1. Scribbled Secret Notebooks, and Wild Typewritten Pages, for Yr Own Joy.

on the distance you can't see

"A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."
- Jack Kerouac

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The social internet isn’t a very good place for me to exist, though I keep coming back to it because sometimes I like the illusion of protection I get from having a screen between me and the world. Mostly I come back because it’s the only way I can keep up with people I wish I could still live real life with, but can’t because circumstances don’t allow it. I cherish the ability to be a small part of your life on the internet, even if it is a shallow substitution for the real thing.

A little is better than none, right?

Still, I can feel when I’ve lost the delicate balance. I didn’t want my feelings to end up somewhere they don’t belong, so I stepped away and went in search of real and tangible things.

When I get like this I start thinking writing is the problem, like maybe writing is a shallow substitution too. So I decided to take a break from that as well. For two months I wanted to simply experience life without recording what I think about it, which didn’t work. I wrote a lot, and now I have pages and pages of scribbles that I have no idea what to do with. Sometimes I wish I didn’t live with this compulsion to document my thoughts. I daydream about how it might feel to be able to turn off my mind. Sometimes I believe I would give up writing if it meant I could be happy.

I’ve been contemplating Jack Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” a lot lately. I’ve been wondering why I write. Part of me writes because it’s the quickest way to the truth; the only way I know how to express it sometimes. And part of me values privacy more than anything on earth so most of that writing never sees the light of day. I even find myself monitoring my journals, omitting these truths for fear of them being found later.

Sometimes writing is a way of grappling with loss, and I find myself searching for someone who might understand that loss. If I read a line someone else wrote that fits into this hole in my heart, or if I write a line that fits into someone else’s, then it feels like all of this might be worth it.

But I’ve never been very good at losing things. As David Foster Wallace once wrote, “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.” Even when I attempt to soothe myself with the zen teachings on the art of letting go, it often makes me sad. Sometimes life doesn’t feel like a lesson in letting go, sometimes it just feels like losing.

And writing doesn’t ease the pain.

I find the internet to be a constant reminder of loss, a graveyard of half-alive things we can’t keep. It offers the promise of something beautiful, but falls short every time. It presents a false sense of connection, and it leaves me cold. There are so many people we don’t get to know, so many places we don’t get to see, so many lives we don’t get to lead.

Somehow writing to you hasn’t felt real and tangible lately. You’re so close, just an inbox away, but I can’t reach you. There exists between us a distance you can’t see, but I can feel.

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"what do I want?

I want to sit with you and be able to tell you the truth. I want you to hold me while I cry, and understand. I don't want to feel the space between where I end and you begin, that ever-present gap between souls. I want to be so close to you that I'm finally not alone."

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It’s hard for me to accept that we’re all in passing; that life really does limit how much we’re able to be a part of each other’s lives. Sometimes I wonder if not having the ability to find each other online would be better. The pain would still stab our hearts, because this world really is too big and we really are going in opposite directions, but with the social internet the pain stabs us every time we unlock our phone. Or maybe it’s just me.

As much as I wish to do away with this particular loneliness, the internet (and I’m tempted to say writing) doesn’t offer a cure. So what is it I’m writing for? Why do I keep coming back? To give that gift to others? It sounds altruistic, but I doubt it’s true.

A few years ago I got in my head about what I should and shouldn’t write. I mention it in so many of these letters that I’m annoyed by it. I felt an immense pressure to share what I really didn’t want to share, but I’ve given that up. I no longer feel wrong for not wanting to talk about it—even if I’m told it would make me feel better, and even if I’m told it would help others.

David Foster Wallace said it like this, “But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?”

So maybe I write to you simply because I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t. (Another Kerouac line I’m fond of, “I am writing this book because we're all going to die.”) I’ve been attempting to make writing make me feel closer to people, to close the gap, but it can’t. That’s not what writing is for me. Writing is a solitary act. It’s how I understand myself in relation to the world. It’s how I learn what I think and feel. And if it ends up changing anything in a meaningful way that’s good, but not necessarily the objective.

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I realize writing this on the internet is a bit ironic. By sharing this I’m grasping for connection, and I know it will fail, and in its place an emptiness will settle. Because I’m a fragment of my real self here, and as you read this, you are a fragment of your real self. And there is so much more for us to enjoy about each other than what little can be shared through a screen.

I hope you know I wish things were different. This ability to share our thoughts, and have them read by others, is merely a consolation to experiencing each other in real life.

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“I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses.’ Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.”
- Jorge Luis Borges

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