I dreamed there was a Society of Nostalgic People that gathered around the stone fence of my old middle school and would sit there as if waiting for their parents to pick them up from school. Some of them weren't even alive anymore but, they told me, pretending for a while was nice.
I don't remember a lot but I remember feeling sad. A lot of things that worry me or I've lost appeared in this dream, mocking me.

Sit down and try to pull something out of your brain. You feel so disconnected from the world, but you have decided you would never take your own life. As you have come to find out, there are other, subtler ways to kill yourself. You kill yourself every day. Even though you don't want to. You would miss this all so much. You want to live in the world.

I want to live in the world.

When I was a kid there was a blog I was obssessed with. It documented the everyday life and intimate thoughts of a severely depressed young woman. Some entries were funny, some were heart-wrenching. There was a backlog dating back years and years of writing. Several paragraphs, or barely a line. I cannot explain my fascination with this woman's words. I couldn't have been older than twelve, naive and nonchalant, and the worst days of my life were still ahead of me, yet I felt this pull towards her melodramatic darkness. I would spend my afternoons reading and re-reading the entries, and fantasizig about who the person behind the keyboard might be. Until, one day, she uploaded a photograph of herself. Her face wasn't visible, but I recognised her nonetheless, because I had seen that picture before: it was my older sister's ex-girlfriend. Thinking back on it, it was obvious; how else would the url have mysteriously appeared on the browser history of the laptop I shared with her? Still, finding this out made it lose all of its appeal. I was no longer experiencing the serendipity of human connection; I was a creep peeking inside the neighbour's window while they changed.

For now the plan is simply not to kill myself. Anything that comes as a result of that is secondary.