diary
I KNOW the moon is a rock: an airless, cratered, gravitationally obedient rock that has been faithfully falling around us for four billion years and harbours, I am fairly certain, no opinion whatever regarding my week or my group chat.
And yet. Every full moon I reorganise my entire existence, weep precisely once, and feel some ancient tidal thing draw at me as though I were ninety percent seawater, which, biologically, I very nearly am. The pull is real even where the narrative I drape across it is invented.
I have resolved that this is not so much a contradiction as a paradox I am permitted to inhabit. The rock is the fact. The ritual is what I make of the fact so that it might mean something to a creature who cannot subsist on facts alone.
We are the only animal that requires its truths to also be beautiful, that will perish of a life which is accurate but contains no music. I have come to think this is no defect in need of correction. I think it is the whole of the assignment, the thing we were set here to do with our brief allotment of nights.
So I hold both within the same hand: the empirical rock and the tidal ache, the physics and the weeping. I decline to let a degree I never earned argue me out of either. The moon does not care. The caring was always mine to perform, and I intend to perform it well.
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