Contemporaneous: Chapters 73 – 74
73. I don’t sleep well, but it’s not because of typical sleep troubles, but because I’m excited to get the week underway. When did I last feel like this? I can’t remember – not specifically. I was once like this, but that excitement and anticipation congealed into the mire that’s made everything so arduous. No more, though. I begin to catalogue what I need to do. Autumn. She’s the first stop. I want, I need to tell her my news. And not because I’m boasting, but because there’s a purity to her happiness – she’ll genuinely feel good for me, and there’s something about, some validation that I’ve never experienced…
Contemporaneous: Chapters 65 – 67
65. The one thing I note now is the reappearance of certain memories – being held back by the teacher during recess, the inexplicable bouts of melancholy as a child, being a pariah as a teenager as anxiety compromised so much of my life socially, and then there’s something new, something dark, and I can’t unearth it, I can’t remember it, but it sits behind these things, a secret pulse that has beat all my life and gotten buried under more and more and more shit; and then it’s little things that I’ve dismissed, like bartending early in my twenties and a handful of short, unfulfilling relationships, and then the…