September 28th, 2026 - Dark Horse
Dear TNY,
Here we are on Sunday with “Dark Horse” and I am a human on planet Earth.
I’m not sure about this one. There’s a darkness to it. It’s raw. The language is visceral and so is the imagery. I appreciated the compression. Overall, the structure, flow, pacing, tonality…they were all on point.
So?
I didn’t much care for it. I may be sitting in the position of knowing this is a good story but also knowing it’s not for me. Actually, I am curious what a person I once knew would think of this story. But as for me? I’m tired and I think that’s all I can be bothered with. To say that I don’t much care for it but I respect the effort.
And I guess that’s okay, right? I don’t have to understand everything. Be moved by everything. See everything. You know? It’s all just stuff. This letter is just stuff. The world moving forward, one day at a time.
But is it? Days are labels invented by man. Click the stopwatch at 05:43 and reclick it again at 05:42:59 infinitesimal and there you go. “A day.” Or is it when the sun is up to when the sun is back up again? All of this tracking of time, that is a solidly human thing, at least to my understanding. The universe does not appear to keep time that way. Cataloguing it is a collective agreement between our species and it makes sense because, mostly, we all experience time the same. But do elephants? Fish? Oceanic currents? Redwoods? ‘Oumuamua? It can be certain they do not as that would break Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Einstein. I have been thinking about him a lot over the passage of this week of human time. It coalesced, the thinking, a couple of days ago when I had gone out for a long walk. Something like nine miles. Hilly. Woodland trails. Cemetery. Covered wooden bridge. And I had just taken this photograph of a tree and a rock and a stream and was walking along afterward, thinking about how that moment, like many moments in all of our lives, presented itself. It was up to me to notice as it was just waiting there, indifferent to me or anyone else. But I saw a thing that I thought might look okay. And I framed up the photo in my phone, got it balanced, did it just how I wanted it to be, and snapped the pic. I cropped it some after the fact, looked down at what the phone helped me to do, pleased, and then put the phone down. And then I looked up at what I had photographed, taking it in fully for the first time. And it was so real. The leaves shivered in the wind as the clouds, their upper peaks, curled up and back away from the mass of fluff moving to the left, like offspring demanding to be left behind. The water shimmered and shook, the knobby rocks below hirsute with moss. It was astonishing to be in that moment. So I held myself there as long as I could, brushing aside the mental clutter I tend to accumulate moment to moment. I kept pulling myself back in as the thoughts bubbled up.
Later, when I was walking along, I realized I had not been thinking about the thing I was thinking about. That I almost always think about. And I began to take note of its presence throughout the rest of the day. Oh, there it is again. Yep, we’re doing it again. Oh wow, I was doing it for a long time before I noticed this time. Get in the shower, brush teeth, shampoo beard, think about it. Normal shit.
Einstein once said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” I used to want this thing, the thought thing, to go away. The topic of it. The subject. To be free of its pain. But the more I thought about that nondescript spot on the side of Sunday River and Einstein, I realized I should be focusing more on the processing instead of the subject. And that’s when it hit me.
I have gratitude. I have gratitude for the immense amount of time and energy with which I have dug into this thought. It has been all encompassing for so long I can’t imagine life without it. And I realized that I, in fact, appreciate my processing. That there is something in the willingness to sit with a memory or idea that pains so much. To dissect it. To absolutely pore over it with every microscope in the collection. To fillet it open, examine it, stitch it back up, fillet it open again in a different dimension, see a section anew, and do it all over again. This processing, it has gotten me through my whole life. A thing that I was cursing and wished would leave me alone, has allowed me to sit here in front of this screen and type so many words. It has allowed me to do a light remodel on this house in Maine. To do good works in Vermont. To take my kids on gargantuan adventures. To read intimate partners and try to understand what they want without them having to ask for it. To process grief. Loss. To turn a life’s accumulation of injury into beauty, whether I end up writing about it or not. So that I can hold it all, you know? We all end up carrying so much anyway, and my brain has been actively trying to see the things that frightened me or scarred me or damaged me…it’s trying to render them beautiful for my sake. And that’s a gift.
And as this gratitude hit me, I realized how much I had for existing at all. How much gratitude I had for, pardon the plagiarism here, my stupid little life. It had gratitude for all of it. The Basque cheesecake that C. brought me on what would have been my brother’s 43rd birthday. Gratitude for being consistently neglected by J., watching her do it to my face, and my processing unit breaking her down into a scared, hurt little girl who did not know what she was doing. Gratitude for all of the horrible toilets that my sons and I found at campgrounds and gas stations from coast to coast in this country. For the times that the handful of people in my life listened to me, them, parking and coming inside when I arrived at an airport. Gratitude for the last few days I got to spend with my father before he passed; although difficult, they were the last I would get. Gratitude for every single decision made and not made that led me to a writing program in Alaska which encouraged me to be more me, not less. And gratitude for how that transformation changed my life, including making it past the struggle that that was and still is.
I’m sitting here not dead because, like you (if you are reading this), I survived. The harder the shit, the more I learned from it. Had things been easier or I was given what I wanted or I traipsed through life with a sense of entitlement, I wouldn’t be here right now. I wouldn’t know what I know. I might not even know the most crucial thing I have learned in all of this: I don’t know a goddamn thing.
So, as I was in the shower today and said, “There it is, there’s that thing again,” I just let it happen. If it hasn’t killed me yet, it won’t kill me. So, I might as well learn from it.
Nick
P.S. It only became clear in that last paragraph that what I was doing in this letter is exactly what the protagonist was dealing with in this story. The Thought. All of this perceived uniqueness in humanity, and even in our complexity we seem to be in one fat, never-ending river, sloshing around in the same problems from time immemorial to time not yet written. Nothing new being done. The same, basic, human problems frothing about as endless waves of people experience them for the first time. And as I sit here drinking coffee at 19:49, human time, like some asshole who is not thinking about sleep, I feel gratitude for our oneness as it proves unequivocally, and directly in opposition to my incessant stubbornness, that I am not alone. That we are not alone. For better or, much more likely, worse, we have each other.
