People have asked me how I feel. It’s not simple sadness - it’s far less real- but more a resigned sense of loss. I guess… I guess I’d say it’s like when your shoelaces come untied and you look down at them, you see the laces laying listlessly on the ground, but you don’t reach down, you don’t twist them back into a knot and rescue them from the dirt. It’s not that you don’t want to, it’s simply that something is lacking - the energy, the motivation, the care. And so you keep walking, and with every step you take, you see those laces snake around your feet. They tangle with each other, trampled by your shoes, but you don’t care. You don’t have the energy to lose. Instead, you let them drag in the dirt, in the wet, in the dust. You let them because you just don’t care. After all, it’s not as if your shoes have fallen off; the laces are still doing their job, just not as efficiently. They’ve been compromised; they’re acting differently. And that’s fine. But the worst is when people look at you, look down and say to you, “Oh, your shoe laces are untied,” realizing it anew. As if you’re not aware with every step you take that those tiny plastic nibs at the ends of a fraying string are slapping against the floor, raking across the ground. As if you can’t feel the looseness in your shoes, the vulnerability, and the sense that they no longer feel quite as snug and might fall off at the slightest tug. As if you can’t look down and see them dragging, twisting like snakes trailing  in your wake. Yes, you know your shoe laces are untied. It doesn’t matter what you’ve told yourself, it doesn’t matter if you’ve lied. You know. You know, but you’re not going to do anything about it because why? Why bother? You’ll have to untie them eventually; you saw it coming, that inevitability. Everything must break. Everything must come apart, every shoelace, every person, every work of art. Nothing can stay together in the long run. We might as well let it come undone.