Slow Down, Fast Train. Take Me With You.

I try to balance on this thin line between the personal and the impersonal, the general and the specific. I try to write sentences which mean something more to someone than, "Oh, she felt this and that way these days," Because, really, who cares how I feel? I try to make this into literature because I am having such a hard time making much else into literature. Each day that passes, unwritten, into the long and growing line of days behind me, is a day lost to all the things that could have been but never were. I am constantly writing about how terrible it is to not write. I am constantly pouring over all the time I spend not writing, even while I'm in the process of trying to make something memorable, or at least something that I am proud of. But, it seems possible that it is just as useless to spend words on what it means to not spend words on anything. It seems possible that I am wasting just as much time as if I wasn't writing at all.

Rimbaud raced and rambled through my head today. His soft face stared at me from behind my eyes and I closed them over and over again to see those deep, dark eyes looking out at me.

"Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.

One evening I took Beauty in my arms - and I thought her bitter - and I insulted her.

I steeled myself against justice."

In the Great Hall it is said that one can live only in thoughts, but why would one want to? Fernando Pessoa says that he can live a million lives in thought so why would he want to do anything else? I, whoever this "I" is, try to dig a life out of the ashes of moments which constantly rush by me. I try to catch the seconds as they speed across each minute and hold them steady for just long enough to know them. But, I also push them forward, let them fall, wish they were passed and done with. I'd like to hold them in my palms, press them out from the tips of my fingers and make them mean something solid. And, sometimes, even when I do, I finish what I'd made and I forget I ever made anything. Sometimes I feel that the only time I am doing what ought to be done is when I am furiously fingering a keyboard, fleshing out a story, making something come alive from nothing. We all want to make something come alive, don't we? We are just so often afraid to see what it is that comes from inside us. We must leap into ourselves with wide open eyes but we can't see what we've done with anyone's eyes but our own.

And I want to follow myself into each moment, into each vibrant sunset, and push myself along with words. I want to add something significant to all the things which have been said before and I wonder if these brief vignettes are anything more than late night boredom manifested in far too many words.