apogee

I’ve been living in a state of jet lag, so life this week has felt dreamlike and unreal — or nightmarish and unreal, depending on how you want to look at it. Without any sense of time, there is no regularity. Each day is bookended by meetings where I struggle to focus. In between I alternate between barely keeping awake and remaining stubbornly sleepless. Is it breakfast, lunch, or dinner when you’ve been up all day and don’t eat till 4? And do you actually need food if you never feel hungry?

I ducked into Kino to pick up a book I’ve been meaning to read. I inhaled a third of it in one sitting but now find myself unable to progress because here is the first inflection point: where giddy, unbridled joy gives way to everyday heartbreak. I bought this book knowing full well what happens, knowing full well that this is the sort of story I seek out, and now — now I am paralysed, stuck on a line in the middle of nowhere: The answerable questions were the only ones worth asking.

Maybe this is my greatest flaw: being absolutely certain of something until I am inevitably not. Just today I found myself saying I shouldn’t have closed Public Culture, as if I made that decision in a tizzy. It was years in the making — rational, patient thought — and still, three days from our closure, I sit here thinking maybe I can walk back this announcement. Logically, of course, I would never do that. Logically, I am too proud. Logically, this is the most fiscally responsible decision I have made. Logically, I need this change in my life. Logically, isn’t the grass greener where you water it? But let’s be honest: I have never been assuaged by logic.

So instead of working through my emotions like a healthy being, I cram my schedule with work, catch-ups, check-ins. My WhatsApp is a tangle of half-answered conversations and harried scheduling. Let’s do lunch, a client says. Can I take you out for coffee? I say to someone else. Saw you’re back, can’t wait to see you! texts a friend. I repeatedly double book myself.

What I would love to do is to lie still and watch the world spin. I want to be that bored, that present, that ready. But I am terrified of what will crack open if I do that, so I let my work self leach into my private calendar. Persistent extroversion does not come naturally to me. But right now, I choose company over the mess inside.

There have been moments of reprieve. Like when pb and I caught up on basketball in bed, half-asleep, or the night I paced under the night sky, confessing my innermost thoughts to W. That’s when I feel the knots untangle. I want to choose this simplicity always, but I am equally fuelled by ambition, pride, fear. I stay up writing, hoping the hurricane inside me can quiet long enough, but avoid talking about how this feels to anyone else. Why do I feel like every decision turns into a mistake? Why does it always feel like I’m making the same ones? And when does regret turn into something you learn to live with?

— I really hope the answerable questions aren’t the only ones worth asking.