September 21st, 2026 - Lost Child
Dear TNY,
I got to “Lost Child” early, bee-otch!
Yesterday was a bad one for me. I had a dream about a person from my past. Some people, you know? They hurt you so badly, intentionally or otherwise, that when you dream about them, it doesn’t matter if the dream is a happy dream or a bad dream, because when you wake to reality they aren’t there and, ultimately, all the dreams of them become bad dreams.
I dream about lots of people. Some dead, some not. I dream of my father often, who beat me as a child and made me feel so small (to be clear, I am stealing that line from my one of my sons; I asked them both a couple of years ago if they were afraid of me and they said, terrified, and I asked why, and my oldest son said he was never afraid I was going to hurt him, but that, “you have the ability to make us feel so small, Dad,” so all of you reading know, this is what real radical transparency looks like, this is vulnerability, this is the horrors of existing). But I’m always glad to see my father in my dreams, most of which I’m dragging him along on some adventure, him, frustrated with the difficulties of life, much as he was in real life, me, now fully understanding that when you spend most of your adult life doing what you don’t want to do, that sitting in a recliner and watching bad action movies from the eighties while sharing a bowl of ice cream with your scruffy, pre-diabetic dog might be as close as one can get to heaven. A life of working to provide Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for people who won’t understand the sacrifices you have made for them, and them only tending to complain, makes that chair a cozy one. I didn’t get it then, Dad. But I do now and I’m sorry.
Anyway, I had a dream and it blew my fucking day up. And last night, as well. I woke up at 0337 this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. I discovered that you, TNY, don’t publish your stories on Sunday at the turn of the clock. You published sometime between 0337 and 0638. So I rinsed my taint of late-night sweats and hauled my ass to Bethel, Maine to enjoy a coffee and éclair before work today. And to read your fiction.
First, though, yesterday. I have these events. I don’t know what triggers them. It isn’t always a dream. It can be a song or a line in a movie or an old picture that pops up or someone asks a question or, really, anything. If I had concrete answers, I would avoid said triggers, but I don’t so, like all of you, I’m wandering through life knowing that I could pop off at any time by some random shit I have no control over. And that blast came and went with the dream and I woke up and cried. I watched videos on the internet and cried. I played a game on my phone and cried. I took a brief nap before waking for work and cried. I reported to a few friends what happened as my brain was melting. And I cried. I did some incredible mudding on drywall yesterday, though, and listened to some backlog work of Joe Frank. And laughed, surprisingly. If you haven’t, listen to him. A good primer would be the Radiolab episode that was made after Joe passed. Joe was doing work that will continue to remain under-appreciated for years.
I kind of ran out of work in the early afternoon, which wasn’t helping my brain. It feels like panic, guys. Like, I go from being totally fine, sharp, and capable of processing so many tasks at once whilst simultaneously handling existential discussions in my head and keeping up text convos and designing iterations of solutions for problems such that the R&D phase of projects mostly happens in my imagination. It’s a beautiful machine, my brain. But when the doom comes, the blow up, the panic, the whatever, all processing power goes to that and turns the volume all the way the fuck up. And that’s it. I can’t do much else. Guys, I’m tired of it. It’s why the idea of suicide comes up so often. Because you can’t escape yourself. No matter where I go or what I do, I’m still there. And the problem with having a wet processor like mine is that it never shuts off and what it processes isn’t always under my control. I sat in the shower last night doing tick checks on my legs and kept trying to recite, in order of operations, the work for the next day. And I couldn’t make it past step one (check glue up/do other glue up) without derailing and then death-spiraling into a panic attack.
Good news, no ticks. Oh, why would there be? In an attempt to snuff out my thoughts, I went for a hike after work. I left the village and started up the ski slope. My intention was getting to the top of the Sunday River side, not Barker where I live. I ended up making a wrong choice and hiked up to Barker Summit the hard way, up a black diamond route. It was over 45° for the vast majority, and there was no way to get off the run because there were no cut-throughs. So there’s me, in weeds up to my waist, breathing like a wild animal during a hunt, slogging my way up terrain meant for going down swiftly on snow in the winter, and it was a tickertape of the same fucking thoughts all goddamn hike. Popped out at the summit, hooked up with a ridge trail, walked that to the other summit where I discovered that the motherfucking chondola was running and I was on the second to last carriage down to the base before it shut it down for the day. What luck!
What I’m saying, and maybe you can see that in this writing, is that my brain is fucking misfiring all the time these days. It’s a constant barrage of voices, arguments, counterarguments, realizations, re-realizations, re-re-realizations, put downs, complements, and all manner of shouting and whispering and it won’t shut the fuck up for a few minutes and just let a guy be.
I thought about a lot of stuff. One thing I thought about resonated with this story; it was the idea of this little girl standing in front of the elevator. Oates states:
Kit, who became Kathy in high school and college, and, in graduate school and beyond, Katherine.
But still, she says, she is Kit.
Still waiting by the elevator.
And that’s it guys. That’s all of us. We are all standing outside the elevator of our pain, waiting for the person, place, or thing that gave us that pain to come take it back. For most of this story, I didn’t care. But I yearned to help this little girl. To pop out of the elevator and save her, you know? But you can’t. We are all waiting for an elevator to open and the thing to take the pain away, but the people who do want to save us can’t take it away. And the people who can take it away don’t know how or don’t want to. Even if her father came back, her life wouldn’t have been better. Especially if he murdered her mother. But if those doors opened and he was there, so apologetic, she would fall into his arms and cry and cry and thank him for coming back. And even though all those people helped her, eventually ending up with her aunt and living a good life, she was still having coffee with her friend fifty years on and standing right there in front of that elevator again.
And that’s what we all forget. We get so mad at these people for hurting us. And we forget that everyone, without exception, is standing in front of their own elevator waiting for someone to take their pain away. This reminded me of a post I wrote in 2023 when the illustrious C was busy blowing my life up. My kids, guys. They are so smart. Even then, my youngest would say, “Does she ever pay for anything,” or, “She’s not very nice to you, Dad,” or, “Does she understand that you don’t get to see us very often?” No, son, she would have to exhibit empathy to do that, which she never had to develop because people wanted to be around her for other reasons than her apparently non-inherent “goodness”. So she would tear me apart, take the offense in every conversation, berate me, make me feel so small, and I wrote that post about being nice (a post which she was NOT happy about; her response was, “What if my dad read this, what would he think?” And my response was, “That you aren’t nice to me.” Lead fucking balloon, baby!).
And we all forget when we are hurt that the other person, the person hurting us, is also hurt. It’s easy to be that little kid, that first time in front of the elevator doors, waiting for your dad to come through and save you from your pain, the pain he inflicted on you, with not an ounce of anger in your heart. It’s a lot harder as an adult, after having stood in front of a lot of elevator doors, waiting for anyone to come and take your pain away, to not be angry when the doors open and it’s the person who gave you the pain. But that’s the thing. Pain begets pain. That person left you there because they are fucked up too and the appropriate response is always love, but rarely does one find it within themselves to forgive them for they know not what they do. Myself included.
For this reason, I find myself relating more and more to dead people from my life. Their suffering is over now, to our understanding anyway. And I want my suffering to end. But as Father John Misty says, we need to end “…the obscene injunction to enjoy life.” Now, he took that line from Jacques Lacan; regardless, it’s still true. We seem to be here to struggle and the hard part about understanding that, fully, is watching most of those around you disregard that contract and bend their lives toward enjoyment, often at the expense of others around them, thereby increasing your suffering while masking or distracting from their own. It turns out the real tragedy of the commons isn’t taking from the commons, it’s disregarding the lives of the others you affect when you take. Dead people don’t fuck with you. And they don’t go on living like they never blew your fucking life up.
And yes, I’ve blown lives up. And yes, I have increased my enjoyment at the expense of others. This is the hard part about self-awareness, I think. If you are really looking, you’ll find that you are a monster. And that you have to live with yourself, knowing how horrible you have been to others, while at the same time so desperate that others be nice to you. What a wild piece of equipment the human is. It will destroy everything around it, its brain will justify those actions to ensure that it stays alive despite its nature, and it will want the others around it to treat it with kindness, forgiveness, and care regardless of its actions. And it will continue to make a fucking mess, even when met with exactly what it wants.
That’s the kid, waiting outside that elevator. Kit, asking herself her whole life, what did she do wrong to deserve this.
Nothing, honey. You didn’t do a goddamn thing. The worst part is that you’ll live the rest of your life earning those worn in grooves in front of that door. Punishment before the crime, it seems. And one is forced to ask, if we all hadn’t been abandoned in our own way (too much attention, too little, too much freedom, not enough, too much parenting, none at all, etc), would we hurt the others around us so badly? If we never stand at those elevator doors, can we live a life not putting someone in front of their own?
One doesn’t know.
The story wasn’t all that good. I did feel for the little girl but the narrator being the woman in the coffee shop felt too distant with no discernible reason for being distant. I don’t care about the narrator, I care about Kit. And Katherine. And the narrator’s existence, opinions, and inner dialogue are getting in the way of that. I can only think that the author felt strongly it was important. And this is an important distinction for all you writers out there. The work knows where it wants to go. It knows all the notes that need to be played, in what order, and with what amount of care. When you, the author, get in the way of that, that’s your fat fucking ego sliding out. Tuck it back into your shorts, Joyce!
Anyway, what a meandering piece of drivel this post is. I’m okay. But I’m really not okay. And I don’t know that I’ll be okay. In chemistry, there is a term: Supersaturation. It is when the concentration of a solute exceeds the concentration specified by the value of solubility at equilibrium. Roughly, it’s well past when the solution is stable; it’s when you use other means to force more of the solute into the solution than the solution can handle. I have achieved supersaturation. It’s not one person, this dream, or anything that simple. It’s an accumulation of observation, data, and pain that has created a situation where I just can’t fucking take anymore. I’m at the fucking limit. And I don’t know a way out.
But I know this: I ache because I was paying attention when life was so fucking perfect that I didn’t want anything else. I ache because I have been able to say, with full truth, “You are enough; this is enough.” I ache because every fucking time I have been in that pocket, it has come to an end. You likely have felt the same. I have a friend that has never fallen in love or been loved. Terrible, I know. And she is hoping so hard for it. I’m not sure which is worse. She yearns for what she doesn’t know. And I yearn for what I do. Sometimes I feel like Picard in Generations, rejecting when things could be perfect, but not real. And sometimes I’m Soran, and I’ll do anything to get back to the nexus, no matter how fake.
Right now? I’d like someone to hold my hand. It’s been almost two months since I have touched another human. Had a hug. Etcetera. So, at least for now, I’m going to stand in front of this elevator and wait for the doors to open. Maybe it’s a thousand times. Maybe it’s ten thousand times. But eventually, it’s going to open and beams of amber light will pour out onto my face and my wet eyes will widen all the way. I’ll smile and be met with a smile. And once again, I’ll be in the pocket, recognizing it the whole time, hoping wildly that it doesn’t end.
Nick
P.S. Katie, of yore, who does not read FTNY, told me two days ago that she is proud of me for doing this. That the only way to get this far is to not have given up. That it takes a particular type of person to try this hard at something for so many years. The reason she doesn’t read FTNY? It’s too raw. It’s too hard for her to look at. Guys, you know how you know you are telling the truth? It’s too hard to look at. For her to say that to me is so beautiful. Also, I was searching for a Joe Frank clip yesterday and found myself in an email from 7 years ago. The link is dead, by the way, but the email was from an old writing mentor. And he said, “Of course you’re writing nonfiction now; I always thought you’d be better at it because you’re so fucking honest.” For better or worse, the way home is forward, fellas and fellettes. And it goes right through the truth.
P.P.S. Buddy, little buddy, who won’t read this: I forgive you and there is an ocean of kindness here, as there always was and always will be. Just like the rest of us, one just needs to look with different, softer, more vulnerable eyes. One must be scared, and go anyway.
P.P.P.S. When you spend most of your time alone, you, well I, end up with a lot of existentialism. Which should be the default. But sadly, I don’t think it is. So I apologize for these posts. But this is the job. This is how FTNY is made. It’s made one week at a time. Living. And living is failing, which is then suffering. Because trying means failing. Over and over and over again. Maybe if I do enough of it, the elevator doors will open and The Flying Spaghetti Monster will be inside, extending a pasta tentacle toward me, beckoning me home.
P.P.P.P.S. The feather is from a recent, super-long walk.
