today we would have been married 14 years

Made this placehilder weeks ago...

For the poem I would write...

For what would have been out 14 year wedding anniversary...

But now, day of, I still cannot think of a thing to say...

Maybe that's closure.

more reward than punishment

 

sleepwalker

Sometimes, after finally falling asleep when I couldn’t before, I dream that I can’t sleep. While I’m resting, my Fitbit tells me so; while I’m in REM, my body is still, yet my mind plays out what feels like a memory of complete restlessness.

I have everything I wanted and needed—sleep—yet my brain tricks me into feeling as though I got none of it all night.

And that’s kind of where I’m at with my life right now. Everything is good, fine. Objectively, I have everything I want and need. Yet somehow, I keep envisioning holes and empty spaces—all those places of lack that don’t even exist.

I’m getting all the rest my body needs, but my mind is wandering again.

I am nostalgic for a time that never existed.

stendhal syndrome

Instagram now advertises an AI boyfriend app and a mail-order husband app dressed up as an international dating app. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve marked both “Show less of,” “Not interested,” and “See too much of.”

It doesn’t do any good. I’m almost certain it’s a waste of time to mark them as unwanted—they just keep coming.

It occurred to me that something about the way I doomscroll somehow seems to scream *lonely*. So I tried to fix the algorithm, searching and clicking on all kinds of different content.

Yet again, I get an ad of a woman saying her husband hasn’t asked her about her day in weeks, but her AI boyfriend does every night. And in pain management, they always say to stay ahead of the pain. Treat it before you feel it.

And so, I just have to get off social media. At least for a while. Because I’m too scared I’m one bad day, one difficult week, away from using up clean water so a data center can ask me about my day—and I can repeat the same shit I did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.

Besides, I know what I’m craving now. I figured out what I want, and it isn’t there. It isn’t in a phone or an app. It definitely has nothing to do with AI. No one has ever come down with Stendhal syndrome over these things.

Yeah. That’s what I’m wanting, what I’m craving: shit so pretty I faint, go a little crazy, fall into a stupor, can’t speak. And I’m pretty sure that will come from within.

am I really going to let this soft-ass life get to me?

all of life is a negotiation.