&c.

there's this guy i work with -- "this guy" because it's weird to call him a man, even though that is what he is and he is that, you know?, but he's a little too much of a guy to be a man -- anyway, this guy i work with who, i realized today, smells faintly of stale cigarettes in a way that i have never smelled stale cigarettes before. it's not even, like, an actual cigarette smell that i smelled when he came to my desk to show me illustrations that are "fucking awesome" and needed to be inserted between the correct pages of a manuscript, even though i knew he'd just gone out for a smoke in the half-covered pseudo-wind-tunnel thing we have outside our door.

like cigarettes and snow. and if not snow, then that deep winter chill that accumulates between glass buildings and concrete when the rest of the world is snowed on and new york is just left to exist, always moving, always breathtaking, never beautiful.

i thought, really, that i had really felt alone before. i also thought i was done with that. feeling alone, i mean. (not lonely. alone.) only recently have i become aware of a gnawing pain, in every inch of my body, making me cold and hungry and listless and detached. not sad so much as done. with whatever i have to be done with, i guess. (not life, i don't mean that. i don't know what i mean. just an abstract sense of "thisness" that i really can't define.)

all this is is twelve minutes of silence. that's what it boils down to. (but doesn't it always? isn't that inevitable? am i wrong for being almost relieved instead of surprised or disappointed?)

i wish i had a penguin in a suit.