sometimes i think i’m actually broken for how much beauty can carve me out, leave me hollowed and ringing, not from sadness, no, never sadness but something deeper, a frequency i pick up only when the world screams its brilliance and my bones remember what it feels like to be nothing but vessel, just a shell holding the echo of something too vast, and the sheer audacity of existing in chicago right now, with these insane, bruising sunsets, it makes the tendons behind my knees ache with this profound, almost reverent helplessness, like i’m watching a private, catastrophic performance of the cosmos just for me, and the way my palms start to sweat then, not from nerves or fear but this intense, almost unbearable privilege of witnessing, of being utterly, completely permeable to all of it, feeling the texture of eternity on my tongue for just a second before it’s gone, leaving that strange, almost mineral aftertaste, a kind of existential grit that settles deep in the molars, an unsettling knowledge that even good things can dismantle you, turn you inside out, make you feel like you’re almost going to shatter but instead you just... hold, you just vibrate at this impossibly high pitch until the moment passes, until the colors bleed into ordinary grey, and you’re left with only the memory of how close you came to dissolving, how close to absolute pure, unadulterated sensation, and part of me almost wishes i had let go completely, just melted into the pavement there by the lake, become part of that impossible, breathtaking destruction.