• • •

being capable is one thing. but being too capable is another.

i know exactly what my life could become. apparently, knowing is the one form of participation i can reliably sustain.

hope needs uncertainty. i have replaced uncertainty with an extremely detailed understanding of how i keep fucking myself over.

what i feel is not hope. it is the slow horror of watching insight do the opposite of absolve me. every answer makes me more responsible for the fact that nothing has changed.

nothing is withholding the future from me. i am waiting for the right life to identify itself beyond reasonable doubt, relieve me of every competing possibility, and retroactively convert the years i spent not choosing into some kind of eerie intelligence.

i know what i could do. i know what i want to make, what i want to become, what i would have to risk, what would have to change. then, because apparently wanting something cannot simply be allowed to embarrass me in peace, i start checking what else i have promised myself it will do. save me. prove something. correct the record. make a few people feel briefly fucking stupid. this is where it starts going wrong.

i want to write, then picture somebody reaching the end and thinking, fuck. maybe she was never difficult to value. maybe i decided what she was worth before i had done enough looking to know. i have already perfected this imaginary person’s remorse. the story itself remains, for now, a rumor.

i want to sing, then realize i have quietly asked the song to do something medically impossible: keep me alive inside people who are perfectly capable of moving on.

i want work that matters, then realize i have confused purpose with leverage. somewhere along the way, “i want to contribute” became “i would like my value to be so fucking obvious that nobody gets the luxury of pretending otherwise.”

i want love, then catch the considerably less romantic request underneath it: choose me again. and again. keep doing it until i finally run out of ways to explain why it does not count, why you do not know me well enough yet, why i have somehow just been extremely persuasive.

the second i find the part of the desire that wants to be admired, wanted, remembered, envied, avenged, whatever, i go, there you fucking are. as if the most self-hating interpretation is automatically the most intellectually serious one. as if contempt is somehow better at fact-checking me than love.

i trust the thought that wounds me because i assume it has nothing to gain. this is, of course, bullshit. believing it means i never have to risk discovering that the kinder explanation was true and i wasted years being clever about nothing.

no one wants anything for one reason. there is the reason you would say out loud, the reason you admit after two drinks, the reason that makes you feel like an asshole, and the reason you picked up at twelve when you were still young enough to think whatever hurt you was probably explaining you.

i know mixed motives are not a moral failure. i know people make good things for terrible reasons and terrible things for good ones. i know all of this until the conclusion has to be: fine. want it anyway.

i want to begin only once i can say, with a straight face, that i am not making something to be saved by it, loved because of it, or finally seen correctly by people who already had their fucking chance.

so, naturally, i wait for motives no human being has ever had.