The rule is just to finish something every day.

Monday, March 16, 2026

I thought about killing myself on the way to work today, like I do every morning. I crossed a big road that cleaved two neighborhoods like Christopher McCandless' Teklanika River in asphalt. It gave a wideopen view of a distant highway, an unusual sight in Oregon but typical of Texas, and I thought of the walk to the preschool in June, its narrow sidewalks & roadworked roads that suddenly broke & gave view to a grand, ugly freeway tangle across the open sky, something so close by car but impossible for me to reach walking. After crosswalking the asphalt river, I was in a small neighborhood that I'd only walked through once before, following a street that gently curved toward today's school. Avril 14th played through my headphones & it was light outside, but the sun hadn't risen yet, so it looked as though all the sunlight had traveled down through a giant sheet of blue tissue paper, filtering all but the softest light. The neighborhood trees were recognizable as cherry blossoms for the first time, flowering softly in white & pink. I looked around & realized that I was living a life only I could live.

After work, Mary said that if you measured your life in the amount of times you see the trees flower, that it's not a large number at all. This March was my first time.

Friday, March 13, 2026

A day working as a reading interventionist, which meant meeting with small groups of children throughout the day in yet another classroom whose windows were obscured from me. This time they were hidden by several filing cabinet towers containing various reading intervention curriculums. The whole school is dim & lowceilinged, a contrast to the usual brightlighted school hallways whose ceilinglights appear as ghostly white geometric figures trapped in tile, antiseptic reflections. The perpetual dim of this school always makes it seem dirty, that the minor playground cuts & scrapes of its children will never heal. The only time the semidarkness is interrupted is at a group of large hallway windows showing the school blacktop & distant playground— no drawn blinds, no clipped up anchor charts, no filing cabinets— just clear glass separating me & cherry blossoms newly petaled by spring. It was the first day without rain in a while & so the children were able to have outdoor recess again after days of being trapped inside. Normally I dislike taking students out to recess— the nonsense rules of the school are never specified in the plans left for me & it is always difficult to count a squirming group of kids whose names & faces I don't remember— but after days without sunlight, I just wanted to go outside, even if within the screaming din of play. But there was no one for me to take to recess today, & so I spent a two hour break reading a book in the classroom, occasionally glancing at the backlit filing cabinets.

Checking the time left for our reading game, one of the children asked if my phone wallpaper was a picture of me— Bartolome Bermejo's Saint Michael Triumphs over the Devil, circa 1468.

As I waited for the train, a school bus passed & several children I didn't recognize rolled down the windows & yelled to me, furiously waving. The afterschool panopticon always feels awkward, as though I'm doing something wrong by existing in public. ( Though no matter the school, the kids really enjoy telling me that they saw me walking along the sidewalk or waiting at the bus stop, sometimes followed by an inquisition. ) Across from me on the train, a man took out two cans of beer & shared one with the man next to him. It was their first time meeting. I felt wistful & wondered if I would ever become the sort of man that other men share their beer with.

I slept for a long time after work & went grocery shopping in the dark, but was too tired to cook anything for dinner. As I wrote before bed, I heard a man beat his dog beneath my window.

Thursday, March 12, 2026

Things feel less real. Walking home from the train today after work, it felt like I was walking through a model, that everything was somehow smaller; all of it fake, even though it looked the same. The only thing different today was a dead rat on the sidewalk, soggy from the rain, about the size of my damp & sneakered foot. I almost stepped on it before recoiling. I was scared until I realized it was dead, which made me feel guilty.

I don't know how to fill my time lately. It feels like it is passing more slowly, or that it's being stretched by a malicious force. It's hard to choose what to do when nothing is enjoyable. Everything feels obligatory; whether I'm at work or not, it all feels the same. Mary said today that she knows things are bad when I stop complaining about work.

The March Car

Latenight Tuesday / earlymorning Wednesday, I had an extremely vivid dream about hitting a woman with my car, a role-reversal of what happened last year. I wept through the hallways of my dream in thick sobs, unable to breathe. I experienced a profound & corrosive guilt that I had never before experienced either waking or dreaming, which could only be described as the bloodguiltiness read about in scripture. Despite being ostensibly alive, I felt truly dead, as though a wandering ghost. After a long time, I woke up sick to my stomach. It was the first morning since the time change that I had to wake up into the dark. I considered shaking Mary awake, but instead I gathered a pile of drab workclothing from the unlighted bedroom & got dressed under bathroom light. The roads were rainslicked & I hesitated at the crosswalk, the headlights glaring & more sinister than usual. I was alone as I waited for the bus & wanted badly for someone to be there with me, even another miserable stranger. The darkness felt like it was closing in, physically, that the empty space around me was shrinking & taking my breath with it, & I considered just going home. But I fought back tears & I continued to wait in the dark. And after a short bus ride, I went to work in a classroom with blinds I couldn't open; the teacher had clipped anchor charts over them & I wondered how she could bear it every day. And because of the rain, recess was indoors, so I didn't see sunlight until 2 PM, blocked by cloud & umbrella as I walked to my train.

I'm not sure how my dreamingself knew while my wakingself didn't, but I looked through old writing & saw that it was exactly a year ago, on the 11th, that I was hit by the March Car.

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

After barricading myself from work the past couple of days, I'm going back tomorrow. For the past month I've mostly been working at the same school. I got used to the familiarity, but it never lasts . . . Maybe I mistake familiarity with control. Maybe substitute teaching is a bad job for someone like me, me who despises uncertainty, whose impulse is to hide from it, but the alternative is what? A full time teaching job? A principal in my voicemail offered that to me today . . . I thought about it, about having a place to return to, a place that I am recognizable, where I wouldn't have to correct the secretary about my name each morning. Then I thought about the lesson planning, the after school meetings, the parent teacher conferences, the grading . . . I told the voicemail-principal I am so flattered that you considered me for the position, but I value the flexibility that day-to-day subbing offers me; translated from the school-doublespeak: I just don't want to go to work every day. There's no reason my work schedule needs to be flexible, nothing it needs to contort itself around ( aside from my desire to work as little as possible ). And after drafting this list of what I don't want to do, I wondered why I even decided to become a teacher in the first place. When I tell the schoolpeople I encounter as I float through school after school that I have a teaching degree, a teaching license, they always decide that I'm currently searching for full-time employment. ( Because why else would I be working this job that I am overqualified for? ) I've learned to noncommittally nod— or committally & lyingly nod— when they tell me that I'm a fresh-faced graduate looking for the best school for me, as if this current state of being is some long prerequisite investigatory process for the next step in my life, when there is no next step.

In September a friend wrote me:

Best of luck with unemployment & writer's block. I remember you once said that teaching is a profession that's good for writing. I know you felt conflicted about being a teacher but I still think about what you said from time to time. Though, it doesn't take a lot to fend off stagnation, so take things day by day.

Aside from the fact that I have a job, nothing has changed since then.

Mary plays the Beatles in the car a lot. When we were visiting Grandpa in his last days on the mountain, it was Help. Then, back to work after my monthslong avoidance, it was Good Morning Good Morning in the car, in the dark, on the way to work each December morning to the windowless music room. ( Now the song makes me wince the same as my phone alarm. ) Lately it's Nothing's gonna change my world, Nothing's gonna change my world, Nothing's gonna change my world . . . The lyrics play in a short mental loop, more like a swirl, & I can never remember any of the other words.

I almost blurted out "I don't want to wake up tomorrow" as a shorthand for "I don't want to wake up for work tomorrow", but what's the difference?

Tuesday, February 25, 2026

I noticed protrusions from the apartmentbedroom walls, small tumors of paint like splattered curds of cottage cheese, comet-tail shadows streaked by desklamp illumination. Before the protrusions, I noticed that my days have been undifferentiable despite their demarcating events— days of work at the same school (instead of the usual scattered hauntings), months delayed coast with its snow-wisps of sand, unexpected drive through a snowed Tilamook State Forest, church for the first time (since moving) in time for Forgiveness Sunday, waking up in the middle of the night screaming— though I don't know what amount of time the blur of days spans. And before the dissolvement, I noticed that I am very unhappy for no discernible reason.

On Sunday I returned to church for the first time since moving to Oregon. I visited a couple of Catholic churches— The (Tourist Trap) National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother & a faraway Trappist abbey with the humility hush of monks' voices— but neither were my church. Both times unused to sitting in a pew, I was observer & not participant. I even felt a little dirty, neurotically. A rained-on Sunday bus ride delivered me directly, on asphalt just outside the gate. Back to standing church, I went through the gestures & the words again like talking to an old friend, as though there were no time apart. Father A—n had told me once that no matter where it was in the world, each Orthodox church was going through the same choreography, and that choreography had been mostly unchanged for hundreds of years. Thinking of Mary in her Michigan church, this made complete sense to me, and I could think of it as a sort of intuitive bilocation. But in this church of strangers, this observable fact felt like a small surprise. The priest talked about another priest tortured, & that a saint said our sins were a handful of sand thrown into a God's forgiveness sea. I thought of the wisping sand like snow across the beach a day earlier. That of course sin is that insubstantial. That tomorrow it would be Lent. That for Lent I would write every day again, because as Mary said to me "not a writer but someone who writes". And I already failed, but the failure is a snowball of sand across my own shoes & I am a worker in the vineyard.