I’m not returning—and have spent the last two-plus months free of Tumblr and quite happy for it—but I felt I left too abruptly for some people. More than I thought, seeing as I just logged on to a crowded inbox. 

I’m returning to blogging, but in a more professional manner. I don’t want to repeat the mistakes I made with Tumblr. But in the interest of reconnecting with some of those I left behind, and as a show of good faith to some of the people I unwittingly hurt—again, according to some messages I received—here is that blog:

Wasted Words

(An incredibly original title and domain name, right?)

This is, of course, all predicated on the assumption anyone actually gives a shit about my ongoing adventures. If I ventured a guess, I’d say that number is perilously close to or equaling zero. This could just be me grumbling a bit of self-important nonsense into the wind.

Oh well.

Goodbye, again.

I’m wasting my life, I’ve realized. What little energy I have goes in the wrong direction and there needs to be a correction. Three and a half years on here and I haven’t done a single worthy thing. No, that’s not true. I’ve deleted the oldest post in my saved drafts, a suicide note I wrote in the winter of 2010. That was difficult. Everything else has been cursory and forgettable.

So I’m logging off.

I’ll see you around, kids.

We’re the futureless, the tetherless, the unpredictable even to ourselves. We have no answer for Where do you see yourself in five years? other than canned laughter. All we hold dear fits inside a single bag, which sits in the corner waiting for that frantic moment of packing and flight. Our bank accounts never dip below the cost of a bus ticket. Forwarding addresses fall behind us like footsteps. The shipwrecked ephemera of abandoned furniture and old books already read and almost-friends who remember two or three drunken nights with us.

How do you distract a heart? How do you settle the gut’s roiling tempest, forcing hot storm surges through your veins, each pulse screaming for another unexplored road to continue down? You eschew. You walk. You leave behind wrong-turned lovers and hollow jobs and friends who’ve grown tired of you. You slip away with barely a sound.

At what age can you stop asking yourself Aren’t you too young to be feeling this empty?

Harmon Hall, Kalamazoo College.
Early February, 2009. Night.

It’s snowing. Of course it’s snowing.

Yann Tiersen plays on the speakers. Good Bye, Lenin! score on repeat. I’m sprawled on the floor, arms above my head, fingers fanned against the walls, so cold that my skin almost sticks to the paint. Eyes closed, I can feel my reach spanning through the cement and mortar and tile and piping. Feel myself expanding room by room, hallway opening into hallway opening into hallway.

This building is alive. Directly below me, someone clicks a pen absentmindedly while studying for Organic Chemistry. Down the hall, a Freshman swimmer is the highest he’s ever been in his life and scared that the sensation will never end. Three couples are fucking in this moment (two of them sound bored, simply going through the motions; the third ecstatic and giggling, the thrill of the first time for new partners, doomed to fade in time). In the basement someone is writing on a typewriter. I’ll never learn who this person is, despite my best efforts. Movies on mute, cages lefts open, books left unread, a disgruntled roommate pissing into a bunkmate’s pillowcase, mice running tightrope across copper conduits along the utility room. No one presses their fingers to a wall. The connection holds only as long as I do.

Chicago, Illinois.
Early March, 2013. Night.

A hand reaches as casually as possible, almost as if possessed by its own will, and unfolds flat against the plaster. But as hard as I try, I feel nothing. As if I expected to in the first place.

Roommate trudges in through the front door, wiping the frost from his hat. ‘Got halfway home from work and it started snowing out of nowhere.’

Of course it’s snowing.

Being  an adult  a human  alive  is exhausting