This Is What Jadedness Feels Like

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One of those days in which you fall into an “existential” gloom—you know, the kind you read about. I’ve been stuck in conversations—just one—that make me say, “I long to discover,” and then fall into determination. “Discovery”: so moving that you’ve never yet felt it. There is more to see, but we’re jaded about being jaded; discovery will remind of the feeling of novelty.

I know drunk, orgasm (not for a while—thank you, Prozac), stoned, falling in love, in love, and hold a refractive inventory of each of those states. They’re memories, and I think of my grandmother’s inherited dishes and the narrative she and I have spun of past.

Déjà vu may have a neurological basis, some say: a delayed synaptic response or something that means that by the time you’re conscious of an event, you already “know” the sense of sensing that event. I no longer know the source of that theory. I tell myself I’ll write and know I won’t. This (this) is too many feelings spat out hastily, before grief is manageable and no thoughts are left. I am melancholy in the way that 20-somethings are melancholy and like each of them alone: knowing both the commonness of this feeling and that your internal state is uncommon around these parts. If, at once, you could have the feeling of being singularly alone, then it seems it would be as much a comfort as anything; you would escape this collective emotion and experience (discover!) something that’s new for yourself and your peers.

But you know what you are, and you know what you have left to feel, and you’re comforted and stifled by the familiarity. I am alone in my emotion right now but I know this feeling, too, and I will write in a burst to try to make the most of having it, but continuations fall; that is why people believe in fate.