Seasons ease into one another… This has been, and still is, the metaphor for slippery slopes. I’ll come back to that.

No matter how unexpected some losses are, or how an ice cream scoop falls from its crunchy cone onto the ground, they are never just momentary happenings. At least for me, they never have been. Just as being alive, in a brief moment, eases into being gone, like being on top of a cone then suddenly on the ground. It has always been like the moon phasing inch by inch, or the gradient greens of wild forests.

Perhaps, as you once said, this has always been my superpower. You and I, and the rest of the people in the world, remain unhappy for reasons I can’t quite grasp. Shouldn’t such constant unhappiness unite all of us, or at least you and me, in our sufferings? We each remain sullen in our own private corners, terribly alone, yet comforted by the idea of watching fireworks on New Year’s.

Now, knowing that I could sense the liminality between phases, or the very moment when forms turn into other quasi-forms, I was never able to explain the chain of consequences. The substance of our existences, like the universe, is chaotic. It is nebulous and muddy – glittering and twinkling. Our hands, too, are muddy, reminding you that they are just like the universe, because it was foretold we arose from the mud of stars. You have to understand now, in this very moment: your hands are muddy because you thought you arose from mud, because I just told you so. I just told you, in this instance, and you eased into it. It’s a messy metaphor for slippery slopes. You slipped and fell. There was no reason behind it, no way to know why we were thrown into this bedlam world. Yet we all have our special skills and abilities, and these are, most of the time, so mediocre, so boringly ordinary. The funny thing is, one way or another, they should have made us special, not alone.

When I told you this rabbit hole we were entering was a dead end, you thought I was just overly anxious, tangled in the same old attachment issues. I am attached to the shapes of the earth, so no, it wasn’t that. It was my extraordinarily boring skill whispering to me that we are phasing and fading simultaneously, with which, tragically for you, I was fine. Seasons, then, eased into one another. You found it unexpected.