it’s 3:18am and I can’t fall (back) asleep and I’m reminded of that one time when we were high school freshmen when a friend of mine asked “do you ever just lie in bed and think about the future and get really really scared?” and how it’s wild to think we (first) had this thought at least ten years of our lives ago

in the winter the sun sets so much earlier and up here it just feels like afternoon all day, and it’s kind of beautiful but it makes me wistful and sad too, which reminds me of that Anne Carson poem that starts, “Beauty makes me hopeless,” and it makes sense to me in that sometimes beautiful things take me out of the general malaise and troubles of daily living, or at least allow me to put some distance between them and myself, and it’s wistful and sad that beauty cannot actually make them disappear forever, or bring back a time before they took shape in the first place, or last forever itself, no matter how much I wish it so or feel it so in the moment

and that reminds me of that Dorothea Lasky poem about writing poems – making “art” or whatever – to hold on to things, and I didn’t really get that until recently, and I hope this year and onward to learn to do this too, because otherwise beauty can only make me hopeless, but if putting it into things or making it myself makes me kind of hopeful, even if only temporarily, maybe these afternoon-days won’t all feel so short

January 2018