what drives us to write is usually a feeling, which can end up in just a lot of descriptors. i am disconnected and ungainly. i am not quite real, soap-bubble, this life is not solid. i am scared and tired. i am hurting (back spasm for ~20 hours) and alone. i feel fanciful but vulnerable, poppable – the soap again.
i feel like there is a brink i can’t quite put my finger on, and i am teetering over it. i could fall one way into lighter. lighter burden, permeable responsibilities, possible, open. i could continue sliding back the other way to sink, to watch horrified and struck-still as my life turns to stone, my self, into immobility is i think the gist. where i don’t have the physical energy required to open a window, where i don’t have the mental energy to flip open the laptop for our (fake) internship.
where good intentions bob close and impossibly out of reach. i’ll do my dishes. i’ll get some real coding done and make up for lost time. i’ll do the laundry. i’ll make my space clean and bright and usable. i’ll eat meals as opposed to sunflower seeds (which nowadays is code for the random crap i eat when i can’t prepare food (always) – cookies, luna bar, dry tortilla chips, almonds, yogurt, ice cream, whatever. not BAD for me but not meant to be all that is eaten.) i’ll organize my life and make usable my time, my empty spaces. i’ll deal with the scary mail. i’ll get back on top – just – not this second – in half an hour – an hour – tomorrow. when i try to move this second people scream and act like they’re drowning (maybe they are). anyway, i guess my stupid back has made most cleaning impossible today – bending and turning are both pretty much torture.
i want my life to be a clear running stream (purity is a myth), filling the low places, touching but not concealing, sharpening. beautiful, sustainable. it’s fairyland. it’s why turning over a new leaf has been such a habit, especially when we were young. at 13 it was all we knew how to do. it worked then, for a short time. maybe would have been longer if we were singular. now the balance of power in the system is too different and it’s hardly ever practicable.
my hands and feet are uncomfortably sweaty but i’m not warm. in fact, my feet are cold. typing feels clammy, my palms lubricating the front of the keyboard, my grimy fingers touching and rubbing off on the keys. the part of my back just below the neck is there, like a hot stone, pressing. yesterday it was like a hot iron, so i guess that’s progress. i am stiff from holding my head in one position. my body feels hollow and sticky and fraudulent. finding words is pleasant but not as it could be, and not lastingly. a ripple of rest for each novel accuracy in what i write, but the pool is in a thimble.
there are so many thoughts and they are so, so lost. i store myself in talking to edges, only, and now edges and i get maybe two hours together on 2/3rds of the days. nobody’s fault. but it’s empty-making. then again, maybe it got me writing, maybe that’s good. everything is unsure, open to saturation. permeable, but i say that too much. you know how it feels sometimes like the boundaries are kind of fractal-ey, the finer you go the finer holes there are to fill, things that seem connected from a distance are a riot of gaps? shrug.
there is no destination. there is no journey. there is only a cruel mocking glimmer of motion, lulling and damning, because it never comes. only i’m so close. if i could just move… then i’d have motion. but it’s like exercising to stop depression. if you could exercise, the depression might be manageable. if i could move, then maybe i could cover distance.
blah all of it is starting to feel too pretentious, what gives you the right to be delicate and obscure and fake-poetical. and this is part of everything too. drink any draught of feeling deep enough, there is the coarse bitterness of self-hate. i don’t even think it shows when i’m mocking myself. i meant to close a paragraph ago. what am i doing? what is there to do? we want to die.
