3 Weeks

What a whirlwind.

Or rather, “What a light breeze!”, if I’m being honest.

It’s been three weeks since my first book release and every single one of those days has gone by in a blink. I feel like I did last year upon returning home from my month-long sojourn to Europe, staring at my bedroom ceiling while I wonder if anything actually happened or if the biggest parts of my current life are little more than a half-remembered dream. Poe might’ve thought that was the case and if it’s good enough for him, then it’s good enough for me.

Unless we’re talking about my dating life, in which case I’ll subtly step far away from that particular literary titan.

It’s odd, though. It really is. I’ve often tried to explain how I experience the passage of time to friends and family, if only to see if this is a shared perception, but with little success. I’m quite sure it is because if there’s one thing the internet has taught me, it’s that all the quirky things I did as a child and teen aren’t nearly as unique at I once thought they were. Our similarities run much deeper than I often thought, so perhaps the fleeting sense I have of everything is shared as well. I doubt I’ll ever know for sure, though. As with everything else, I feel like I’ll never have enough time to figure anything out at all. All I’ll have are the unanswered questions.

It’ll be like playing “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” but without a host, which seems about right since Regis is now dead. But I digress.

Three weeks. Twenty-one days. And I swear to god, it seems like forever ago and just yesterday at the same exact time. Memories are a hazy thing for me, they always have been. Sad and terrible events linger forever and with great prominence but the best that life can give tends to exist in the part of my brain that most resembles a cluttered and cobwebby cleaning closet. They’re there, those moments, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to ever find what I’m looking for in there. It’s a cluttered mess of half-forgotten things and so much more.

The amount of times I’ve fallen while trying to find a talking mop and come out with a rusty iron shoe, I tell you what…

But they’re there, those good times. Those incredible memories and experiences I hope to take with me as long as I can without losing them to the luggage carriers as so often happens while flying. And I think if I looked hard enough, I might find every stressful moment of joy that came with my first ever book release party. There were friends and family, people I haven’t seen in ages, and they showed up in droves to buy my book and have me sign it like I’m not some agoraphobic weirdo they’ve known for the past decade or more. There were beers. There was chaos and pretty girls. There were a lot of people who cared, in short, and that meant a lot to me.

But it’s gone now. Everything is always gone. And I hope it saw me wave goodbye as it wandered off to wherever those things go.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I have now returned from a 90-minute break. I had to watch a nice little horror movie called “Hell House LLC”, which, while possessing of a truly awful title, is a surprisingly fun and creepy little found footage movie. Recommended. And so, I digress yet again.

I go back and forth on whether or not I’ll put another book out there. I’ve never gotten this far in the game before, so I don’t know what will happen next and I worry that 80% of the people who bought the book bought it as a novelty. As something about which they could say “Hey! Look! I have his book and I know him!”. I know it’s a strange worry, but it’s a worry nonetheless because if I were to put out another book and that novelty is gone, if they’re not really reading my stuff so much as stocking their bookcase with it, then how forgotten will book two wind up being? See, this is where my mind goes and how it works all the time. It doesn’t quit. I don’t honestly know if it knows how. It’s a constant ebb and flow of worries and fears, that I’ll write for myself and myself alone and yet somehow even fail at that.

Good god is it a pain. But pain won’t last forever, right?

So yes, one of the biggest moments of my writing life is now three weeks deceased. It exists in a hazy broom closet that I try to visit sometimes even though I often wonder if it’s meant for me. I’m toying with releasing a second anthology if only to amuse myself, a collection of my truly sobering stories of the sad and whimsical so as to confuse anyone who might think it’s a follow-up to ISLAGIATT. What an oddly enjoyable experience that would be. And then, because I am the man I am, I could inevitably have this same exact conversation with myself all over again once it came out and was released to the world.

It just seems weird, that’s all. Momentous occasions should feel appropriately momentous, possessed of resonance that spreads out across a pond like rings in the water. It’s odd to see them die out so quickly. It’s strange to see the water fall flat.

But it does. It always does. And no matter what, I can always be sure that there is a dusty broom closet somewhere out there. I may not be able to find it, I might not even know it’s there sometimes, but it is and the best moments of my life are sitting there around a small table as if they’re the aging characters of Wonderland. No matter how recently those memories were made, I’ll be left to wonder where they’ve gone to and why they’ve left me here alone. And I will. It’s in my nature to dwell on these things.

And yet when push comes to shove, I’ll do what I’ve always done: I’ll see if I can’t make more. Not just so I can relive the feeling I’m sure I felt, but also so I can make them feel less lonely by giving them what the occupants of a forgotten room in an empty house so often need.

Friends.