spent my summer lying by the north atlantic listening my sorrow away with adrienne lenker, lana del rey and sufjan stevens.

i always feel like i’m one step away from a completely different life, for better or for worse. i’d like to think that tomorrow i could wake up, run the errands, and on the way home, get blindsided by a drunk truck driver speeding through a red light. and that’s it. that’s how my life plays out. there’s no grand conclusion, just an abrupt left turn.

i wonder if that thought comes from my love of sudden shifts, or if it’s the opposite. perhaps i’m more afraid of a life planned out. people have goals. most people move toward them. they strive, succeed, or fall short. if nothing goes awry, the life they envisioned becomes the one they inhabit. but then what? if life orbits in a perfect arc, does it gain significance, or lose it?

maybe this is just the reckless phase. maybe i love the thrill of it all more than i should. but for now, i’d rather stand wide-eyed in the storm than sleepwalk through the calm of a life perfectly set.

(while crossing poland/slovakia border)

some people turn sad awfully young. no special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. they bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as i say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world.

memories are precious to us. it is no accident that they are coloured by poetry. the most beautiful memories are those of childhood. of course memory has to be worked upon before it can become the basis of an artistic reconstruction of the past; and here it is important not to lose the particular emotional atmosphere without which a memory evoked in every detail merely gives rise to a bitter feeling of disappointment. there’s an enormous difference, after all, between the way you remember the house in which you were born and which you haven’t seen for years, and the actual sight of the house after a prolonged absence. usually the poetry of the memory is destroyed by confrontation with its origin.

i’m trying not to spend my life convincing myself that love or joy is reserved for the idealised version of myself that only exists in the future.

and suddenly, it’s july again, and time has passed without my permission. july has a memory that the other months don’t. it has a stickiness like tree sap you can’t wash out of your clothes. i always find myself here, sitting on the sun-warmed pavement, listening to the silence that used to be laughter, watching ants as they march in circles that never end. what is it that time does to us? what does july know that we don’t? what was it?