A kind of cloud

Saturday 12/6/25

I find myself trying to get myself to just give in to this being the end. I am aware of this kind of transpiring shift--or a would-be shift, unless I fight it away--in mindset taking the form of these gathering clouds. They carry this idea, the rain they hold within, of "It's not going to happen, you see that now, and if this is how it is and you're leaving, take as many people with you as you can."

My days are darker than ever before under those clouds. If there's a feeling you can have of being in the last chapter of a book, with the knowledge that soon the book will be closed, then that's the feeling I have. I feel like I'm at the end of my life. And I'm hanging around, in theory tying up loose ends, but what do they matter?

Sometimes I think my work would have a better chance if I was dead, like I'm part of the obstacle. I am the obstacle. I know there are people now who know me who wouldn't let me have credit for something I created. It's like my being alive stands between them and not just favorability, but normal responses in keeping with what something is.

That same person would experience "Dot" or "Big Bob and Little Bob" differently, I think, if I was dead. Or maybe experience it the same, but share that. Not keep it a secret. I think they'd want to proclaim what they thought and felt that thing was if I was gone. And also I was not here to potentially say anything to. Like an obstacle, a blockage had been removed.

They'd read it and think, "This is the most amazing, beautiful thing I've ever seen, what a gift to the world." That's the people who are technically on my side. They are killing me, too. I tell them, but they don't stop. I know they don't really care. They're caring, as such, if for themselves, so they can think things about themselves. who they are as a person. What their life has been. Their purpose, maybe.

The worst person I've ever known is someone who thinks they just haven't been "great" to me, and they're absent-minded. He's not in publishing. He wouldn't life a finger to save my soul if that's all it took. All he cares about is himself. He's betrayed in a fashion, over the years, that I couldn't afford to experience. Not after everything else. They told me to trust them, too. Like they were setting me up for betrayal.

I've been thinking a lot about suicide notes. You know why people write them? Because they've never written anything else. Words haven't been put down elsewhere. That's not really relevant here, is it? If I left a note, it would be to name this person as the factor that moved me beyond the point of no return.

But the "they" of which I speak as this group, some collective? It's a very small "they." I know so few people.

If the above is true, though, for the people who are technically on my side, then maybe something in following would happen with the world itself. Maybe I have to die. I don't know how I'm alive at this point. I don't know how I write anything. I don't know why I put so much time and effort into doing these things that no one else could ever come close to seeing, that I don't think anyone will ever see. Amazing as they are.

I don't know why I subject myself to begging someone to write something masterful for $5. Or to do a book with them for free when they're hooking up hacks and amateurs. I know what's happening. They know what's happening. It's the same people. The same mindsets. The same lack of any money. No readers. No one who can read, as in understand what they read if they even wanted to read it, no matter how straightforward it might be. Subject myself to horrible people. Twisted, sick people. Warped in their pettiness and small-mindedness and their insecurity with their envy and their prejudices and their clannishness.

It's the same people. Everything is the same. It's done the same ass backwards ways. Everything has to be unoriginal. You need to check boxes. The skin color box, the followers on social media box, the went to this school box, the came from money box, the as mediocre as they are box. You could have the greatest thing ever, the thing the most people would love, that could make the most money, and it won't get a chance here. The system isn't designed to put that work and that person forward.

And I think, okay, you could change that. You are not anyone else. This is all new. Financially, you can't compare something and someone we've never had before with what's in place, as a financial ceiling, for these people who blow at writing. Where would the money come from anyway, though? For starters, anyway. This is all I wake up to in this unlivable apartment in which I can't move with everything breaking down every day. I don't have lights. Stuff is rotting away. Then it's two in the morning and I work until twelve thirty, and then walk across the harbor to run stairs so I can...what? Live longer?

Today has been a bad day. All I can do right now is call it, as it were, like a doctor does the time of death for the just-expired patient on the table, and get in a mental place to try again tomorrow.

I didn't go to Haymarket, I didn't run stairs. I worked on "Dead Thomas" some more. Why I don't know. What a thing to say about something you know is better than anything anyone else has ever written. I didn't know that anything could be like what this is thirty years ago. I would have thought that if you had that thing--if someone saw the thing, or more of the thing, they'd also know I have that thing--that would be a good thing, but it's not. It's actually like the worst feeling in the world.

When my dad used to tell me that you should be your brother’s keeper, I asked him what if you don’t have a brother, because I didn’t. I wouldn’t have minded, but a brother or a sister wasn’t anything I wished for. Santa didn’t see “Baby sibling” below “Binoculars but not toy binoculars” on my Christmas list.

There was Rachel, who was like a sister. But I didn’t want for what I didn’t have, because it felt like what I had was what I wanted, even if I didn’t consciously say that to myself, though I likely would have if pressed on the subject by someone like Mr. Margolis, except I didn’t know him at the time.

One year, Rachel gave me a Valentine’s card she’d made after having first said that this card, special as it was, and as much as she meant it, didn’t also mean she wanted to marry me, because she would someday marry a boy—but only if I also thought this boy was amazing and “really super truly” the boy for her—though we would continue to live close to each other.

She still had fresh Crayola caked under her nails along with some backyard dirt, as if she’d biked over the second she finished the card. She’d drawn this heart in a blue sky on the outside that took up practically the whole front. Only the thin outsides of the heart were red—it looked like thread—and there were clouds in its open middle where clouds would have normally been anyway like they were a part of something beautiful without having been inconvenienced.

Inside the card she wrote, “I would stitch all of my love in the sky for you.”

We had recently learned that a stitch in time saves nine, which was confusing, but sounded important.

When my dad said “Be your brother’s keeper,” he spoke as if both to me and to the air, which made me think of Rachel’s card. He clarified that it was an expression—the first few times, that is, until I guess he figured he didn’t have to anymore.

And he’d ask whether I followed him, which was how he finished these talks, and when I would ask questions if I had any. I said sure, because as I was saying, sure works that way, and you like to follow people you love. That doesn’t mean you can’t follow your own heart. But two clouds usually go in the same direction.