It’s about to get dark, so the afternoon is dim and vivid and mourning the light. And it just rains and rains and clogs the earth while the sky remains bright and false. There are many implications to telling the truth, being too honest is a howling mistake— more than it is not. But the outcome of pretending I have anything I would like to write about would be too insulting. I haven’t yet showered because I am in agony over my incapability and I cannot move. It’s a little darker now than it was a few minutes ago. I am practically inhaling the plaque from my teeth, and my gums are slimy with coffee.

There is a peak in my 24 year old day. A day gets as high as life will currently allow when I’ve written a commercial thing, or made some other sellable thing. A good day sustains the belief that anyone would buy me. It has become so that I am nothing if I cannot be understood and enjoyed. It’s weird, fine tuning your weirdness, laundering it, slamming it in to make it fit. There is something very non-endearing about the process of becoming consumable. I don’t think you’re supposed to like it, yet you are expected to be smart enough to do it anyway. It is what you do when you’re hellbent on forging a career out of the natural— your impulses, the things you do but can no longer admit why. It is 24, this sort of thing, and maturing is whittling yourself into bite sized chunks. Either you get in that car, you walk, or you turn around and go home. I’m walking, albeit very slowly.

I miss telling the truth, that is what I’m really saying. I don’t want to write anything but I won’t say why. And it is more likely that I’m even incapable of saying why because I no longer keep a diary. These days I’m not so mathematical with any sort of emotional turmoil. I’m no longer that self-absorbed, analytical creature; at least there is no longer evidence to support it. But back when I was a little more selfish, I was honest, and I would say things I can no longer say (it isn’t sellable to write for yourself, or to live in a goldfish bowl). I miss a literary cringe sesh in the notes app. I don’t cry when I write anymore. I’m trying to forgive myself for being a giver. On the horizon is a return to self-absorption and a loyalty to emotional detail in some way, there has to be, forgive me in advance.

The clock in my grandma’s room is wrong, no, it has stopped completely. In there, it is ten-to-nine, and whether that is morning nine or night time nine we’ll never know. When you go in there, the sound of your living— your breathing and your footsteps command the room, for there is not much left in there to shush them. She has not been dead for long and the room has a bankrupt quality to it— furniture has been removed and things are pushed to walls, and there’s ghost-like dust on the floor; and her ceilings are suddenly very high now, very white and webby. When do we run out of things to say? When we start to make observations like this in order to feel like something is being reasonably addressed when nothing is really being said at all.