I thought I was fucking grand, and then I thought I was garbage. Then, I worked without thinking. I plowed through, and found that the elusive spark I’d been chasing was accessible, lightable from within. It just took work, and fuck that it did, I have always wanted to avoid that shit so hard.

It’s something I can do. Make the spark. I used to think it was about doing it anyway, but it’s not. It’s about finding that thing that makes you go, the dying relic of it, and breathing flame back into it.

My friend died last week.

Or like, I’m unsure how to phrase this. My husband’s friend. My friend, too, though, I can say that much with certainty. More my friend than my husband’s other friends have been, with the exception of a few. He died suddenly, and his parent’s and brother were there, and I can’t get that scene out of my head and I was states away when it happened.

I miss him.

He told me to go back to school, and to do it for creative writing instead of anything logical. He told me, days before he died, that the he’d worked shit jobs and done nothing to school for a decade so he could have a job that didn’t make him hate life. He had just graduated.

Saying it’s unfair would be so much of an understatement it’d drive me insane, but it is. It’s unfair. It’s unfair it’s unfair it’s unfair.

He told me to go back to school, and to get out of social work, and when his brother was going through his things he found a box marked ‘very delicate,’ and it was full to the brim of carefully wrapped small packages.

Seashells were inside each one.

I think instinctively I view time as set. It’s already happened–the future. I pass the anniversary of my death each year, and I have no idea. It infuriates me that he did, too. It makes me so, so angry that this might’ve been just what happened.

Not because he didn’t do anything, because he did. Because he didn’t know, I suppose?

He changed my direction, and I wasn’t even that close to him.

Perhaps knowing only would’ve made it worse. Perhaps living time linearly is a survival tactic, an evolultionary benefit for a species that would’ve driven itself mad, had it known.

Perhaps we do more if we don’t know.