Good Friday: In the Middle

Jeremy Geddes

…from the journal of EIL’s founding editor, Chris Al-Aswad, in the last year of his life, a few months before his death…

…and yet I also sense that I am in the middle. The end is either far away or too vague to be a point on the map. There is no map, per se. Only the cloud of experience, which leaves me in pockets of mixed emotions, vacuums of hope and illusion and terrifying loneliness, restlessness, and sadness. I don’t know who the hell I am or what I’m trying to be. I wake up every morning trying to be someone. It feels like the most natural way of life would just be to be myself—and yet I cannot always do that. Sometimes I can—and when I am myself I achieve beautiful things—but when I feel disconnected and looking out from the murkiness of my mind, nothing can bring me back into me except maybe a notebook. Feelings don’t remain in one place. Simply writing about your feelings in an ongoing investigation, you recognize that the troubling sense of restlessness, fear, anger…dissipates—breaks into something else, lighter, vaguely perceptive…