Writing In Oblivion
It’s like hiding under the covers in a game of hide-and-seek with your siblings, except they got sidetracked and started watching Land of the Lost. You revel in your best hiding place of all time, only to fall asleep there. You were playing a game that stopped long before you thought it did. And here I write into the void, day after day.
This is the whole point, though. To write haphazardly into the ether and allow the words to fall where they may. Nowhere, somewhere, anywhere. Writing is an act of compassion to myself because it allows me to unfurl memories into sentences that unhollow my heart. It never matters to me who reads it, but oblivion can still be a cold package of three-year-old peas from the back of your freezer.
I wrote a lot as a kid. Images from my early journals are somewhere on my Instagram. I wrote about the Yankees. I wrote about weird alien stuff. I wrote a lot about things that seem nonsensical now, but were a world of my own then. I was an only child who spent a ton of time alone in my room, with my thoughts as a soft pillow of toddledum.
When I got popular on Medium the first time, it felt exciting to have people (over)reacting to my writing. I fell into a way of writing that was part me and part what the Internet wanted. I used headline analyzers and shaped my essays with headers and stock images. That wasn’t how I should have been writing, but my style was still in there under a layer of gristle.
As with so many other parts of my life, I found myself writing a lot about the inequity of the platform and some of the publications. Bucking the corporation just lit me up. Spam writers became so enraged that they started signing me up for male porn sites and other oddities. Adults can become the worst version of themselves over nothing. I started searching for oblivion.
My old journals were for me. Writing is for me. I lost my way so many times because of the rigors of the Internet and the FOMO one gets from being micro-successful in a niche product that exists to resell you your own stuff. Building this site and pouring my letters into it is the antidote. I still harbor odd wishes that someone from The Paris Review or The New Yorker will happen upon this asteroid of a site and fall in love. Here, I wait.
I write like I think; in flashes of moments and broomswept memories. I tell myself the stories of my past with an unusual transparency. I have no secrets from myself, and therefore, my writing tells it all. Letting it out inside a small box in a patch of parkland in a piney barren is just the tool. I write because oblivion allows me the space to reform oblong globules of my life.
© Jonathan Greene, September 26, 2026
