It consumes me, my isolation. It’s remarkable that I am surrounded by people, drowning in countless throngs of the faces of my many acquaintances, yet I feel wholly alone. I have my family by my side, more of them than usual, mind you, but we don’t really talk; we bullshit about the weather and watch movie after movie to strangle the silence between us, careful to not impose on one another with anything weighty. Nathaniel is where he always is when my spirits sour: he’s at a movie, at a concert, chipping away at an unnecessary 80-hour work week, waiting from a distance for me to cheer up and act normal. He comes home hours after I’ve gone to bed and leaves before I wake. In his absence my depression spirals, my perspective throbs and distorts and I fall deeper into dysfunction, and I hate myself for needing him the way that I do.

Elisse lied almost as compulsively and erratically as I do, and for the same reasons: in an attempt to pacify great expectations, to out-wit and out-run the judgments of others, to forge some semblance of privacy between us and the peering, disapproving gaze of the world around us. I wasn’t at the store today: I went to the park, but I told you otherwise because I hate that you need to know. I hate that you ask about the things that don’t matter and blatantly ignore the things that do.

Elisse and I are very similar in that respect: if you inspect the details, the technical mechanics of our stories, you’ll find them to be comically, absurdly untrue. Elisse, however, would always tell the truth about the things that matter. The arching themes- the method, the incentive, the foundational elements capable of explaining every subsequent minutia- were always offered without question. She felt too deeply to lie about what she felt, and she was wise enough to see the folly and the danger of trying to hide it. Thus she wore her soul on her sleeve, bravely and unconditionally.

When things were going well for me I saw this as a weakness and an imposition. When things were going badly I fled to her, frantically, as fast as my hypocrite legs would take me, to bask in her emotional candor and understanding. She had her insecurities- in hindsight I suspect they ran deeper than I realized- but she never apologized for being an emotional being.

She was too much in love with life to lie about the bittersweet thrill of it all. She was salvation and relief, and people gravitated towards her. We need to be honest, we need to accept what is, we need to admit to our demons in order to face them. We feel alone, we feel unworthy, we feel defective, we live life convinced of our inability and insanity, yet we spend almost every precious minute and ounce of energy convincing each other we’re normal and happy.

I am not happy. I don’t want to talk about the weather. I want to fall to my knees and beat my fists upon the ground, crying and sobbing and shrieking myself hoarse, ripping at my clothes, writhing and convulsing in the agony of all this mysterious, inexplicable, unjustified misery. I want to look in your eyes and say something worthy of the explosive existence we share on this earth. I want to discuss something that tries to do justice to the sky, or the snow, or the heart-wrenchingly beautiful concepts of family or friendship or love. I want to love you with the very sinew of my muscle and my being, without condition, without choice. When our mighty cities crumble and my carefully constructed world falls to shit, I want to turn my head and find you there unfaltering. We will mourn our losses, with time laugh at the dark irony of all the ugliness, and then, when the time comes, together we will rebuild whatever it was we let slip through our fingers.

I feel myself growing older. For some reason in my mind I have an image of shattering glass playing in reverse; millions of shards fly through the abyss to gradually complete a whole, unblemished, crystalline surface. Each day brings me new slivers of perspective and another day lived, and every once in a while I can feel how different my thoughts are from what they used to be. I don’t feel brilliant or wise or even less stupid, I just feel… older.

I’m not angry about certain things. I feel a reflexive impulse to open the gates, to let frustration billow and swell and muffle my good mood, to fire up and rage before slipping away to die. I open myself to these feelings, but the anger doesn’t come. I understand now, why people do some of the things they do. I understand that others are just as fragile and defensive and irrational as I. Everyone has their childhood issues, their insecurities, desperate desires stubbornly out of reach and coping mechanisms to accept them.

We’ve always been children, you and I. We fought so hard to prove to the world otherwise and god, how we wasted our time! What were we racing towards, what was the rush? Why did we run so frantically from the sweet carelessness of our youth? We cared so deeply, so desperately about so many of the wrong things. How silly those things seem from a distance! Why did we let them enrage us?

It’s all a dull throb now, those silly little things that once meant everything. I see reasons all around me to get upset but they mean nothing. There’s so much more to all of this than the slights, the injustices, the nagging thoughts of mediocrity and inability and insignificance. We stand beloved, just as we always have, just as we always will. Joy flashes through my limbs: we’re conquering our sadness, my love! The things that once consumed us stand powerless! I want to thrust out my arms and rejoice, I want to run in the grass and the sun towards the future and endless oblivion. I want to grab your hand and face the world, and with your hand in mine walk forward.

But you are elsewhere now, I know. You are with me but in a different way. You are the ink on my skin, the salt of memory-born tears, the wisp of tobacco smoke that encircled you as you embraced a lucky strike in the snow. Slowly, with each passing day, I come closer to accepting this.

I talk to you, you know. Like a lunatic I look up to the sky and chuckle about all the things you’d find funny. I roll my eyes and mutter to you throughout the day, convinced I can gauge your reaction to a tee. But there are things I don’t know about you, darling. There are things we hid from each other out of pride and distrust, all the while convinced we knew everything worth knowing about the other. We were blinded by how well we thought we knew each other; in some regards we were almost strangers.

That’s another thing each day gives me: scraps of truth that reveal how little I know and how tremendously little I knew yesterday. I suppose that’s all I have to say for now. Life is ironic in the blackest yet sweetest way possible, simultaneously falling in and out of focus, beating in rhythm to steps on the sidewalk, mellifluous, muted and miles above our control.