The self that meets people always arrives before I do. It extends its hand, it laughs, it performs the entrance flawlessly, while I watch from behind, a spectator to a role I never learned. It speaks about me as though it knew me, and applauds itself each time the others believe it. Then the door closes. It withdraws without a farewell, leaving me nothing but the silence it had been drowning in noise. And into that silence the other one steps: a tyrant who knows my name too well, who calls out my sins one by one and counts, in front of me, everything that means nothing, which is to say, everything. I hate them both. One hides what is real behind a false shine; the other doesn’t even know how to say what it holds, so it settles for blaming me. But who is the one who hates them? Perhaps the self that imagines itself the truth beneath the masks is only a third mask, quieter than the two, feigning honesty so that I might rest. I buried everything I feel deep inside.

— july 22

Life feels overwhelmingly real. Every moment reinforces its existence. It is too real to flee. Every escape is just another room inside it.

— july 12

Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow

— T. S. Eliot · The Hollow Men

— july 05

Days go on and on... they don't end.

— june 29