Dear Billy.

DIARY

Dear Billy,

While I am genuinely touched by the solicitude you've exhibited on my behalf, I want to immediately warn you against expending too much energy. First, the effects of your efforts are not informed by your intentions or affections, but by the surrounding circumstances, and these have determined that I shall amount to nothing, shall build nothing, shall ultimately appraise and debase only myself. Your gesture, then, must remain only that. A gesture. And second, you need to keep your energy and capital in store for the days to come. We're living in overwhelming times, when every Patricia is reduced to a paddy wagon and every wagon must find its way to go on. It's a whelming, isolating time, in a very crowded way, and lonely, so much so that we see through the blue skies not like the sheening surface of a swan's beak or a robin's eggshell, but as the drag on radiation that it is. They might as well be gray, those skies, at least then they'd be a sign of some atmospheric content as opposed to some pitiless and hungry bowl aswarm with vindictive stars hiding in the electric haze, too small, too far, by-and-large, to really pour their hearts out, and all dying off all the time, just like we are.

Every two or three days I'm shaken by a shudder of realization that I have failed and am failing at everything which I have set out to do. And yet, as bad as things get, you don't see me lifting my finger to exert help upon you that I know perfectly well will serve no purpose.

Take a neutrino.

If you are truly desperate for passion, affection, affectivity, you can beg a neutrino for recognition. You can compose sonnets for it, sing it songs and give it flowers. You can write bright sharp sears of rhetoric that slash through the discourse like lightning. You can grasp for it with your fingers arrayed like zombies' claws, ready to dig into the slippery invisible flesh, to hold it still, to just get it to listen a moment. You can ask and impore and beat the ground with your fists.

You can do almost anything you want. It will not react.

If you don't dig in and do something substantial with your time, all of your affection and appraisals are transparent and insubstantial. Insignificant and of little worth.

So no, you won't see me lift a single finger to exert help upon you.

I'll be too busy using my own energies to augment your own.

~ Connor