Lately I have avoided reading, because reading opens me up, and when I am open I am forced to confront what I am not confronting and wish to avoid. What I wish to avoid: delusion or not, internal or real, it rings in me clear as day. Reading—usually—restores me. More than any other medium, and furthermore, I need to do it: it’s essentially my job, what I’m paid to do. So it’s not an ideal situation to be confronted by something that seems too big to manage whenever I sit and read through something for an extended length of time. But, because I have to do it, perhaps it’s better that I learn how to sit with these unexpected feelings, not to avoid them but to embrace them, so that I might spend less time running from them and come to understand what they really are or mean. And in the process of doing so, spend more time reading, which is, in the end, perhaps all I really want. 

Today the light dimmed in stages as I moved from the kitchen to my room. My body was telling me to go outside. The air was sweet and I felt restless. I had a kind of time. There was something in me, activated. But I decided to stay inside. It felt like the right decision, until it didn’t, but by then we were well into evening.

Where’s the light? I ask myself.

I should not have given the web address for this website to anyone. I should not have bought such a fast and slim computer. At the reading I apologized to someone that I had plans to set up a series with, earlier. Plans that I’m relieved now we did not follow through on (it would be another thing to make me anxious). “Oh, that’s okay,” she said. “I was probably too depressed to do it. And I assumed you probably were too.” I felt like I had more to say to her but then the reading started and she did not move forward. 

I thought she would but she did not. 

We all agreed that it was a special night, that there was a kind of resonance between the readers. I read part of a story entirely in questions. I described the ending to a friend: the father writing letters eventually reveals his own negligence. But he is ignorant of it. Afterwards, the basketball game projected across the far wall of the bar. The home team was up ten on the away at half. I left then, at the same time as a friend I worried some would think I was going home with—it wasn’t my intention. That wasn’t what I was doing. 

I just didn’t want to leave the bar alone.