How my day is going

Living like this means the year stops making sense, and the month and the week. The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle. Is that a Saturday, a Friday, a Monday? Is that an April 13, or a

As I tried to reorient myself, I realized how much of my angst had emanated from an existential crisis. Not in the clichéd sense that I couldn’t find meaning in my life; rather, that the weight of my choices and responsibilities, combined with a new, sustained confrontation with mortality, was bamboozling. This was a world tilted.

Rather, as I got sicker that winter, I no longer had the sense that I was a distinct person. On most days, I felt like a mechanism that moved arduously through the world simply trying to complete its tasks.