And Other Things I Cannot Name
There is a loneliness only writers seem to know, though I can never tell if it's solitude or exile. The page burns with a fire no one else sees—an energy that feels alive in me, but invisible to the world. Still, I cannot stop. I have never been able to. It is less a choice than a compulsion, a current that drags me back, again and again, to these empty lines.
I try to name what it is I feel, but the words shift somewhere between thinking and writing, between what I mean and what appears. Perhaps that is the paradox—this hunger to express what cannot be expressed, this ache to be heard while knowing the silence is both substance and solace.
August makes everything uncertain. The afternoons stretch hot and heavy, and the crickets sound like something I should remember but don't. I find myself drifting back to the blurred edges of youth, not out of nostalgia exactly, but as if I'm caught between what was and what might still be. As if there's another future waiting there—not the one gathering now like storms on the horizon. I long for it without knowing its shape, the way you long for a vivd dream you can't quite remember.
And so I write to you, even if you are only half-real, somewhere between imagination and memory. Maybe this letter will never reach anyone, but in writing it I feel less alone—if only for the space of a page and whatever lives in the gap between one word and the next.
28 August 2025
Note: I've retired the chapter numbers from these diary entries—they were never really chapters anyway, just fleeting moments.
Dean Bowman