

Every memory with you feels like a lifetime ago. Your Speedmaster still makes the same
ticking noise, but I can no longer decipher what it says. In a way, my life stopped at sixteen, but your hands held all the tenderness I have ever had in my life. Now and again, I try to track you on the radio to see how far long you are on your resplendent journey on the other side of everything, and I just assume the journey you are on is long; there is no way for me to know. If you ever want to tell me about it, I am still in your room grappling with 2018 and trying my best not to sink.

Lately, I find that I keep asking myself when is it okay to give up on trying to be a better person and just be who I am. I keep receding into a familiar gulch where I keep trying to identify all my shortcomings and get caught up in the facile attempt to try and fix them. Yet I have spent a large lump of the year looking for radical acceptance, how some of these shortcomings make up who I am, and there are no fixes or healing out of my personality.

A prominent trend among the urban populace and anyone's social circle is that, in general, is how most of us care about how our potential romantic interests fit into the pre-existing narrative of our lives, among our friends, what their beliefs are, and so on.
It is like we have forgotten that what matters more is whether we genuinely care about them beyond a surface level. Our primary area of concern is rarely mental state or the turmoil of their lives or how we can build something lasting with them,

It has been over a year since I moved cities, and with it, I felt a new sense of longing and loneliness. Previously, I would have dealt with these anxieties and familiar feelings by consuming copious amounts of caffeine or obsessively obsessing over all the things that have gone wrong in the past and the things that could go wrong now—leaving me panic-stricken every time. Unlike before, this time around, being in a completely different city, I did not have the familiar backdrop for me to fall back on old habits. Despite my truest attempts at not falling back in them over time, I fell harder on old ones and new, possibly worse ones.

You can grow as a person. Be better or worse. But you can never be a wholly different person. All the shitty things you have done will always be a part of you, and you must take responsibility for them forever. Similarly, all the good things you have done will be a part of you. Your genetics, environment, surroundings, and everything else have an interest in who you are. You can not escape determinism and fate and become someone else.

In modern society, there is a certain lifestyle that a lot of us seem to pursue, commonly referred to in this article as “living in the present”. We seem to have moved far from the past ideals of working for a more secure future and made an effort to forsake our past since it only serves to depress us increasingly. Instead, we try to devote ourselves entirely to living in the present. This shift in lifestyle comes from the idea of “it’s now or never” being hammered into our heads over the past two decades by almost every mainstream pop-culture figure.

Twin Peaks first aired on the 8th of April, 1990 in an era where primetime television was mostly dominated by safe, unambitious, and loud sitcoms and soap operas like Cheers, Full House and Dynasty with mostly standalone episodes. In the midst of this television culture of shared consciousness and predictable plot lines emerged Twin Peaks, with its elements of occultism, irony, horror, soap opera, canned narrative, Lynch’s dream logic, and a prepossessing cast diddling-about.