaking after the speaker is gone. There is something humbling in that. I spent so much of my youth afraid of being misunderstood that I forgot misunderstanding is part of being heard at all. Paper risks it every time it carries words forward.

I think about how paper creases when folded, how the fold never disappears completely. Even when flattened, the memory remains. And yet paper does not resent the fold. It accommodates it. It adjusts. It becomes a map of where it has been bent. I treated my own bends as failures, as proof I was weakened. Paper wears its history visibly and still functions. Sometimes better because of it.

What saddens me now is not that I lacked paper’s qualities, but that I didn’t recognize them as virtues while I was still becoming. I mistook rigidity for strength, silence for control, untouchedness for worth. I didn’t know that the ability to receive, to hold, to be altered without collapsing, was a kind of courage. Paper has been doing this work for centuries: the holding of love letters, manifestos, prayers, grocery lists, or final words. It has given itself over to human need again and again.

And I am deeply, quietly sad that I never learned to become like that for myself or for others. That I didn’t trust my own fibers to hold what came to me. That I didn’t believe I could be strong and soft at once. Paper has carried the weight of so many lives. I only wish I had sooner learned how to carry my own.

I mourn something I cannot name because to name it would be to admit it had a shape once, that it lived somewhere in my body and not just in the negative space around my days. It is easier to say I am tired, or busy, or doing well. I wake and rehearse myself into existence: shower steam erasing last night’s thoughts, the mirror forgiving me enough. I choose clothes that suggest intention. I smooth my hair, check my teeth, practice a smile that looks like continuity. There is an alter ego who stands behind my eyes, straightening his shoulders with confidence, stepping forward without hesitation. He knows how to speak. He knows how to say her name without shrinking it into his mouth. He is brave enough to ask questions that open doors instead of politely circling them.

I dress as if I am meeting the future. I walk as if nothing has been lost. My posture is a kind of performance art, a thesis on resilience. When I imagine her, I imagine ease. The way conversation could unspool into hours, the way silence could feel companionable instead of indicting. The alter ego has already lived this life. He has taken her to coffee and then somewhere unplanned and fun. He has laughed without scanning the room for exits. He has told the truth gently, and the truth has not detonated. She has touched his arm and he did not flinched at the electricity of it.

I put on a smile the way you tape a cracked window before a storm. I tell her, in my mind, that I am fine. That work is good. That I am settled. That I sleep. This is the lie that passes inspection because it is vague enough to be believable. The truth would require too much scaffolding. The truth would ask me to explain why courage feels like a language I once spoke fluently and then forgot after an unnamed incident, a moment that did not announce itself as a turning point. Something happened, or perhaps many small things compound like dust on a lens, and now the world looks distant even when it is close.

I mourn the conversations that never began, the questions that stayed in their packaging. I mourn the version of myself who could cross a room without narrating every possible outcome. I remember the way anticipation used to feel like oxygen instead of risk. This grief does not wear black; it wears my face. It follows me into daylight. It nods politely when I say I’m doing well. It is unnamable because it is not a single loss but a subtraction. A quiet reduction of capacity. I am here, but less so. The alter ego waits patiently, tapping his foot, watching me prepare for a meeting that never occurs.

Eventually, the day folds in on itself, and preparation becomes its own end. This, too, is a kind of art. The artist begins not with color but with an empty canvas, stretched and primed, acknowledging that nothing can happen without a surface willing to hold it. The canvas must be taut but not brittle, receptive without collapsing. It is not yet an image, but it is already a commitment. To build it is to admit that something may arrive.

The artist does not rush. He lays out his materials as if arranging a ritual. Brushes cleaned, jars filled with water, rags folded with care. He understands that pigment is not a single substance but a mixture. Blue alone is too cold. Yellow alone is too loud. He grinds minerals into powder, measures oil, tests viscosity. He adjusts, adds, waits. The right hue emerges slowly, through patience rather than force. He knows that if the balance is wrong, the color will crack or fade, will refuse to adhere.

Before the first mark, there is contemplation. The canvas absorbs light differently depending on the hour. The studio breathes. The artist stands back, then closer, learning the distance at which intention becomes action. This is where mourning lives, too, not as paralysis but as attentiveness. He is aware of every prior painting, every failed attempt, every moment when the image did not survive contact with the world. Still, he mixes again. Still, he believes that the materials, properly combined, will hold.

Paint is forgiving if you listen to it. It teaches you when to stop pushing, when to let gravity and time collaborate. A layer dries. Another waits. The image becomes a conversation between what was planned and what insists on appearing. The artist cannot lie to the canvas; it records hesitation, overworking, fear. But it also records return. You can leave and come back. You can scrape away and begin again. You can build depth by allowing what is underneath to remain visible.

Perhaps this is where my alter ego belongs—not as a finished figure, but as a pigment waiting to be mixed. Perhaps bravery is not missing but uncombined, a component without context. The canvas is here. The materials are here. Mourning, unnamed, becomes part of the ground, the primer that makes adhesion possible. I stand in the studio of myself, brushes laid out, light shifting, knowing that readiness is not the same as arrival. Knowing also that something can still be made, slowly, with care, when I am finally willing to touch color to surface and let it stay.

Clouds are born from what cannot be seen. Water vapor, so ordinary it slips through fingers, rises, cools, and condenses into something strangely visible, something that can be pointed at and named. They are made of countless small things agreeing to become something larger than themselves. They are always in motion even when they appear still. They are shaped not by their own will, but by the pressures, temperatures, and winds around them. Formed from invisible interior weather, composed of many small truths, always changing in ways the eye can’t quite track, responsive to the world rather than armored against it. Someone to look up to.

I have not been very good at that kind of change. I have been a cumulonimbus when a thin cirrus would have been kinder. I have brought storms into rooms that only asked for shade. I want to apologize for remaining the same person all these years, for walking into new moments wearing an old emotional coat that no longer fits the weather. I kept showing up dense, saturated, ready to rain, when what was needed was lightness. Just a veil between the sun and someone’s face.

Clouds don’t cling to one shape. They rise because warm air is less dense than cold, because something inside them believes it can be lighter. They expand when pressure drops, relax into new contours, drift into whatever space opens. I envy that physics. I envy how a cloud is allowed to be responsive without being accused of being fake. When it changes, no one calls it inconsistent. They call it a sky.

I have been called stubborn, intense, too much. I have been a weather pattern people learned to brace for. And I understand why. I kept condensing the same old grief, the same old fears, into the same heavy formations. I kept raining out of habit. I am sorry for that, for mistaking emotional gravity for authenticity, for thinking that being real meant being immutable.

A cloud forms when rising air cools to its dew point, when the invisible finally cannot stay invisible anymore. Something has to give. Droplets gather around tiny particles, such as dust, salt, smoke, and a nuclei of imperfection that make becoming possible. That feels like a confession about being human. We don’t become ourselves in pure air; we need the grit of accountability, the specks of hurt, the strange debris of living. I have those nuclei in me too. I just kept building the same cloud around them.

I want to feel the pressure change and not panic. To let new air in. To thin out when the room needs light. I want to grow tall and dramatic only when the sky is ready for thunder. Mostly, I want to drift—to trust that I do not have to be anchored to who I was five heartbreaks ago.

Clouds are temporary by design. Even the largest anvil of a storm will eventually dissipate, break into wisps, fall back to earth as rain and start the cycle over. There is no shame in that return. There is nourishment in it. What if I could believe that about myself? That letting parts of me fall away is not a failure, but a way of feeding whatever comes next.

I have been afraid that if I change, I will lose the only proof I have that I existed. The hurt has felt like my only solid shape. But clouds prove that form does not equal essence. A cirrus and a thunderhead are both water. A mist and a monsoon are made of the same quiet molecules. I am still me even when I soften. I am still true even when I rearrange.

So this is me, standing under my own internal sky, practicing a new weather, trying how to be porous. Being a cloud means to let warmth lift me instead of insisting on my weight. If I arrive somewhere different than I used to, it is not because I am pretending.

I didn’t know how to thin myself then. I didn’t know I was allowed to.

Look up and even now something is shifting. A breeze you can’t see is rearranging me. I am becoming a new outline against the blue, still made of all the same water, but no longer insisting on the same old storm.

When I was young, my body sat in a chair but my life did not.
My life was busy somewhere else. Running, saving, building, loving.

In my head I carried volumes. I had names for the backstories and moral dilemmas that kept me awake in the soft way joy keeps you awake. I lived so many happy lives that my single body could barely contain them. I was brave in those hours. I was generous. I was chosen. I was beautiful, not because anyone said so, but because beauty was a condition of existing in a world I made with care.

The classroom was a narrow place for someone like that. Fluorescent lights gave instructions I already knew how to ignore. My eyes were open, but the real work happened behind them. Teachers called it drifting, or daydreaming. They said my name sharply, like pulling a cord, and I would snap back into a room that felt less alive than what I had just left. They mistook stillness for absence. They thought effort had a posture. Straight back, eyes forward, pencil moving. They never saw the miles I was walking.

Daydreaming took concentration. It took stamina. It took the discipline of holding a thread and not letting it break. I remember how exhausting it was to keep a story alive while pretending to copy notes. How much more work it required to imagine a better world than to memorize the dimensions of a worse one. Laziness was never the problem. Laziness is easy. What I was doing was not easy. It just wasn’t assigned.

I know this now because I became a teacher. Because I stand where they once stood, holding attendance sheets and objectives. And I see it: the vacant gaze that isn’t vacant at all, the student doing invisible work, the mind creating something the administration did not authorize. The awful truth is not that we failed to stop the daydreamers; it is that we never tried to understand what they were building, or why. We measured work only by what could be collected, graded, archived. Anything that couldn’t be stapled was suspect.

As a child, I lived entire lifetimes before lunch. I mattered to people who did not exist except because I loved them into being. I saved cities. I made mistakes and learned from them without ruining my real life. I was allowed to rehearse goodness, courage, devotion. I practiced being someone who could show up. Those worlds made me sincere. They made me hopeful. They made me believe that what I felt inside would one day find a door in the real world and step through.

I grew up.
And the door did not open the way I thought it would.

I now reach for those images and my hands come back empty. The rooms are still there, but the lights won’t turn on. I try to imagine a future and it feels like pressing my face to frosted glass. I know something is there, but I can’t see it clearly enough to love it. Responsibility has weight. Time has teeth, and imagination now feels like a muscle that went unused and forgot its own strength.

Except there was a moment.
When I was in love.

For a brief, dangerous stretch of time, the childish dreams leaned toward reality. The stories I used to tell myself began to resemble plans. I could see a life where my sincerity was useful, where my inner worlds had an address. Loving someone felt like being given permission to believe again. I thought: this is how it happens, and this is how imagination graduates.

And then it didn’t.
It stopped short.
The story ended midway.

What hurts is not just the loss of love, but the way it took those worlds with it. As if imagination itself decided it was unsafe to come out anymore. As if the child in me learned the wrong lesson: not that dreams can fail, but that they should never be trusted to speak aloud.

Sometimes I still catch myself drifting, even now. In meetings. In quiet evenings. For a second, I feel the old effort return—the focus, the mumble, the almost. I want to tell that child they weren’t wrong. That the work they were doing mattered. That even if the stories never became real, they taught me how to care deeply, how to imagine others fully, how to love without needing proof.

I don’t daydream the way I used to.
But I am still made of that effort.
And some days, that has to be enough.

I want to wear a gorgeous tie on special occasions, but they are in my closet without a warrant. I keep returning to the same doorway, the same small moment where your leaving first happened, as if the mind believes repetition might soften the blow. When you chose to leave, abandonment was not a concept but a physical sensation, an immediate hollowing, like the body suddenly realizing it has misplaced an essential organ. I did not argue with it, but I did recognized it. My nervous system knew the shape of that feeling before my thoughts could catch up. I stood there and watched love convert itself into absence.

I performed grief the way people do when they know the steps by heart. I cried in predictable places. I told the same story in different times, each to myself, and I was sanding it down each time so it sounded survivable. I slept too much, then not at all. I waited for mornings to feel redemptive, for nights to feel instructive. None of it surprised me. What surprised me was how abandonment returned. Not as a memory, but as a loop. Each day it arrives fresh, as if it has learned how to disguise itself as routine.

My daily life now feels like a series of motions without gravity. I wake up, make coffee, answer messages, read words that do not lodge themselves anywhere permanent. I move my body through rooms that do not ask anything of me. Nothing is technically wrong, and yet meaning refuses to attach. The hours slide past like water over smooth stone. I am not in pain every moment, but I am constantly aware of what is missing, the way the tongue keeps finding the empty space where a tooth once lived.

I think about the silkworm, how it creates something exquisite out of its own laboring body. How it secretes a filament so fine and patient that it becomes silk. Soft, luminous, impossibly strong for how delicate it feels. I imagine holding that fabric between my fingers, the way it responds to touch, how it seems to remember the warmth of skin. Silk is made through repetition too, through looping and looping until something coherent forms. The worm does not rush. It gives itself entirely to the process.

I envy that certainty. I envy the knowledge that what you are producing will eventually be beautiful, useful, desired. My hands ache with the memory of what love felt like—how it softened me without weakening me, how it made the world feel briefly legible. I want my hands on that again, not as an idea or a lesson, but as a texture. I want to feel love the way silk feels: cool at first, then warming, yielding without disappearing.

The silkworm begins without knowing what it is making. It eats and eats, obedient to a hunger it does not question, until its body learns a single, miraculous task: to give itself over to a thread. From its own mouth it releases a filament so thin it is almost nothing, and yet it does not break. It loops this thread around itself again and again, patient, rhythmic, instinctual. What looks like confinement is actually devotion. What looks like repetition is creation.

Inside that small, dim architecture, the worm is not thinking about luxury or desire. It is not imagining dresses, hands brushing fabric, light sliding across a sleeve. It is simply doing what it must: spinning, enclosing, trusting the motion. Its body becomes labor, which becomes texture. Its texture becomes something the world will later call beautiful.

Silk carries the memory of that persistence. It feels cool, then warm. It yields without surrendering. It looks fragile but resists tearing. People want it because it remembers the body that shapes it. Softness born from effort, elegance born from endurance.

The silkworm does not survive the transformation, but the thread does. It moves outward, touching strangers, resting on skin, becoming a symbol of desire. All that wanting begins in silence, with a creature small enough to fit in a palm, believing—without language—that what it is making matters.

The abandoning did not destroy my capacity to love, but it interrupted my faith in its timing. I am still here, looping, grieving, trying to thread meaning from my own unraveling. Maybe this is part of the making. Maybe this ache is a filament too. I keep my hands open, even when they are empty, quietly and painfully trusting that something tender is still forming.

I watched a movie and the song stayed the same. I go to Central Park the way I return to an essay already finished, certain there is nothing left to say, and yet compelled to read it again. Once, this place was a place mark in happiness: a pause where laughter caught its breath, an occasion between dates that promised more clauses, more time. We entered through familiar gates with the confidence of people who believe the future is generous. The paths curved kindly then, as if designed to accommodate the rhythm of two bodies learning how to walk side by side. Every bench felt chosen. Every clearing felt like a broadcast meant just for us.

I remember the park as a map of beginnings. The first date that multiplied into many dates, the soft astonishment of realizing that memory could begin forming in real time. Family visits anchored themselves here too, the park serving as proof that my life had coordinates worth traveling to. This is where I go, I would say, gesturing toward trees and water, translating myself into geography. Back then, Central Park was affirmation. It mirrored back a version of me that felt coherent, lucky, underway.

Now I walk it alone, sometimes willingly, sometimes with a resistance that sits heavy in my chest. The solitude is not the problem; it’s the contrast. The abruptness of the shift. One day the park is a shared language, and the next it is a dialect I must speak by myself. I follow the same routes each morning, the same looping logic of paths that promise variation but always return me to myself. Meandering is different when it’s chosen than when it’s habitual. What once felt like freedom now resembles inertia.

The charm has not left the park, I know that intellectually. The trees still perform their seasons with discipline and grace. The lake still catches light as if it were practicing devotion. Runners pass me with faces arranged into determination, couples lean into each other as if gravity has singled them out. All of it is objectively beautiful. And yet, it reaches me the way a postcard reaches someone who no longer recognizes the address. I see it, I register it, but I remain untouched.

Gratitude used to arrive uninvited. It would settle into me while I walked, a quiet certainty that this was enough—this morning, this person beside me, this city opening its arms. Happiness made everything luminous. The ordinary became charged. A squirrel darting across the path felt like a sign. A street musician at the edge of the park felt like accompaniment. Now, without that headspace, everything flattens. The park does not offend me; it simply doesn’t notice me anymore. Indifference, I’ve discovered, can be more devastating than loss, and life’s greatest war can be against the self I can’t live without.

There is a particular loneliness in walking somewhere that remembers you differently. Part of the fear of identifying an anxiety is that the words used may also trigger the keen worry. My feet know where to go without asking me. My body repeats the ritual, hoping repetition might summon feeling the way rubbing a worry stone summons calm. But routine is unforgiving when it is emptied of meaning. Each turn reminds me that I am circling, not arriving. That I am passing landmarks that once signified joy and now only measure distance.

Everyone carries the same quiet, unvoiced conviction that somewhere deep inside, they are unlike anyone else. I keep walking, perhaps because part of me believes that places, like people, can surprise you if you stay long enough. Or because I am not ready to surrender the idea that happiness once lived here and might, in some altered form, return. Central Park holds my past gently, even when I cannot. Alone, unresolved, attentive in spite of myself, I move through it trusting that indifference is not the final state, only a season I must cross.

Our attachments function like sanctuaries, like objects of devotion, places where we direct our faith and attention. What we bind ourselves to matters deeply. Attachments are never trivial. So choose them carefully; choose, with great care, what you allow yourself to revere with such intensity.