I was born in 1990. If you were born around that time, I suspect you also feel a profound emptiness inside of you, which you can’t recognize or don’t comprehend. All of my writing is beginning to try and comprehend it. 

3.4.17

Loving someone starts with two kinds of sadnesses. The first kind is a sadness you feel when you’re apart. The second sadness is a sadness of not having. Think about the person you love. Now think about how you felt when you didn’t have them. It is a peculiar sadness, closer to emptiness than not-happiness. The danger begins when this sadness resurfaces. Even though you have the person you love, and you are with them, you feel the sadness of not having them, and you feel the cold place inside you that is left behind when people abandon each other, though no abandoning has yet taken place. The first kind of sadness is a beautiful sadness. It is a sadness of subjunctive thinking, of should haves and will dos. It is a sadness embedded in love, like the yolk of an egg, and all that empty white space around the yolk is potential. But the problem with these sadnesses, beautiful or not, is that they’re cold and uncomfortable. Sadness forces you to want things. And the things you want are all the things this sadness emptied out of you. I guess its okay to be sad. Because being sad is being human. The moment you stop feeling sad something tremendously wrong has happened inside of you, and you have started on the years long path to non-existence. But that is for another time, another poem.

Written at 8:36 at night, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA, while preparing to get drunk.