It's so late

In which I tell you why I bother at all

I write to you from the bit below the stars. I have to walk back and forth to locate the anger that is there. If you say the word enough, it starts to lose its trouble. If you hear it said enough by others, it starts to lose its trouble.

But beneath the stars, there’s so much to say. That opens things up—you can get somewhere when you have time and space.

I thought about everything I hadn’t written. Not everything I hadn’t yet written. But what I just hadn’t gone ahead a written, that had passed. If I were driven in that way I would just go ahead and write it. But it feels better to let things pass, to adjust my vision again and again. Of course, someone else will do whatever I haven’t done. And if they don’t, it will come to me again, like a new idea. That’s how it works.

I let things pass. That’s a way of looking at things, of doing things—to watch them as they go. . . I wonder about this tendency when I think about all the people who have had to connect me to the things I have written and said.

But I am not a passive person. I was just reading a book review (of a translation) that says “Andersson’s critique of the modern order is particularly sharp when it touches on ghosting, that torture by technology. ‘It was a perfect demonstration of how to kill a person by social means,’ Ester thinks, when Hugo stops answering her text messages. There are sanctions against physical murder, why not against the social kind?”

I have written a heavily worded letter in response to unwritten text messages, in a kind of moral fury. Now I know I would not stand to just be left for dead.

It’s those kinds of achievements, when you have gone ahead and written it all down, and sent it, in the mail no less, and said, in a way: Keep it. The anger. It’s yours. That’s what writing has to do to be worth having done.