There was a fish dish on night two in Palermo, and even though it was so fresh, it still deserved a slap of salt on it. I don’t know where to go with that from here... was there something I forgot to return to?

Feelings buzzed like cicadas this time around in Sicily, hard to hold back, and I couldn’t go more than a couple hours without excitement pouring out. Back in NY, I still hear bugs getting louder and feel that there’s nowhere I’d rather be. Something beneath the surface of this sentiment holds more weight and I can feel it clamoring, connecting back to the false project of the answer. 

About is not an answer, but a region or an area. In Tiana Reid’s essay “Crushed,” a sick turn of phrase appears: the symbol of becoming. A crush is interstitial, both emotional and motional, referring to something so sillily powerful and painfully, obviously not built to last. All of a sudden, my chest collapses under the weight of the next second. 

In the case of the universe, a crush is an implosion. The unbearable weight of it all is, in theory, the thing that both destroys and births everything we see, collapsing, but subsequently releasing so much energy that the whole process starts over. A symbol of becoming. "Crush" in the human set deals with something boundless, unpredictable, and uncontainable. This definition holds up at physical and logical extremes.

You’ve got to keep a mind for kid art, and never call yourself dumb. I’m thinking about how inexperience keeps coming to the surface of my writing. There's something in the idea of juvenility and openminded-ness, intentional naivité, that relates precisely to the feeling of a crush. Beyond maintaining a freshness for the world, a fresh perspective, so to speak, I find myself searching for desire in an inexperienced form: something less charged and not as sheisty. Not a reach for the objective or unattainable, but the crush for life. Desire as something held deep within, not a stand-in for chasing the dragon.

Like a dried up tardigrade or a catfish in survival mode, a crush comes as a drop of water and makes my gills flap, setting me back into motion even if I’ve been sedentary the past few months, or years. But the ocean is tumultuous and it’s not easy being returned to inexperience. I read this essay at a time in my life when it was destined to, if not make more sense, match up uncannily point-for-point with things that are going on in my current life. 

When something hits so close to home, I wish I didn’t think, “wow, this was meant for me at this moment.” I wish that things weren’t serendipitous, because it generates an out-of-body grandiose feeling: ego! How dare you see yourself in someone else’s words? This is their effusion, their outpour.

I wish I didn’t relate, so I could read anything at any time of night without tearing up, without recognizing myself in someone else’s words, without feeling like I had to print them on myself. 

Leaving it be is impossible. I'm not entitled to this feeling of connection, and it can go as far as feeling invasive or undeserved. It also feels like the point of everything.

I wish I could see clearer that what I’ve been doing is not particularly unique or random, and might even be a predetermined path that the world knew about. I’m still pushing down and thru sadness, months out of a four-year relationship, but what is the point of emphasizing this when there is so much to be happy about? Essays like "Crushed" remind me that we're all on pretty much the same timing, that even though equivalence is a lie, the same things happen all the time. Why?

There is no answer. There is only constantly being crushed, and the Big Bang of blinking eyes, the every-second devolution into darkness and back to sight.

Unlike Tiana Reid, I don’t ask my ex if she wants to read this before it goes out. I haven’t for any piece, even when they were acutely about her. There are reasons. There may even be an answer, but dead. I poked it with a stick and it went nowhere, and I don’t even know how that one feels. 

What is that about? I still feel so about something that is not the region of my life anymore. A story about two people who are no longer about each other. If you keep looping around, tracing the same shape, but the thing you’re outlining is gone and there’s nothing in that space now, what is even being drawn? What is being described by those points?

A heart in the sand, a loose thread around the world…