tell me where to keep this

in the circuitous way that life works, events are coming to an end and it all feels so familiar.

i am slightly disappointed with how things have turned out. other times in the past, eras that now feel like a million years ago, i would've managed, i would've sojourned on. the idea has never been to merely cope but to take every setback as a form of impetus, barreling faster towards some vague sense of future and happiness. people make the mistake of assuming that i am a pessimist because i recognize too quickly the ugliness in the world. but my fallacy has never been cozying up to the bad but believing for so long, that some good comes out of everything.

it is hard for me to accept this. lately, i have noticed the creeping shade and the slow turn inwards. the growing list of things i am sorry for: i don't mean to be so angry all the time, i don't mean to be so sad. often at night, i walk back home and it feels like every day there is less. Less time, less light--everything is diminishing. i wish i could take handfuls of it all, store it in boxes and hide it beneath planks of wood before it disappears but i can't.

i realize now how little good is left. there isn't enough to pass around. lately i stand very still, this frozen palm pressed to my hip.

it just gets harder.

paramount

i am keeping my ear very close to the ground.

i am listening harder than ever to hear what is approaching.

lately, i have been mistaking the sound of my refrigerator for the sound of my ceiling fan. for some reason, they are remarkably similar. oh my fridge: chopping the still air with its imaginary blades. woosh woosh woosh. a familiar rhythmic churning every hour or so. i find myself sitting in my room thinking "hmm better turn off the fan."

even though it is nearly mid-april, it is still so cold in new york. it is becoming a little dispiriting to remind myself that, no, it is not the fan, it's just the fridge. it's not nearly fan-weather yet.

in other news, i'm moving out by the end of the month. while i have a bunch of things to finish up beforehand, i'll be leaving the city soon too. it's surprising but i'm really looking forward to it.

nyc is the kind of place you either love or hate and if you grew up here and live your whole life here, you can't help but love it. at the same time though, you end up obsessing about the parts of it you are losing. the nature of this city is change and all the familiar elements that you have known eventually become supplanted by the alien and the new. every loss starts feeling like a memory slipping away and the longer you stay, the more the city starts feeling like a memorial of your own life.

in between fighting with myself about what it is that i hate about "new" new york and what it is in the grit, cement, and oddly out-of-place tree that keeps my finer feelings afloat, i've come to accept that living in long island will not be so terrible. in every aspect of my life now, i expect the worst and i figure that things can only surprise me by turning out better than i planned.

if nothing else, it will let me do something i have never really done which is to miss the city. i'm looking forward to shifting my perspective away from what it is that is disappearing before me to what it is that will still be there when i return.