diary
I cannot, in good conscience, hold a planet seventy-seven million miles distant responsible for the fact that I dispatched three texts I regret and construed one perfectly neutral email as an unambiguous declaration of war. I know this. I own, on paper, a functioning frontal lobe and a library card.
I do it regardless, and I have ceased apologising for it entirely. It is cheaper than therapy and, in a genuinely wretched week, very nearly as effective: simply possessing somewhere to file the chaos that is not the bleak, total verdict ‘I am struggling and it is nobody’s fault and there exists no story that renders it meaningful.’
Blame directed at the sky is a form of clemency you can extend to yourself once you have exhausted the other varieties. It says: this week was hard, and the hardness was weather, and weather passes, and you are not the storm, you are only the one obliged to stand within it.
I am not mistaking the metaphor for a mechanism. I do not believe the planet is doing it. I believe I am a person who occasionally requires the sky to hold a feeling too large and too shapeless to hold bare-handed, and the sky, being vast, has always been liberal with the loan.
And in candour, if a rock that remote can reach across the entire indifferent solar system to sabotage my group chat for three consecutive weeks, that is a staggering feat of influence, and I respect it enormously. Mercury, you magnificent little menace. I forgive us both.
the diary lives on a site with a moon phase, a daily oracle and a shelf of things reviewed with feeling.
visit the full site