2026


Sentimental Value  


Everyone has left the city.

December was so full, of people, events, crises, and good conversation. As winter begins to shed its skin, real life must be returned to, and return everyone will. I don’t ever remember being idle during this time. I have always had somewhere to return to and something to get to. I have always been in commute or preparation and bid farewell to the joyous holiday season, chained to some machine of productivity that needed me back on the clock. For the first ever time, at the start of the new year, I am left to my own devices. I am my own machine, unoiled and functioning off an instruction manual. As a person, I feel quite okay. But, as a bird, I feel without a flock and left wandering post the migratory winter. 

S. recommended I watch Sentimental Value. In our ritualesque fashion, of watching something we really loved and immediately urging the other to watch it so we can discuss, he brought up the movie with me. And since I was feeling like a sentimental movie anyway, I had it downloaded immediately and ready to watch. I had no particular interest in watching the film, even though it looked interesting, owing to my general disinterest for, well, everything. But Trier dragged me in, as he always does– each time, to my surprise, but always so consistently. The emotions that cloaked this world felt Bergmanesque. And so, naturally, this felt like good inspiration for the script I have been (not) writing for the last three years. Rather than leave it at just being inspired, this time, I’m making notes as I watch the movie, of elements that captivate me, to later draw from.

A bar of Tony (brought by E. & L. from Amsterdam) — an old comfort of mine, now reduced to just one perishable bar.

To part with friends is to have so much joy lost. I feel that departure dually, for my friends E. & L., to whom I said goodbye a few days ago as they returned home to Europe, and for N., with whom I haven’t spoken in so long. Today marks what, over the years, became sort of our anniversary, or rather a day symbolic of the beauty and celebration in our friendship. I wrote to her last night, when it was still a different date in her country and nowhere close to turning today. It will be many more hours, if not longer, till I hear back from her. Patience is all that can combat distance, and every day I exercise it as best I can. I was her a year ago, in a foreign timezone, celebrating a different New Year’s from everyone else. It was cold and lonely and called for a stream of tears, inevitably so. I fear harsh winters, grey, and living in a different time from the worlds I call home. It is the most unfortunate thing that throwing myself to the wolves to do what I consider good work will drag me away to a distant place so cold and grey. I always know that it is partly in that fear that I keep myself from progress and migrate home, seeking lost comfort. 

Love and work will always exist oppositionally, and either path I take will strip me of something. 

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism 
I was reading an old letter from A in which she had written the words “a particularly cruel kind of optimism.” That was in May. Later that month, while working on the final chapter of my thesis, I turned to Berlant, seeking guidance on affect. And today, as I reflect on the year through my letters with A, and feel more than existential about my place in life, it feels like Berlant is calling back to me, in more ways than one. I have also been thinking of Yeats and whether, this year, the center will hold. I have bet all my horses on the center holding, but it is hard to envision a stable center, and what or where it is.
I cut myself shaving — evidence of impatience

While watching the movie, painstakingly, I see my future in Nora, participating on cue in the projective self-recognition her character was built for.
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The dread of longing to succeed in itself may be some strange kind of optimism, or so I gathered from my reading of the first section of “Cruel Optimism”: “Optimism and its Objects.” 

“impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic”


      Took a break to make passion fruit jam
In describing cruel optimism, Berlant inclemently connects hopelessness and blind faith to desire and its inevitable attachment to ego, and its continuity. 
In despondently waiting for a job to land on my lap, and money to come with it, and finally a fruitful creative career to follow, I have invested my ego continuity in anticipation of email notifications that often turn out to be spam or kind words by friends; other times also updates from Patti Smith, which still count for something. 

It’s mythical to view from the outside the path of someone who has reached their north star, their object of desire, against unconquerable odds. The reality of this myth takes 3 years in a city and eight years wandering, and 12 years in the making. Still, in all these stories (beyond possessing what Berlant calls “x”), recompense finds its way to people through folds and folds and folds of seemingly miraculous coincidences. 

In reading “Optimism and its Objects,” I have come to realize (thankfully) that providence is nothing but indirection working out. 


providence is not arborescent, it is indirectional and rhizomatic. 








I met my uncle for breakfast that morning, for the first time in this city instead of somewhere else in the world.