Haven’t We Always Been Friends?

Aristotle drew a ladder. I drew a circle. A scheming actor asked to climb, and I answered with a question built to end the conversation. Years ago, in a rehearsal room that smelled of coffee and radiator dust, an actor I will call Curtis said six words I have retold wrong for decades: “I want to be your friend.” We had known each other three years by then. We had built shows together, struck sets at midnight, shared the particular intimacy of people who fail in front of each other at ten in the morning and repair it by eight that night. His sentence cornered me. I laughed a little, the way you laugh when you need two seconds to find a door, and I said, “Curtis, haven’t we always been friends?”

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The Curated Self as the New Delusion

There is a specific, modern anxiety that is difficult to name. It is not the dread of a specific event, but a low-grade, constant hum of disconnection. It’s the feeling of living in a world that is eerily frictionless, a world that reflects your own thoughts back at you with placid, unwavering agreement. It is the anxiety of a consensus of one; the quiet, digital loneliness of being the only person in your own universe.

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What the Dead Leave Behind

Every death is a beginning of the end of the beginning of the end. Or something like that; but there is no curiosity more powerful than the clues the dead leave behind as breadcrumb secrets of who they really were during their lives, along with all the curses left behind with the truths of their real, haunting, hidden, desires.

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Alone in the Company of Others

It is entirely possible to be in the company of friends and yet to feel alone and isolated. It does not even necessarily have to relate to being somewhere else on an emotional or intellectual level. I was with a group of friends the other night and while I appreciated their company, there were a few lengthy moments when I felt that I could just disappear entirely without my absence being noted.

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