blowing out the candle

Wooooooooosh

outer wilds

Standing now, before the not-so-pearly gates of the Embassy of the United States of America she finds herself once more before an ever increasingly big Maybe.

The research has been great, thanks for asking. There has been nothing greater than The Research. I have not been much of a person these last two months, not really. I should be feeling very proud of myself. But I’ve not been doing a lot of feeling lately.

Yesterday, I awoke from this monomanic homeostasis gasping for air. An emotion took its place that I can only name as leaving. It came unsolicited, with a profoundly scary sense of permanence, even if all this should really be a very desirable state of affairs.

It’s really the sort of thing only writing has ever helped with.¹ Uncertainty about the future so intense it makes me want to crumble my attempts at epistemics into a ball and join some kind of crazy world religion.

The medieval peasant did not know what the future would bring, sure, but at the very least he had an idea where he would be living, how he would be living, and if he will be living come next year.

These are very uncertain times, but it is our future, and ours to shape. It is my duty to trudge on through the lightcone and ponder the man made horrors increasingly within my comprehension. The bay will be my nest for a while, I must make myself at home, comfortable even.

It’s time to blow out the European candle, and the years of futures never lived with it.

And perhaps, in a couple years, I will come to my senses and realize that the city that’s not willing to wait is no place worth waiting for. That this too shall pass, that there's nothing for me here.

And I will look back like a child that suddenly finds itself thirty. Someone who summited the great mountain and found only more desire at the top. There will be nothing back the way I came, and I will have been better for it.

It will have been good to pack.

We must not belong to those who are gone, nor old selves we cannot forgive.
We will go into the storm as children with only each other’s courage for comfort, and all the great days ahead waiting to receive us.
We will water the Azaleas.
We will cry with our friends.
We will stay with the trouble.
It will be hydrogen and hubris.
It will be I love you and you’re gone.
It will be one more time with feeling.
All these years we’ve starved for meaning,
All our strength in quiet defeat.
But magic always loved the hungry,
And it’s time for us to eat.²

1. and existentialismslop

2