Aurelio,
Change your world, that’s what you told me. Easy enough, right?
The fact was, I couldn’t change much of anything this year. I was hitting all the points I needed to move forward, but never felt as though I was making breakthroughs. I told you that I took on Moby Dick. My whale within, reading something just to prove I could. I was starting to hate Melville, and I think he hated me back. For whatever reason, I couldn’t conceive of doing anything, reading anything until I went through six hundred pages of cetology. I came to the end, and just like that it was over. Not to spoil a century-old book, but Captain Ahab doesn’t kill the leviathan. He went through all that effort for nothing.
I couldn’t rhyme anything with ‘change my world’ at first. You gave me the marching order, and it seemed all I had ever known was Herman motherfucking Melville. What I have read, you have read many times over. Where was the defining message worth sharing with you, I wondered? It couldn’t have been …
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