high-bar baking

When I was little, we read a book in library class about a man with a beautiful coat. I believe it started out as a coat, but now I can’t remember. Throughout the book, it progresses into different articles of clothing or cloth as he wears it out. He uses it until it can’t serve the function of a coat anymore, and then it becomes a shirt, maybe? Then a kerchief or a pot holder or something, decreasing in size as the fabric becomes more and more worn. As the last step of the journey, he turns this once-coat into a button. One day, though, he misplaces this button. And you’d think the story stops there, right? Nothing left from which to create anything else? Well, that wasn’t the case. This man chooses to write a book about this progression, thus making something from nothing. The implication, of course, is that this is the book we’re reading right now. It was a cute story, but I never really bought it. Because, of course, he doesn’t make this book from nothing — he required paper and ink and binding materials and all the guts that go into a physical book. I still don’t buy that you can create something from nothing, at least not like that. 

But I get it now. I understand what the author was trying to say, in a way that second grade Madalyn cross-legged on her reading square couldn’t. What he created wasn’t a book. It was a story. The best offering humanity has, our only weapon with which to rage against the dying of the light. His story was this, and I offer it again to you today: love doesn’t end. It doesn’t matter if you can wear your coat as a coat anymore, or if you carry it in your pocket like a button, or if you’ve misplaced it on the subway and all you have left are the memories of what used to be. The shape is immaterial, and the progression it goes through as it fades into the background doesn’t, can’t, diminish what it once was. Love is not a coat that goes into the world and is worn down until it doesn’t exist anymore. It is recycled in new interactions. I carry it with me into the choices that I make and the people that I meet. More importantly, it existed, and there’s nothing that can get rid of it now. It was real, and now it lives on in memory, if not in reality. Humanity is a collection of stories, and it lives on in ours. It’s a something that came from nothing. And now it’s too real to turn back to nothing. 

I wrote that for something else and am recycling it here. Not because I believe it to be true. Not tonight. Not after a dropped game against NIU like that. Tonight is a night where I turn on Revenge of the Sith because only that kind of darkness can match my mood. The children, Annakin! The children! 

I got ice cream with a regular person. Stopped by a boutique. Had a hazelnut quest, more to come on that. 

Tried to remember that there’s more out there. 

Why do I continue to open myself up to hurt?