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?

oscar wilde said that if you know exactly what you want to be in life, a teacher or a grocer or a judge or a soldier, you will become it. and that will become your punishment. actually, not knowing what you want to be, reinventing yourself every morning, not being a noun but being a verb, moving in life, not being fixed in life is a privilege, even though it’s a difficult one sometimes. so don’t feel bad about not knowing. i think it’s the most wonderful thing to be open, to be a permanent student if you can in the mind.

because not everything profound has to be born of suffering. not every revelation needs to come from rock bottom. not every breakthrough needs to begin in crisis. you are allowed to know peace. you are allowed to experience softness and call it sacred. and yes, you are allowed to be well without needing to earn it through agony. so stop using your pain as proof of your depths. it’s time to retire the narrative that your pain is the most interesting thing about you. it is not. there are so many interesting things about you, but you have to take time and energy to learn them. start asking, what brings me joy, not just relief? what fuels nourishing, not just numbing? you don’t need to be in pain to matter. prove that to yourself by being the first person who acknowledges you without the pain.

i'm not healing i'm just collecting guilt fragments.

i wish the world were ending tomorrow. then i could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in vienna, and say: come with me, we are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. because the world is ending tomorrow. perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. but what if we don’t have time? or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. we could help each other very much.

i’m a mosaic of everything i’ve ever loved, even just for a heartbeat.

a modern man can no longer die a dramatic death. he dies in a hospital room, like a bee inside a honeycomb cell. that’s how i recall it, at least.

all my life, i’ve watched people chase dreams they secretly hated, dance with lovers they didn’t love, and laugh loudest when they felt most alone. i’ve seen idiots crowned king, genius left stranded, smoking on sidewalks, and integrity quietly traded for applause. but i’ve also seen strangers become family and friends.

complexity is not a problem, ambiguity is.
simplicity does not solve ambiguity, clarity does.

as you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. and in return, life and travel—leaves marks on you. most of the time, those marks on your body or on your heart—are beautiful. often, though, they hurt.

grief isn’t loud. it’s surgical. it cracks open your ribs at 3:44 a.m. and whispers her laugh into your lungs until breathing feels like betrayal and memory becomes a slow self-strangulation. it doesn’t scream; it seeps, curling under your skin like smoke, staining everything quiet. the weight isn’t in the wailing but in the moments that should be silent and aren’t, when her name hums through your bones without permission, when a song, a scent, a half-formed thought pulls the floor out from under you. grief rewires you, replaces heartbeat with echo, turns time into a cruel loop where healing looks too much like forgetting, and forgetting feels like losing her all over again.

do i contradict myself? very well then, i contradict myself, i am large, i contain multitudes.

i lived so carefully, thinking someone was watching. but the stage was empty, the audience never came.

a generation struggling to survive behind smiling faces and pretty pictures

to the wild wild youth. to the grand ambitions that were drowned by adult responsibilities. to heartbreaks and bruises. to drunk nights. to shared cigarettes. to morally ambiguous angels. to sweet wine. to feelings you can’t put into words. to regrets. to jealousy. to resentments. to those who left. to those who stayed. to scars across our hearts. to fear of commitment. to longing for that one love. to be afraid of opening up again. to sex. to gentle kisses. to soft touch. to standing by your door. to music. to pictures without stories. to set your soul on fire. to cry. to laughs. to disappointments. to intrusive thoughts. to pick ourselves up again. to not losing hope. to memorise those numbered days we are here. together.

individuality is increasingly policed by niche subcultures, where any expression that even vaguely resembles a familiar aesthetic is quickly dismissed as performative—like when a guy hums along to clairo and someone decides he’s staging vulnerability for women, or when a girl mentions she games or likes radiohead and is instantly accused of faking it for male approval. somewhere along the line, the self fractured into a hall of mirrors, with every version of you held up to someone else’s idea of what’s real, every action scrutinized and stripped of authenticity, reduced to a hollow performance presumed to exist solely for the validation of others, never as an expression of the self. when will we ever be free?

we read books and highlight the lines that speak to us, we listen to music and tattoo the lyrics that touch us, we turn to poetry and learn the lines that become us. we're all hopelessly inept people, struggling in vain to coherently express ourselves. we know what we want to say but we don't know how.

people hate their own art because it looks like they made it. they think if they get better, it will stop looking like they made it. a better person made it. but there's no level of skill beyond which you stop being you. you hate the most valuable thing about your art.

i wasn’t made to last forever,
but i was made to feel everything.

to love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. the people they're too exhausted to be any longer. the people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. we so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost. but it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. it is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.

if i don’t spend enough time getting to know myself, i’ll end up absorbing everyone else’s definition of me. i owe it to myself a life that’s mine.

now i know i’ve got a heart because it is breaking.

until death, all defeats are psychological.

tunnel vision & blurry mind

if something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.

the human obsession with purpose is merely a distraction from the absurdity of existence.

a profound sense of loneliness envelops me, as if the subject exists in a world untouched by others, suspended in a vast, empty expanse. there is an undercurrent of despair, a silent cry, a longing for something unattainable, as if the figure or scene is trapped in an eternal moment of yearning. and yet, there is also a sense of transcendence, as though this scene is not just a depiction of suffering but a meditation on the beauty of existence itself, rising above the pain to find a deeper, almost spiritual connection to the universe.

nothing is real except the present, and already, i feel the weight of centuries smothering me. some guy a hundred years ago once lived as i do. and he is dead. i am the present, but i know i, too, will pass. the high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand.

i always feel as if i'm struggling to become someone else. as if i'm trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. i suppose it's part of growing up, yet it's also an attempt to reinvent myself. by becoming a different me, i could free myself of everything. i seriously believed i could escape myself, as long as i made the effort. but i always hit a dead end. no matter where i go, i still end up me. what's missing never changes. the scenery may change, but i'm still the same old incomplete person. the same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. i think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself.

if i stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something i couldn't afford to lose. it was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. the kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.

two lovers went to the museum and wandered the rooms. he saw a painting and stood in front of it for too long. it was a few minutes before she realized he had gotten stuck. he was stuck looking at a painting. she stood next to him, looking at his face and then the face in the painting. what do you see? she asked. i don’t know, he said. he didn’t know. she was disappointed, then bored. he was looking at a face and she was looking at her watch. he was looking at a face but it might as well have been a cabbage or a sugar beet. perhaps it was something about yellow near pink. he didn’t know how to say it. years later he still didn’t know how to say it, and she was gone.

i think it could also be argued that self-creation in regard to the mind, is less daunting than through the flesh. the mind has the ability to offer a more malleable and less physically confrontational space for self-exploration, whereas the body often demands a more direct engagement with our limitations, desires, and vulnerabilities and exposes us to discomfort and confrontation with the physical self. the mind’s fluidity allows for more control and refinement, while the flesh - bound by biological constraints and sensory experiences, can often lead to unpredictable vulnerability and existential uncertainty. therefore while both forms can be integral, the intellectual pursuit of self-creation may indeed present itself as less intimidating and a more manageable path to understanding oneself.

intellectual seduction, on the other hand, can also be performative and self-centered. it isn’t just about deeply engaging with another person’s mind as it is also about how these engagements reflect their own self-image or offer new ways to understand themselves. in this sense, a relationship with intellectual intimacy as the forefront can be thought of as an extension of one’s ongoing self-exploration, essentially just seeing yourself or even part of yourself - that could exist or is brewing - within the another’s eye. it’s possible that intellectual exchanges aren’t always primarily about the other person at all. for many, the experience of being intellectually engaged might be just as much about personal growth and self-creation as it is about connecting with another - ultimately leading to a deeper understanding of one’s inner world and the continuous process of self-creation.

to be undressed, not in body, but in mind—is the kind of intimacy that lingers far longer than touch. and maybe this is the great paradox of intellectual seduction: we long for the mind because it is unknowable. the body can be mapped, claimed, exhausted. the mind is infinite.

if seduction is about transformation, then the question remains: what are we seeking to become? if physical love binds us to the moment, intellectual intimacy is an invitation to exist in a constant state of potential. and perhaps that is its greatest allure—not what it gives us, but what it promises. the thrill of the unfinished. the seduction of the unknown.

perhaps this is why the idea of intellectual seduction is so intoxicating: it thrives on restraint. a conversation charged with subtext, a letter laden with implication, a gaze held just a second too long—these moments generate their own kind of tension, a pleasure sharpened by denial. the body, paradoxically, becomes most present in its absence. if physical desire burns quickly, intellectual intimacy smolders.

but is restraint always sustainable? at what point does the hunger demand satisfaction? and if it is never met, does it turn into something else—devotion, frustration, obsession?

there’s an inherent tragedy in the idea of intellectual intimacy replacing physical desire. if seduction is transformation, then an intellectual relationship with no physical realization exists in a permanent state of becoming—unfinished, unresolved. and yet, this liminality is part of what makes it so powerful. the mind never fully possessed is the mind that remains desirable.

even the most consuming love for another person is, at its core, a misplaced yearning for the divine. we mistake people for salvation, we hunger for them as if they could complete us, only to find ourselves disappointed when they, too, are fallible.

i changed jobs and
cities, i hated holidays,
babies, history,
newspapers, museums,
grandmothers,
marriage, movies,
spiders, garbagemen,
english accents, spain,
france, italy, walnuts and
the color
orange.
algebra angred me,
opera sickened me,
peace and happiness to me
were signs of
inferiority,
tenants of the weak
and addled mind.

your face is becoming a fuzzy memory and i don’t know if i have it in me to remind myself of your features. i could let myself forget the face i’ll never touch again. or i could be reminded of all the ways you made me feel less than myself. sometimes i think there’s no good answer to anything in life. and it’s only the outcome that makes it a good answer. but there is no outcome to either choice. i think i’m just going to have to live with the fact that whatever we had is turning into a dizzy memory. and the love i had for you is rotting. the time is coming. i just don’t know if i want it to. missing you is forming into forgetting you. and with that i am sick to death. even now that you’re gone, you are still consuming my thoughts.

you know being a person never came naturally for me. but i have mapped the route your hands trace along my neck as if it were innate. long golden light and sloppy kisses. i think i could disperse into nothingness if it meant i could hold you a moment longer. my name hums in your chest even when you think i’m not looking. i can see everything you don’t. we laugh in between bites of flesh and our bodies entwine like skin covering a wound. i have thought of you every now and then.

everything that’s happened in the past year strangles me to silence. i’m stuck in a world no one will ever know because my tongue can never say the right words. my thoughts don’t make sense, even to me. time flows too quickly and stops when i don’t need it to. my eyes are always red, i’m guilty for that. but i have good intentions. i want to heal wounds with my mouth and speak to people that won’t remember me in the morning. i create my own ache and hate the world for it. my words are quick and cut with anger that will never go away. i’m never pleased with myself. i want to scrape out my insides and place them into someone else so that maybe they could understand me. i’m too intense and i find meaning in things you won’t be able to understand. i’m pretentious and an idiot but i’m also soft and tender and my world still shatters while you yell at me. i miss you.

i try too hard and i sleep in too late and there never seems to be an answer to anything. i wake up and can’t control the worry that eats away at my stomach. soon enough i’ll be nothing but bones. like a snake eating its own tail, i have no one to blame but myself. how can i be the person responsible and still have no control? the longer i spend on earth, the more i come to realize that i truly have control over nothing. not even myself. i spend time thinking about who is steering my ship. maybe a different version of me. the uglier one. maybe one day i’ll figure it out and steer it myself. but for now, i clench my stomach and pray for something better. i just have to wait.

i died in october and haven’t seen myself since. i search for her everywhere—glimpses of her in grocery store windows, the glow of lampposts, the stillness of creeks. sometimes i feel her presence, fleeting, when i wash my face or hang my clothes to dry. but she’s gone. you took her from me and hid her in the ruins you left behind. if i could haunt you, i would. but you don’t believe in ghosts—and you never will. in a way, we both died that month. but you killed me. and i stood there as you buried yourself.

this summer is long and warm with worry but you say my name and time forgives itself. let me grab your hand and show you what only god knows. you’ve seen me naked, but have you seen my flesh? my bones? the etching of your name in my ribs? i sat on the porch last night and for the first time felt my blood whisper your name. i don’t know when my body grew so fond of you, and i don’t know when it will cease. but for now, i will let summer sing us to sleep and wait for the next sight of you. my brain thanks you for the new scenery.

i press you to me and the birds stop chirping and the trees stop blowing and the buses stop coming and the world is asleep and nothing else exists except for your skin on mine and my skin on yours. i’ll be a piece of the earth one day, and you will be too. but i like to imagine that your piece of earth will be right next to mine, and little bugs will make their homes between us. they’ll come home to their families the same way you came home to me, and i’ll smile eternally with the same wine-flushed smile i gave you.

i’ve turned twenty three in a body that has been stolen and i’m not sure where to put my rotting bed. time keeps breaking into pieces of soured bones, and the mess cannot be cleaned. nightmares become stitched into dawn. guts curdle as broken birds hit the windows. my candles won’t light, and i’m not sure if i’ll ever be me again. everything is wilted. my bones still tremble. screams are swallowed. fingers trace for an answer, but the walls are a silent witness. the time has been lost, and i’m waving the flag with a mouthful of rotten birthday cake. how will i know when my body becomes mine again?