I didn't mean to ignore your Discord messages. I'm just still really bad at managing time, and I work 12 hours an unpaid day, so I'm letting a lot slip by the wayside. This is why we've drifted apart. Now that I'm hurtling fast towards a fundamentally alien future, I've been doing a lot of nerve-wracking inventory on what I want and don't want in my life. No matter our distance, I still certainly want you in it. I crazy miss you, too. So much.
I'm currently in the back of a 2020 Honda Odyssey going to Rosebud, AB. I'm listening to Black Flag, which have become a strange kind of safety blanket now that I've been firmly taken up by the adult part of young adulthood. I'm on two cups of coffee, oatmeal, 30 mg Vyvanse, 10 mg Trintillex, and a little over 8 hours of sleep. My sister and mom are in the front. I'm back to being on my usual terms with my sister after a brief, unprecedented window of trying to be closer. My mom and I, however, are rockier than ever, for reasons I'm too angry about and guilt-stricken to summarize. I'm back in the fucking races.
My life is pretty good now. I effectively teach full-time despite still technically being a uni student (three weeks to go!) I get rave reviews doing it. The main thing I have to do is build a big-boy resume and mass-apply for big-boy jobs in education for the next few months. I wake up at 6 a.m., and go to bed around 11 p.m. I do most of what I have to do on time. I work hard. I have staff meetings. I'm getting pretty good in Excel. I have 60 students. I encourage 14-year-olds to take language classes in high school because they show potential in English at parent-teacher interviews (which, for the record, was the only thing I said to them, given that those interviews were conducted my mentor-teacher, J----n, who I'll get to later). I check Environment Canada to talk about the weather more eloquently than I've usually cared to. I'm an adult now. I've made about two Wattpads where I attempt to sell you a similar story.
It's hard for me to read the old Wattpads, too. It's not just that I feel so far away from you: I feel unbelievably far away from myself these days. 2025 felt like a nuclear fucking explosion, and in the iris-incirating blast, whoever I was then mutated into the incongruous hunk of deformed limbs and priorities that I am now. My face is all weird; my hands are too small. I walk with a limb (metaphorically speaking). I spiritually feel like how people describe triggering a dissociative disorder after smoking too much weed. I feel completely different. This scares the shit out of me. I don't want to have to meet you again. I still want to know you.
In the old Wattpads, it's so obvious to me now how fucking wacked out I was for years at a time. I don't know how I pulled half of what I pulled off from 2020 to '25. I was clearly a kind of out of control mentally ill guy. I barely felt like I could keep it together. Now, whatever part of me was wacked out feels calloused and hardened, and I feel a lot more in control (most likely in no small part thanks to medication). But I'm still up to my gills in angst and woes. I feel like I need to yell into a fucking pillow. I used to treat these Wattpads like a pillow. I'd yell into them, and feel some kind of security in knowing you, who always understood, would get it. Not to complicate this with another analogy, but it was like sending messages in a bottle. They're not guaranteed to be read, but someone could read them, and the simultaneously disposability and guaranteed value of them was soothing to me. I need that again.
I don't want to be literary with it. This is not an essay. I just need a void to shout into that has someone I trust in it to hear it. Here's a point-form list of everything fucking me up:
1. My relationship. I put all my chips on it, and so far won big. We - and when I say 'we', I mean you and I, Madison - have been so distant, I could say far more about Lucas and you than you could about R-----l and I. You don't know about our first trip to Red Deer, or our jobless summer traveling around on busses, or our long, spring walks through strange cities with strange people, or her performance at the Magic: The Gathering tournament, her cats, my relationship with her family and sisters. The fact she is basically a professional scholar on Hindu philosophy, autism neuroscience, and continental French philosophy. Her love of pancakes and crossword puzzles and cigarettes imported from China. The fact she never turns down a homeless person. Her eight million friends all over the world. Her love of Lord of the Rings; her distrust of seafood and virtually any food that isn't bland, seperated, and Western. Her monochromatic sweaters or proneness to leaving messes. Her love of Hamilton and Guided by Voices. Her strikingly beautiful singing voice she can only really muster when completely trashed on rum and Coke. The sticky notes she used to leave me when she left my house that would tell me she thought I "contained multitudes." How she, long before we went out, would write "I love you" on my back with her fingers. The way she pronounces the words 'shit' and 'lovely.' Her big, cumbersome, purple backpack and takes everywhere. Our brief stint experimenting with psychedelics. Her complicated relationship with Protestantism. Her sisters, who she is very close with, and I am subsequently closer than I'd thought I'd be with, too. How I used to drive them to different functions on Canada Day. How I used to clean up around their house. Her love of Aella and LessWrong and sometimes inscrutable Marxist-libertarian-Christian-progressivism. It kills me a lot of this is news to you. And it's hard to talk about how it's all still complicated between me and her. I love her. I love her like I've never loved before. But we're a long-distance couple who dated after we were each other's one and only friends with benefits. Of course it's going to be fucking complicated.
2. My family. Long, long, long, long, long story short, they absolutely do not want me to move to Montreal. This further complicates my relationship with Rachel. She's been a sweetheart to them, though. I'm the problem here.
3. My past. I got skeletons in the closet. When things are good in my present life, they're all I can see. I got to clean them out at some point.
4. My future. I don't want to fuck it up.
Last thing: Br--ney. Holy fuck. It's been fucking me up since you told me. This is actually fucking evil what is going on. Like, this is darkness-of-the-human-heart shit. I want you to be safe and okay. This is fucked. She needs to get a fucking grip. I'm cool with freakiness, but you play with fire every time. That's why it is freaky. Now it's burning you. You don't deserve this.
I want Faith to be okay. That's so fucking scary. R-----'s sister had a high school chum shoot himself in the fucking face a few weeks ago with a shotgun. This type of shit makes the world seem like a open and deep fucking wound across the souls of every living thing. I just want to be strong and good for you all. Especially you, Madison. I care about you. I hope this makes you feel closer to me.
I want to be close to you again.
