new year.

Something hit and I had to take a distance from myself today. I saw so many jumbled emotions there, like if a firework had strings attached to each of its tiny explosions, each of its other ends tied to its source. It’s not that dramatic, but for the purpose of this entry it should be. And for the first few hours it was, until I pulled each tangled string gently and said to each of them, it’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. And so on. Softly like a fluffy lapin jeune, then I could feed myself again, a variant of cold soba with miso something. Lactobacillus Acidophilus.

The differences between anger, disappointment and sadness are not that subtle, I found. There are definite lines between them, and those lines are not thin. The lines themselves, though, come in gradation of colours, like the rainbow. A liminal rainbow, so to say. I went through all my saved, colour-coded history searching for each moment of anger, each one of disappointment and each of sadness. The archive was quite dusty, but it was intact. I didn’t cry. No, I did, actually. Eventually.

One of the reasons I write is to remember. Whether or not my memory ends up subjective is a completely different problem. When I said the archive was intact, it might be objectivity: my memory is in fact inaccessible to anyone including me. What remains are just stories. Stories I believe, and I regard as what truly happened. All of us shed skins, it happens so naturally, and it’s painless.

So which ones were anger, which ones disappointment, which sadness? When I tried to classify them like Darwin did on his butterfly farms, I found myself smiling. The wind has apparently blown all the dust out of Oz and I’m finally writing again. I could see anger, I could see disappointment, I could see sadness. With you, what I knew, what I believed, what remains is solely sadness.

It’s a deeper kind of sadness, the one that’s a bit cream-ish in colour, like the very core of an atom, dissipated. I wish I could read this to you, eye to eye, with nothing in between, not even writings. Not even rainbows not even butterflies not even Darwin no matter how beautiful. But that is only the shape of years to come, when unpredictability meets with stochastic chance, the loveliest twin I’ve never known I had. So I can only thank you, for whatever grief it takes, four weeks of sorrow, forty days of silence – it is wise of us to take our time – each a breath of fresh air.