There’s no way I can compare.

I think I’ve only been deeply lonely for two periods of my life. Both of them in the months after you’ve been here. They’re the sunny months of summer with long days and short nights. The warmest days on the Northern Hemisphere, suddenly wrapped up in blankets.

After you leaving, I’m acutely aware how much you mean to me. How happy I am when I’m happy with you. And how easy it is to be happy with you.

Walks alone are not like walks with you.

Runs alone are nothing like runs with you.

Dinner alone is as if stripped of spices compared to dinner with you.

I won’t even start to compare the nights and mornings with and without you.

The world holds such vague meaning for me. It only ever seems to truly make sense when I’m with you. Looking into your eyes cures my disorientation.

I’ve been trying to write a post for weeks. Beginning and stopping short. They always deal with you and with loneliness. But I can’t seem to get around it in the right way. The sun is setting across from me as it does every night. Some things never change. Some planets and suns are bound together for billions of years. I’m only asking for 76 here, give or take.

Do lives become more significant the shorter their time span is?

On a grand scale, I could say something about world politics. On a grand scale, I could say something abstract about the clouds in the distance who’ll make do as the mountains in my world.

I can see church towers from my window. Places of worship. Places of meaning. They’ve never meant much to me. I’ve set out on a mission to try to understand the world and the people in it. The systems that have guided us through history to where we are now. I haven’t given sufficient thought to how that affects my sense of belonging.

My most deeply held conviction is that I’d give up all my theories to undergo an empirical investigation counting all your eyelashes. You’re so beautiful to me. In mind as in eye as in the rhythm of my heart.

You could make me cry if you don’t know
Can’t remember what I was thinkin’ of
You might be spoilin’ me too much, love
You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go

Flowers on the hillside, bloomin’ crazy
Crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme
Blue rivers runnin’ slow and lazy
I could stay with you forever
And never realize the time

(Bob Dylan, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”, Blood On The Tracks)

Anger dismanagement.

I have a hard time getting angry. I feel like I should be angry at many things in this world, but I just ain’t. The best reason I can come up with is that I’m too content. I’m too comfortable. Nothing really bad ever happens to me. I rarely see the “outsiders” of society. I live a very quiet higher middle-class life. Whenever I want to do something, the only thing that’s really stopping me is myself; there are no outer boundaries keeping me boxed in. From time to time I wish there was. I wish I had a harder time living. I wish there was at least some kind of challenge for me to get what I want, to stay alive. I wish there was something to fight against. The only thing I really want to fight against is the not-so-democratic system we have. But how do you fight that? It’s no longer the politicians who control the world. It’s the big business; it’s the lobbying that’s being done by god-knows-who in god-knows-where; it’s the systems themselves that have run wild. I long for the days when a single person could make a change.

I’ve been listening to so much Bob Dylan these last days that it almost hurts. I’m on my way through his entire discography – or the parts I haven’t heard before, at least. Part of the musical education that I keep planning for myself. The library had the box set with his entire collection. I love libraries. That might be something that could get me really wound up, if libraries were given a less role than the one they possess now. I know not everyone use their libraries, but that shouldn’t be to the fault of the libraries but to the people. At least my library has made great improvements and modernizations over the past couple of years to meet the demands of the “modern person”. They have restructured, they have lightened up the place, they have tried to get a hold of a younger audience and started planning events for everyone. Long live the libraries.

My focus should be on my bachelor assignment. But it isn’t. I’m so caught up in making music and reading poetry. I’m always at my most creative when I don’t have time for it. I’m always looking for a way out. When did I ever fully commit to anything? Not in the last year, certainly. Well, I was very dedicated around the time we presented the first issue of our literary journal. Both on the journal itself and on my contributions to it. And I was very concerned with expressing exactly the things I wanted to express in a piece I wrote on freedom of speech in the months after Charlie Hebdo. But that never amounted to anything. Or, it amounted to a nice piece that I still have lying around on my hard drive but didn’t send anywhere.

I am finding it difficult to write poetry these days, though. I don’t really know why. I’ve had a lot of experiences to write from lately, but it sometimes seems to me that I write my best stuff when nothing really happens. Just like I write my saddest stuff when I’m at my most joyous. Maybe I just need to process my experiences some more. I think I need to sleep more; I need to get back to dreaming – to remembering my dreams. I haven’t been doing a good job of that lately. I can’t even remember the last time I dreamed. My clearest memory is of some seriously wicked dream I had half a year ago. I know I’ve been dreaming since then, but they just don’t stick with me like they used to.

Wow. I’ve read that Self Portrait is a bad album, but the first song is amazing. HOW did Dylan suddenly come up with THIS? This is the great thing about going about my task chronologically. Though I do it very fast compared to the people who lived in this time, I sort of get the same feeling of wonder whenever he takes an unexpected turn. God, it just keeps going on and on. This is beautiful. “All the tired horses in the sun, how am I’m supposed to get any riding done?” Beautiful.

I think I’ll just lie back and enjoy this album.