i long to create something beautiful and true. but i’m not an artist, a musician, a writer, a scientist. and yet i wish i were. a desire so strong inside me always with nowhere to go. a constant restlessness. all that’s left to me are actions, acts. a thing exactly as it is, is what makes it beautiful. the more real something is, anything at all, the more beautiful it is.

my grandmother, the last relative of my extended family that i knew at all, died this week. i’m reminded of how unbearably sad i feel when i let myself think of the family i come from, one that has never believed in closeness. as a child i used to fantasize about someday being part of a big family, instead of my own which was filled with almost no one, and an unbridgeable separateness between those who did exist. strangers to strangers, not caring to change. instead i imagined family reunions filled with good food and music and noisy children and traditions. color, clatter, and joy. where people knew you too much instead of too little. i hardly knew my grandmother, she was 90 years old. i wonder did she have a happy life? was she lonely? was she relieved by death?