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.