Now I’m drifting into clouds of silence, through shadows in the lungs, through inner opacity and its dull din. I’m moving through the stillness as if it were a torrent, as if statues could whisper. As we drift, we change form, and drifting isn’t terrifying anymore, it’s just the motion of leaves caught in the water, the promise of seeing another dawn, the stillness of feelings unsure where to go. I feel archaic loves. I still love people who are dead, who are gone. Warmth becomes a memory of warmth. But this isn’t nostalgia, it’s not wanting to go back in time, and it’s not that the past was perfect. It’s just that warmth has a long reverberation, and it clings to us.
And yet the condition of writing this, of writing anything, is a long and unendurable loneliness that I’m not quite sure what to do with, not sure what to make of. It’s the coldest morning of the season. In the end, to be able to write again, I had to block off all my other outlets, so that all the unmanageable feelings had to be here. Now they can’t run out somewhere else; they can’t spend themselves in tweets or half-written songs or anywhere else where they fade too fast. For an instant, there is only writing. Loneliness isn’t an absolute lack of people; rather, it’s a particular relationship to people, the state of overflowing with things you’d like to share, but can’t manage to divulge. Loneliness is where you are at once guarded and alive to the other.