Everything is coarse up close.

Here's to being as old as we are.🥂 Here's to staying.
Some have left us. By chance, by choice. We carry them or we don't or we can't. But we're here. Older than we've ever been. Younger than how we feel. Always thinking that life has yet to happen.

I filled out a form yesterday. Wrote down my age; it was a surreal experience, as always. I never identified with the age I turned to. The last one has always lingered while my real age always whisper-yelled, "Wake up! This is life! This is all it will ever be!"

My age is all I'll ever be. But age is not just a number. It's childhood dreams, parental expectations, biological clocks and for some of us awaiting our deaths, a promise to oneself to not die before the time is due.

We focus on some things that age implies: career, marriage, kids...and neglect the other things that it entails. Good and bad. Confidence, impatience with decorum, quickness of the tongue, the slipping of our social masks. A kind of freedom when you have little to lose. When what's left of your hair is white and the bones are shying away from your skin and strangers not much younger than you have already called you, "ማዘር". These are the cliches you won't complain about.

But what about the friend group that shrinks down each year and get-together's start to feel like morbid count downs? When you tell the same stories again and again, not because you've run out of them but because you don't quite know how to explain the subtleties of them to someone that wasn't there, physically, as they took place. What then? When nobody gets the joke, what then? Anyone that knew anything, they've all died out on you. You've become the other.

When they don't bother to name your generation and toss you and your crooked uncle together in one age bracket, what then?

Is it only then that you are excused to be authentic to you?

So you can see AI summaries of telegram posts? As if I need another reason to hate AI! Are we this cooked?

"Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith’s opposite....

...He was articulate, but he never made speech seem effortless; on the contrary, he
exhibited what hard work it was—to make his faith, in tandem with his doubt, clear; to speak well, in spite of his stutter."

-John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Death and solider by hans larwin
1917

For my mind was hardly ripe
I tailed him and his blessed pipe

This is about The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Think I made it sound dirty.😅

Its International Women's Day.

Let us all daily celebrate motherhood, sisterhood, wifehood and above all, womanhood.

I hate that tiny bumps send my ship askew
The faintest wind rocks my boat
Drizzles cause my eyes to dew
And my house is eager to fall apart

These gentle waves that tear my sails
They're child's play in others' tales

Stretch Your Wings

There is a whole universe out there
Beyond the window through which you stare
But as you slumber in your bed of hay
Your dream will pass you by

So break free, songbird, for here
Your hums remain unheard

Take off, caged one
Stretch Your Wings
Shake off the monotony of your days

Leave your nest
And live with zest
Dare to try
New things to best

'Cause down yonder
Beyond the haze
There're roses to smell
And stars to gaze

Rules to break
Worries to mind
Wounds to nurse
Lovers to find

-My cheesy poems coming out of the wood work today

I have to resist the illusion of a clean resume
The one that buries dirty socks behind clean garments and smiles
My polished shoes are deceitful
Only I know where they've been
Where my toes dipped
And my eyes have seen

We'll eventually show ourselves
One frizzy strand at a time

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

-William Blake

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair.

But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time.

-The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

Tis a fearful/terrible thing to love what death can touch.

-Yehuda Halevi

It is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

-Donna Tartt

being the person who remembers everything creates an exhaustion that’s hard to explain to people who’ve never carried that role. the exhaustion is cause not just because of having a good memory or general organisation in life but it tends to leek into your functioning as the failsafe system for multiple people’s lives while personal needs get perpetually deferred because someone has to make sure the important things actually happen. birthdays get remembered, appointments get scheduled, plans get followed through on, details get tracked, promises get kept—all of this runs through one person’s mental infrastructure while everyone else gets to be spontaneous and forgetful and generally unburdened by the anxiety that things might fall apart if someone isn’t paying attention.