aSoSS 20 | Reality

It’s fine. Whatever happens is meant to happen. Nothing more, nothing less.

East Quad, 2:00PM, 1/11/2024

we are in charge of our fates in a perverse kind of way, in that we circle the inevitable like a marble in a funnel. it is easy to do what is easy, to let gravity take control, to appease the vultures that accompany death, to look back and say that it was going to happen anyway. we only resign ourselves to fate when staring at failure–would we ever attribute our success to the stars? the sky clears and for a moment the earth is sprinkled with starlight: a reminder of magnitudes, of multitudes. nothing more, nothing less.

I don’t know if I can watch a show and go, “that was in the book! That wasn’t in the book!”

EECS Building, 11:30AM, 1/30/2024

i tell myself i would watch an infinite number of realities with you but we both know that’s not true. it is impossible to write a future identical to the book in the same way it is impossible to direct a life identical to a movie. you tell me about your life and i hear you but i don’t listen. shuffle the deck. the tarot reader looks up and then looks away. perhaps she sees everything and perhaps she sees nothing at all. you can always tell when a chapter is about to end. who is to blame, an unreliable narrator or an unforgiving audience?

You’re going to be polite and smile, and let it roll off your shoulders, because that’s life. That’s just how the world works.

Crisler Center Lot SC-5, 2:30PM, 2/23/2024

the rain is black, heavy, foreboding. the magazine betrays a tragic parlance and you stop reading in between the lines because they blur into a single sentence. i turn the page and point to the cartoons, figures distorted from the damp ink. the uncertainty is memorable. i crawl through a tunnel of nostalgia, the sapphires, the jade, the rubies. my heart races from the effort of keeping up. the tunnel ends and i turn back but there is just a pinprick of flame, snuffed out by the rain before i can blink.