in the beginning there's always so much possibility. you wake up each day surprised by your surroundings, surprised by what has just recently become your life, surprised by the fact that there still is potential for surprise. (this is when i walk around with a self righteous smile, when the weather, whatever shit i have to do, whatever bad luck i'll stumble through, still all seems so incredibly negligable. this is the definition of happy. this is how i like to remember everything, the mental map of my history is composed entirely of the firsts i've had scattered throughout the past twenty three years, several strung together remind me how i've drifted, how i've faltered, how i've fallen in love when i'd rather forget or when i need to remember, when i need to remind myself somewhere in the middle.) in the middle there's so much redundancy, there's variations of the same themes that eventually all sound like the same stagnant melody, there's that slight nagging feeling that you've already lost something.

and you have, you've lost the novelty and there's no way to backtrack, there's no way to erase all that you've come to expect from everything that once had the brilliant ability to defy all expectations. (this is when i start to worry, when i assume that the rest of the world is like me, and that this can't be making them happy either. this is when i wonder why it never seems to be enough, this is when i understand why friends fall out of touch, why couples break up, why people move and change jobs and get depressed when they feel like they can't change anything at all. this is when i'll do anything for a sense of agency, for a hint of possibility, when i want to scream things i don't even mean just to crack through the thick, dull smog of monotony. this is when i need you to remind me of everything i know i should know but it's just so easy to forget in the middle.

and there's nothing sadder than forgetting, than forcing a premature ending, which always only makes me remember the beginning and how even the middle seems sort of wonderful when you get to the end.) in the end there's needing, there's a need to remember it as better than it ever was and a need to dismiss it all as not that much, there's mourning the messy overlap of reality and retrospect, there's eventual appreciation that it was both so much more and less than that. (this is what i used to fear so much, this is what at twenty three feels inevitable, what i always look forward to somewhere in the back of my mind. this is the question i always ask at the beginning, i know it's unfathomable now, but i wonder just how this will eventually end, who will i be, how will it have changed me, will i even remember then how happy this once made me?

the question that holds the balance of life in it's eventual answering. endings are eclipsed by beginnings, they are made somewhere in the middle, they foreshadow what we all would rather not know to be true. as endings accumulate, it's hard to imagine that there will even be other beginnings, that life, love, the people you swear you know will always find some way to surprise you. two months stuck in school for the summer, the one i wish i had spent in italy, two months of never-ending countdowns to you, to long weekends that still aren't long enough this june. (the last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. this that i see now, she thought, to see no more this way. oh, the last time how clearly you see everything as though a magnifying light had been turned on it, and you grieve because you wish you'd held it tighter when you had it every day.) i'm not grieving yet, but the stage is being set.