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There are eight hundred and eighty four days until I would have would have been here, shrinking before the world for thirty years. It’s been time I’ve ticked off with a few rites, trials, and scars; a nice round number rolling right off the side of a fucking cliff. And at the bottom? Something worse than death, more terrifying than inaction: respectability. I’ve been warned of course; in notes written to my future self. In scrawl amazingly more legible than my current script, I captured what should have been the organizing principle of my life in two words: “never forget.” But late adolescence proved less trying for me, something approaching happy and independent. Rocks beneath but high tides, space between bars to grow. As I’ve aged I’ve noticed that emergencies seem farther apart from one another — and never seem quite as intense as they did I was younger. Which has tricked me for some time into thinking that life is better. But how can it be? Everyone I want dead is still alive, and most of the people who meant anything to me are gone. Maybe I’m slowly resigning myself to adulthood, to pragmatism, to fear, to a postured religion of artmaking, to marriage, to discomfort, to pain, to silence, injustice, to threat without strength, to the theft of play.

Maybe I just need new material, something that fits better with the aging me; soft and weak. A hinge that looks like it works but functions only as a noisemaker. Something that says ‘I am powerless to change this world, at the mercy of the slightest breeze, susceptible to every poison.’

I need to be making textured armbands, devoid of any identifiable symbols whatsoever; reinventing the universal icon of the adult — noisy neutral. I am drawn with a crayon. Weed-like. Leaning toward those images and those words which humble, empower and castrate me. Toward whatever light source seems to be the truest color, the most honest. Right now I’m a thin blue line surrounded by sky. Unexceptional, inarticulate, smudged. Animated only to convince what few people listen that I am unfit for living — that I’ve ‘lov’d not wisely but too well.’