Sudden stop
When I was a teenager I had this album on my iPod
It was a super old ipod. I must have gotten it from a sibling or something, I have no idea. It had a dent in the back it was that age where they were super sturdy and you could put music from your computer on it. A corrupted file must have been downloaded onto it at some point because every song on the album stopped abruptly in a strange place. Some of them right after the intro and some halfway through the song right as you were getting into it. I listened to this album all the time though and never bothered to look it up. I think part of me assumed it was corrupted and part of me figured they were just a super quirky band. I never heard most of the full versions of these songs until I decided I can’t handle new music anymore and needed the comfort and nostalgia of songs from an old life.
It is so weird to always expect them to stop and they just keep going. Like every time I have heard this song it is 5 seconds long and stops abruptly mid-sentence. Or this song has always stopped mid-trumpet solo but now it suddenly has an ending. Fuck if that isn’t a familiar feeling, busy waiting for something to end so you never actually enjoy it. My life feels like a dance between fighting and accepting this feeling.
I heard a story a few days ago about an incredible book, an impactful one anyway. a long one a whole world is built with a society and its strange inner workings where you are really invested in the main character figuring out some complicated secret to the universe. They are so close to figuring it out. They have worked for their whole lives. they are old and so close. But while swimming across a lake they have a heart attack.
The book just ends.
No conclusion. No relief. Nothing. It’s just over.
Grief is a lesson I suppose the writer wanted to wield.
Time does not make any sense.
I remember something about physics and time how as you get closer to something time goes faster. Like planets and gravity. Closer to something and more gravity and it’s faster and the further away you get the less gravity and the slower everything is. Astronauts are experiencing time just slightly differently than we are, and further and further out it’s slower and slower.
I think of this when I look at that thing that happens when you get close to people. When you are getting to know someone or bonding really hard and how you can look back at a few weeks ago and you saw them as a different person. You were a different person. The relationship was different. Quickly unrecognizable. I think of orbits, closer and faster, further and slower. I see myself dancing with people in my life, I come into their orbit and dance for a while building up heat, connection, affecting each other’s tides, helping each other grow and change, then I drift out.
I take space.
I slow down.
Derek and I were fast, changing each other and the relationship so quickly. He called me a racecar sometimes. When he died I felt like I was in outer space, I felt like I had fallen into a cave. So much expanse, so much space. So much empty. I still had so much momentum from him but things were fast and slow at the same time. He dies when I was still falling in love with him and I just kept falling and falling and falling. There was so much space.
Sometimes interacting with people and passing through their gravity waves powerful, beautiful rich connection but so far away, so much space in between them. What was happening within me was so big I needed all the space to process it. But I want to dance with somebody and make time move fast again. Fall into a rhythm that changes me in a new way.
I planned to write this week’s newsletter on the robots. Dereks symbol that I have taken on lately but I don’t think I have it in me anymore.
So I will leave you with the pictures from that idea and maybe I will tell you about the robots next week.
Maybe I will leave you hanging with no explanation and no conclusion.
