i've been feeling so lonely lately. i had an awful dream and i have no one to tell it to: the breadth of context is too much and i don't feel close to anyone no, i have a good bit of friends who i consider decently close, a breadth more than i've ever had in any stage of my life, but i am measuring everything. i miss having a best friend, but i feel i can not have one right now because i am too much i can't measure out others i don't know how one just "gets" a best friend at the age of 25 "I'm in a stage of my life where I can't allot time and effort for a best friend right now, but maybe in the future when my availability opens up, I can fit one in!" i am measuring right now.

*slight spoilers for 1000xResist i guess*

i woke up, crying from the dream: it's a "you gotta be there" sort of situation and the only way to be there is if i unfurl. i don't know how to sort out and package me breaking. lately i've been playing the video game *1000xResist*. the game's about many things: i choose it to be about diaspora. i've had it on my mind that to be a child of diaspora is to be a child of contradictions, but playing this game has made it readily apparent that it is also to be a child of persistence because how else does one live contradictions unresolved save for bearing them? the central character iris leaving home, despite the extenuating circumstance of serving as a research subject with immunity to the disease that killed off her entire school and will eventually devastate the rest of humanity, provides that rupture classic in narratives of immigrant families: cyclically she leaves as her mother had left too, she chooses and is chosen to persist. later the mother finds out she also carries this immunity too. she says, "maybe we are meant to survive this", and i am struck.

maybe i am meant to survive this, but is it not a sorry fate, to survive? or maybe it is when you survive for the sake of surviving, when you are designated to survive. it's a lonely survival, being built to do this: makes it easier to trick yourself that this is what you'll ever need, since i've gotten this far with this endurance in solitude. i've gotten too good at this. i don't want to die, but i do think often that if i were to, outside of immediate family, it would take a while for anyone to notice. have i built this of myself, a machine, autonomous, capable of doling out precise calculations ensuring my everlasting–the logical endpoints of my endeavors, surely? survival, once a goal, now a hole. maybe i must climb out, leave too as many others, yet i can't help to see directions none in this persistence too, another means to survival with no ends. i'll tell you this: in these dreams, they laugh at me from across the country. i am measuring still but sometimes i miss just pouring.