I am writing this hungover. It’s currently 9 p.m., and a whole day of recovery was insufficient. Nausea, headaches, and limitless queasiness plague me. I am once again drowning in the shadow of my everything. It’s okay; it doesn’t need to make sense—you just need to catch the vibe. My room is an impenetrable mist of blueness. The only light is warm, diffuse, and non-offensive. This white substack background is a different story. I can put up with black text in a white void if it means you’ll feel what I feel, too.
Loneliness isn’t the word I’m looking for. My mouth is looking for sounds to crunch into words. My brain is looking to make problems out of nothing. I’m not my worst enemy but sometimes it sure does feel like that. If I had to fight myself, we would go at each other like two roosters in a cock fight, hiss the worst insults at each other: nothing you do makes sense, and we both know you’re forever fundamentally unloved. I would make it so the losing chicken gets cooked for dinner. But then again, I’ve never eaten a rooster and don’t ever plan to.
I hate directionlessness. I doubt that’s a real word, but I think that speaks to how lost you feel when faced with a surplus of time. I am tethered in some invisible thought-paralysis state, just watching the lake of time dry up right in front of me. Fifty million ideas, not a single thing spoken into existence. I need to get back into that “don’t deep it ” state. But in a different way. It’s hard not to give a shit when there isn’t anything that is causing you direct grief. Allodynia. I am severely giving a shit about every single thing all the time now that I’ve let myself out of the detachment chamber.
What I mean by all this is that I’m not so sure. To be honest, I don’t even think writing aimlessly like this will amount to much. I am interested to see how much I can meander on, though. There is something interesting about observing the way your brain just never shuts off. It will keep going on and on and on. We are just thoughts. Electrical streams, zipping neurones, reborn again and again- from synapse to synapse. Consciousness is electric. At its core, my brain is like a quasar, spewing rays of thought in every direction, rotating on itself millions and millions of miles per hour. Millions and millions of miles away.
Sometimes, my head gets hot, like the underside of my laptop. My cranium has no room for a fan, and I don’t think my venous sinuses have a coolant in them, either. I am the least mechanical thing I own and yet sometimes I look in envy at inanimate objects that will never have to sit and ponder about their purpose on earth. Maybe life is great if you are just a tool, and that’s all you’ve ever known.
As dismal as the last few paragraphs have been, I do look forward to having a good summer. I look forward to seeing my family and my childhood bedroom. I look forward to sleeping with air conditioning and the heavy, smogged-out morning air. I look forward to beeping air purifiers and dishwashers at night. I look forward to seeing the man I love again.
Living alone can be good, but it deprives you of the chaos of living with other people and weakens your tolerance to outside forces, so when you go out, the intensity of everyone’s thoughts is like a tsunami your spirit wasn’t trained to tackle.
I look forward to being infallible again. If not soon, then eventually.
-swan
I adore your writing!