Skilly 'n' Duff

Despair hits in the strangest ways. I am sitting outside of a falafel shop, waiting to meet a new friend from my [will be discussed later!] workshop for dinner, and there it is. It has no sense of timing and it doesn’t stop—you are awash, immobilized by it. I am sitting outside of a falafel shop and desperately sad and I wish it were less dramatic and less ordinary.

I don’t think I’m particularly good at being in the world. Case in point: the lion’s share of this year to date. January and then February passed, like klaxons and at the same time only vaguely acknowledged. March was an aftertaste. April was… better, comparatively, by a margin (I’ll take a margin). And May? We are unraveling again, in May. It’s an ugly, earthly thing, this sweeping out-of-body-ness. And it’s all edges to topple off of, like some cruel anti-brownie (I try to find the humour where I can).

Nobody ever teaches you how to be a person torn in-between. How to shape your breaths so as to accommodate both the solitude and the stampede.

Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood

For the better part of my life I was a champion of boxing away every iota of a remotely negative feeling—I became quite the expert. Feelings were strictly Uncool and I have no illusions of having been or ever being Cool, but packing them away, booting them off my mental Bridge of Khazad-dûm, and hoping they didn’t resurface was best practice for some 15 or so years.