memories and grief in gray and silver
Today on my bike to work everything smelled of spraypaint. I haven’t journaled in a long time, not since July 11, when I wrote: “and today in the Park, everywhere there are dragonflies.” That’s all it says. I don’t know what I expected living alone to make me feel, but I’ve been frightfully unsentimental about it all: because busy, because tired.
I’ve been dragging my feet on this newsletter because my things are disassembled, my new routines only recently rehearsed. But I’ve also been edging closer to newsletter fatigue. A few days ago, I read a long substack piece about someone’s dying cat. Soundtracked by Clairo, staged in New York City, it made grief feel like a matter of self-help and reflexive urban pondering, like one of those random memoirish New Yorker pieces.
Elegies are hard, but I think the Internet makes them harder. I don’t know why. Maybe online forums are still too virtual and distanced, or just have different rules of engagement. On Twitter and Instagram, the things that play best—pithiness, scolding, irony, nonchalance—aren’t the stuff of gravitas. And even earnestness is its own trope: the sentimentalist is as much an online archetype as the edgelord, the influencer, the eccentric.
The saddest thing I saw on social media this week wasn’t an attempt to arrange grief into something that looks more like the Internet. It was a devastatingly simple admission of the end:
ben tapeworm