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#19 A bird flies into a window
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#19 A bird flies into a window

A shi**y essay with a potentially good point

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Holly Whitaker
Jun 10, 2022
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#19 A bird flies into a window
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I spent this entire week trying to write an essay that absolutely would not work. Also, I do not mean *entire week* in some extra, exaggerative way. I mean I spent above twenty hours over the course of four days fighting with eight terrible fucking paragraphs that never amounted to anything more than “blech.”

I was trying to write about this sequence of events: A bird died in front of me; it’s death inspired a revelation that had me waxing poetic about how quickly life changes and how the fragility is what makes it all so good; which got me wondering why I couldn’t remember that same awe-struck wonder when things actually and truly fall horribly apart; how then like clockwork things actually and truly fell horribly apart; the subsequent and immediate opportunity to practice loving the precariousness of life in the full bloom of an unwanted event with the revelation close enough to motivate me to act differently; a variety of sub-events (a reverse license plate lookup; an immersive perf…

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