I remember when life was simpler, although I wouldn't have called it that then (how could I have known anyway?), when I made a similar promise to find ground. Back then, I decided to write a little bit each day. It began with a little red-bound book that I bought at Urban Outfitters and a pen that is my favorite, the first favorite one. It's been many years now—I can say many and it is true. I long for that time, that angst-filled, depressed time, like unfinished love. I remember it and feel the memory expand like a welcome breeze.

I'm so sad now; I'm sadder for not knowing then the misery to come. People will discourage inertia by saying, "It's hard to imagine unknown joys." And so, you think that if you can only act to change your circumstance, said unknown joys can be uncovered.

I wish I'd been less desperate so I could've thought to ask, "What about the unknown despair?" I wonder what the good response to that one is.

I'm sad. I hurt and I have a hard time getting out of bed, just as I'm too anxious to stay in it. What is worse for me is not having any object, any god, to blame. I observe my psyche grasping for anything to hang this mood on, but nothing emerges to take the glory of the objectively bad situation.

It's usually a bad relationship. I've realized more than once the disturbing possibility that I might choose desperately miserable situations in order to have a place to put my depression. That way, I have a thing I think I can control, and therefore, a way to motivate myself away from the pain. I say, "If only I were out of this, I could feel better."

But now I have done a fairly good job of extricating myself from bad relationships and I am more assertive than I have ever been, and still there's this unpinnable, unshakable mood. What can I do with it?

It's the hopelessness that's toxic, that whispers the benefits of death, which I fear, have always feared more than anything, and now less so, oddly, in tandem with being afraid.

I don't like where I'm going. I want to be where I was: miserable and naïve, and youthful enough to believe that things can still be started. Now I only feel that things already started must be seen through. I don't know how that changed, or when. Only, how much more to go?

In the silence, hear the sounds of a house living. The drips and creaks, the thinness of walls and windows.

The house is a memory of you. This beauty is the beauty of your life, the way you have lived it and arranged it. In the face of this evidence, how can you still think yourself ugly and terrible? You need the evidence. Perhaps it's not ironic that you've been inhabiting the house but ignoring it, walking past it to the black chair where you plaster the Internet to your corneas. You can't see anything of your house or you through the opaque lens.

It's when you sit on the floor in silence and look around that the details of having lived spring into an image map of your life. Your palm discovers the uneven lip of the tea cup and it conjures the memory of Insa-dong on the day you bought it.

For more than a year you kept three stalks of dry grass laid across the top of the rice chest. These were collected the night of the moon, when your heart was leaden and neglected. (Who knew how heavy hope gets when rotted?) Now when you look there, you see the little fish you and Andrew made from long blades of grass when you were together on Oahu.

Nothing you own is without identity or purpose. There are no incidentals.

Where did things begin, then, as I know them now?

With the journal?

Is it a static memory, unchangeable by repetition, and therefore unable to be recovered from?

I take few things for granted, but when I do the cost is profound. I begin to feel the meaninglessness of commonality. Then I don't mind the coming death.

But given a moment to notice something small, unique, the preciousness floods back on a tide of loss.

All things that depend on my noticing them in order to exist will cease.