What does it mean to have charisma?

It cuts you because it’s what you seek and what you worry you won’t find: whimsy. The freedom to meander and wander upon connection, surprising and true.

You worry that suffering has made you permanently rigid and bitter and careful and cold. You worry that chasing whimsy will leave you with nothing that has a sense of real purpose, because everything was chased a little bit and not enough.

You worry that the five years will pass and you will be less traumatized, more passably Americanized, but still fundamentally lost.

You think about how the world is different now and you think about how each generation says that and it’s always true. That knowledge fills you with fear and apathy. You worry that you will never drink again. You worry that alcohol will never be sweet for you again, that it will never again bring you into a universe of whimsy and performance and desire.

You think about how your life would be better if every single day you wrote and you swam and you had good sex. You think about what gives your life meaning and you worry that staring at it all too directly is what causes what you’re seeking to disappear just as it feels within grasp, like a vanished sneeze or orgasm.

You worry that no one will ever see you, truly see you, again. You don’t want your life to be a series of lists or meetings or goals. You want the timeline to be murky, to search for the years as you’ve left them in disordered, cherished piles. You don’t want to live one hundred years of solitude.

A thought that brings on that soft smile at least, the one you’ve come to love instead of hate—the one you thought at first was sad and forced and weak, but now you know is born of sorrow making way for joy and lives inside that meadow where hope never leaves.