When you participate in a group text message between people that haven’t convened in a while, when someone comes back to town you haven’t seen in a while (and it feels as if they have not yet left, perhaps you are in denial), and you get those texts that are updates on everyone’s arrival - I’m five minutes away, got held up at work, etc - and you read them and then right above them you see when the last time you all texted each other as a group, it was some years previous, the mind reels, what we were doing then, why and where were we meeting, is it really so rare a convergence as this lack of texts would make it seem. These old messages are ghosts that your cell phone charms out from beyond the pale (or is it behind the veil).

Later lightly disassociating and feeling the personal, particular grain of how deeply psychedelic all lived experience is (for instance standing your friend’s stoop with a rotary telephone under your arm, you are to give it to him in order to have your music play through it at a music festival in a few weeks, he’s late to meet you because he has witnessed a severe bike accident and, also, it’s his anniversary, you recall how they talked about their first night as a couple when you were here last, and you stand in the almost-not-cold early April air wearing a jacket from a country-western bar in your home town that mysteriously appeared to you on the rack at a used clothing store 3,000 miles from where you were born but two blocks from where you now work, in your 30s) - one could endlessly free associate on every individual you know, one could tie together the webs of connection, when and where these people met, how they are affiliated, what they were doing when they entered your life and how much time has elapsed, what has changed, who has left town or gotten married or maybe died, who was President when a friendship was formed, what records were popular (and how they’ve aged, whether or not those bands broke up), all data, all points of intersection spurious or meaningful, reading the wet and spent tea leaves of your own life and looking for shapes - there, along the rim, a rising lion, a tongue of flame, a moon. And then naturally - of course! - an acquaintance passes you on the street, they are carrying home their groceries, they invite you to a birthday party next month and, for the third time, ask for the date of your birth, sagely nodding when they determine your sign, making some shape of it all.

This writing this week is an exercise in how quickly and efficiently I am able to do the things I want to do (I imagine someone - not I - effortlessly and cleanly breaking the neck of a chicken, then plucking its feathers), it is a test of how dedicated I am to getting in a full night’s sleep, to responding to messages and notifications and alerts promptly and without anguish. It is my attempt to say no to things - even now I am on my way home having said no to two friends looking to see me at a bar, they would show me kindness, the impulsiveness of a last minute hang is nearly irresistible, yet here I am typing with two thumbs and carefully balancing on the train back to my house. I am trying to see how expansive I can be without bursting, I am also trying to take up as little space as possible. Part of me still believes that with the right combination of words and tones I will unlock some deeper happiness, some unhurried moneyed contentment that only shiny haired people get to enjoy, and yet I know, as I was told earlier, that there is no needle to thread, there is only thread, the line of a single life, who you are and what you choose to do (“am I more myself today? What would I do in this situation?”). Not what you choose. What you are doing, beyond choice, what you are driven toward by unseen forces in your sleep and what you stumble in amidst, a foal in the mist.