The Avalanche

I Googled someone I shouldn't have Googled.

It made me think of all the friendships that lapsed due to my carelessness. I sincerely hope all those people have either forgotten me, or never loved me at all. It is an unpleasant feeling when someone you care for is needlessly absent from your life. I hope I have never caused anyone such discomfort. If so, I hope I am forgiven or forgotten.

I suffer from a condition I like to refer to as "Gatsby's Syndrome."
It's the misguided desire for transformation: to create an ostensibly greater self. Jay Gatz and I believe that one must go away and acheive a kind of apotheosis. Although important things are left behind when this journey is embarked upon, our hope is that success will cast a net large enough to ensnare the past. But the past can be neither captured nor reconstructed in the present. So, the Great Gatsby is wealthy, but his life is empty. While I; well, I'm not even rich.

But I can see now what lies ahead of me. So I fill my days with love and work and fun: the palliatives of solitude. And I enjoy the strange pleasures of being myself. I enjoy the things about me that should never change.