Dear internet,
I don't know if you noticed, but today is the third birthday of this website.
Three years ago I probably would have laughed at you for suggesting that I'd still be doing this so steadily three years later, because I'd have figured that by now I would have gotten bored and gone off to something else--basket weaving or crime fighting or whatever. That's what I do with everything else, after all. Which just goes to show that we should never underestimate the staying power of narcissism, but the fact is that I have never been very good at writing endings, so I imagine that as long as I'm incapable of creating a conclusion I'll probably just have to keep going.
Sorry about that.
In the past seven hundred and something posts I've cobbled together something over 200,000 words, and I honestly have little to say about that. I read a short essay by Norman Mailer once--all the Mailer I can stand--about a friend of his who would write and rewrite constantly even though the whole act was anguish for him. And when Mailer asked him why he did it, why he continued to write even though it caused him such pain, the friend said, "The only time I know the truth is when it reveals itself at the point of my pen." I have come to realize recently that the purpose the Kissing Booth serves for me is to understand just how I am doing, to resolve and solidify whatever it is that I'm feeling. I can't say for sure whether that is good or bad, whether anything useful has come out of this experience, but I feel that I have been honest. And honesty was, originally, the point.
When I came home tonight a giant urban raccoon and I scared the heck out of each other, and then I walked into my apartment and noticed that something had changed. Eventually I figured out that the trees right off of my balcony that have been ever so slowly obscuring my view for the last few years have been lopped off. I'd gotten so used to squinting at the city through the branches that the unobstructed look at downtown and Queen Anne is astonishing. I had forgotten how the city twinkles. It reminds me how much has changed since I came here, and how much I've changed.
I don't know who most of you are, internet, but thanks for coming along on the adventure with me.
love,
me
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