Maybe the mark of a really good writer is the ability to resist nostalgia and projection. A clean, emotionally unfettered writing. It's certainly not how I write. And I have to wonder if relying too much on memories in writing suggests that you are stuck in a rut, that your life has stopped generating meaningful activities and experiences, or at least is not generating them fast enough.

I have been stuck in irritation the past couple of days, with things, with people. I have been struggling with the experience of having to wait for things, with feeling held back by people and circumstances. And the resistance to these small, meager experiences feels like resistance to the weight of the entire world, which maybe it is.

I can feel the imperceptible cracks between myself and everything else forming, and I know that this is one of two ways that everything ends - either slowly, with tiny invisible fissures that slowly overtake a whole process, or at once, with a loud shattering. I think I prefer the loud crash to the vague and nebulous descent into an eventual fracture.

The thing about time unfolding slowly is that it allows you to think; you have space to contemplate an impending tragedy, accompanied by a false sense of agency that maybe you can change things. But once the fissures are there, then what? Everything is directionally in line with the trajectory of time, and maybe this is the ultimate tragedy: that everything unfolds as it does. Tiny fissures form and become great cracks, illusions shatter, rose-tinted glasses have to be removed once the white glare of something beautiful fades.

The worst part about being human is this process, the trajectory of time, whether it moves quickly or slowly. We are trapped within the arc of a beginning, a middle and an end. The place with the broadest vantage point is at the top of this arc, where we can see either the folly or wisdom of how something started, and the numerous ways in which it can possibly end. Because everything ends. This is the curse of time. And perhaps the curse of being human.

Physicists believe that the separation between past, present and future is only an illusion but clearly, it is an all-encompassing illusion. The joke is on all of us. If only we knew the punchline.