In the 21st-century, careers and lives don’t roll off an assembly line. We have to put the pieces together ourselves.
“How are you free? You have free time during the day when most everyone you know is working. You’re living on the edge of poverty. You can’t do anything with that time.”
We think that by avoiding decisions now, we keep all of our options open for later—but not making choices is a choice all the same.
Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the twenty-first-century opiate of the masses. So twentysomethings like Kate are tempted, and even encouraged, to turn away and be twixters, to close their eyes and hope for the best.
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today And then one day you find, ten years has got behind you No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun. —David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright of Pink Floyd, “Time”
Days rise up before me like great waves, threatening to drown me if I can’t surmount them. So I kick until my legs are heavy and my lungs burn from the effort, and each night, somehow, I crest the wave, sliding down the other side of it into a meagre sleep, only to wake the next morning to the sight of another wave gathering on the horizon.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
I wanted a fix. A hit. A tiny little taste of you. Instead, I feel like a spider in an empty web, waiting for vibrations that never come. A single strum on one silk strand would do. A gentle hum in the gossamer. But all is quiet. All is still. And another lonely week looms large.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
It’s even more difficult to talk about you in the past tense because you’re technically still here. Here as in alive, obviously, not here in this house.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
And this, I’ve just now decided, is maybe harder than death. With death there’s no option to call someone, to hear them laugh, to see or touch or hold them again. There’s no decision to be made. No temptation to resist. Choosing to be apart is its own special kind of torture. It means making that choice over and over again. Every moment of every day. And some days the choice doesn’t seem as clear.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
are the moments we remember most actually the moments we remember least?—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
I’m beginning to realise that time does not heal wounds. Time just adds more days in which to feel the effect of them.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
And look, I know how this goes. I know that by the time you get married I’ll have healed enough that I can smile for you too. But this foresight barely makes a dent in the agony of imagining it now. Somehow, each fresh loss feels different, like a maze with shifting walls; I know there’s a way out, but I’m fucked if I can find it.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
The photos elicit in me a feeling akin to that of Maeve’s paintings, or the eerie videos that preceded my most recent nightmare. In them I see no past. No future. Just infinite present. And the threat of something unseen. What that thing is, I can’t tell, but there’s a lack in each one, a romanticised longing. I feel I could fall into them, that even as I stand here now, I am free-falling.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
New Year’s Eve finds me staring at an endless loop of liminal spaces: unfinished construction sites, dreamlike swimming pools with no obvious entrance or exit, mono-yellow hallways in some nondescript hotel. I’m reluctant to call it an addiction, but I can no longer go a day without watching these videos, which get me so close to that feeling of falling, and the sense that at any moment the ground will hit and everything will suddenly make sense.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
But quick as memories come, they are rewritten, altered by the knowledge that you knew then how little time we had. And soon this knowing starts to seep through my whole mind, like ink in water, tainting every memory I have of you, darkening the tone of my whole childhood. I thought that I had mourned you fully. That there would be no more mourning left to do. But this is a fresh, graveside grief, raw and untamed, that doesn’t so much slip under the door as burst through it, demanding my attention.—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted