laura and me

(apologies to anyone with epilepsy)

In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centers, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.

—moby-dick, chapter 133

Yesterday I visited Tracey and Skip and Baby Rooney in Park Slope . . . we met at the Infant Swings in Prospect Park . . .

Tracey said Rooney has developed Stranger Danger senses and usually cries when someone new shows up. And yet she was just peacefully chillin with me the entire time! She loved my jacket and all the zippers. Hey, me too . . .

We have of course met once before, but she was barely two months old at the time. That was a fateful day for a number of reasons:

(I’m not sure what I’m doing in that last picture . . .)

I feel truly awful today . . . and I don’t need a crystal ball to know why lol

i wrote this one winter night back in berlin when i first moved there in 2019, just a few weeks before my birthday . . . i think about it sometimes because all these years later, it’s still a true thing in my mind:

If it’s not fun it’s not worth doing . . . and I know that if I stopped believing in myself then there will be no one left to believe in me, and I’d finally vanish. I miss these people who are gone. Do they miss me too? The worst feeling in the world is knowing you never meant as much to that other person as they did and still do mean to you. It can’t have all been for nothing, though grimly I know now that it was. It had to end, and it did. Time bottlenecked into this and left me here alone on the other side. Where are you now? Have you left me the last of the dum dum daze? Where are you now when I need your noise? The walls close in and I need some noise.