The question of things that matter
This isn't about things mattering in any grand, moral sense. That is the lie you tell yourself when you are young, or when the air goes thin. You want to believe there is an invisible calculus being worked out, that the ledger will balance itself. It won't.
What I mean is the texture of the day, the fine, grit-like specificity of what, on a given a Friday afternoon on the 405 South or when you shouldn't have slowed down on a yellow, actually constitutes the field of vision. It’s the small, nearly invisible transactions that start to accrue weight. The way the light, that particular October light, hits the lurid orange of those big ass Spirit Halloween banners you see for a couple of months. Sometimes it's the sudden, utterly useless conviction that if you could just find the right accessory, the one that completes the ensemble—a bracelet, a particular shade of lipstick—maybe the whole confused pattern would resolve itself.
It’s the sheer, exhausting effort of maintaining one’s personal weather.
I keep coming back to the clothes. Not the good stuff, not the tailored linen suit or the vintage silk scarf you actually like. I mean the interim pieces. The temporary, fading, utterly anonymous t-shirts and jeans you bought in a fluorescent mall, the ones with the minor, irritating flaw—a twisted side seam, a pocket that doesn't quite lie flat—that you simply learned to accept. They are placeholders, a kind of cotton-and-denim stage prop, and you know, peeling them off in the weak light of the bathroom, that eventually you'll take them to a bin, or throw them out entirely, their brief utility extinguished. And yet, for this week, this month, they matter. They hold your shape, the faint scent of your day—airport air, weak coffee, the layered perfumes you put on every morning for the sake of smelling like you—when you pull them on at 6 AM, giving you a skin to navigate the relentless, indifferent world. They provide the necessary friction.
The horror is not that nothing matters, but that everything matters in the moment of its use, its consumption, its fleeting, temporary arrangement—and then it doesn't. The effort to track that shift, that point where the thing or the person or the promise moves from the center of the frame to the periphery, where it becomes simply data, that is the only real work.
And if there is any single, miserable utility to be drawn from this kind of cataloging, let it be the note:
Don't hold on to anything longer than you use need it. The refusal to release is not loyalty; it is only wasted energy.
And yet, there is a counter-argument to the ruthless efficiency of that final note, a necessary friction provided by the very act of holding on. It’s an easy, seductive austerity to say, "Let it all drift." But what is the you that remains after you’ve jettisoned everything that failed to provide utility past its expiration date?
The things you hold onto longer than you strictly "need" them are not dead weight. They are markers. They are the anchors that give you a sense of longitudinal position in a life that otherwise threatens to become one vast, undifferentiated sea of days. The effort required to live alongside the imperfection and the failure is the slow, hard work of accretion.
The point is not to cling, but to observe the clinging. And to understand that sometimes, the reluctance to let go is not a failure of nerve, but the deep, animal recognition that the empty space will be colder than the occupied one.