Wednesday, October 25, 2006

All I Got Inside Is Vacancy.


This day blew by a slow blur, things flopped past me and I clumsily shuffled around them. I dreamed of empty houses with broken floors and dusty ceilings. The mildew was suffocating me; I kept breaking floorboards. I was scared I would fall through and I didn't want to take a step in any direction. Perhaps this is a symbol. Perhaps not.

I am looking forward into the future and counting down the days until fun things happen. I will take many pictures on Halloween and at shows which are approaching. The Bistro will soon be bustling with business. I shall see someone whom I have not seen in quite some time. My horoscope tells me to free myself from ballast. I am wondering if this is something I am capable of doing.

I am searching aimlessly through my skull, trying to find something worthy of saying. And it seems that there is nothing there.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

More Than I Do.

All manner of things have come and gone. I have been intently focused on some certain things which mostly have gone but perhaps have not entirely gone. I have been falling into the past, headfirst, as if into a freshly raked pile of freshly fallen leaves. I have been soaking in all the things I used to feel before I knew why I was feeling them. Those feelings used to seem so real; they used to seem so honest. I used to be someone I never knew I was.

All manner of things have come and will come. The leaves will leave. The frost will follow. And then the winter will melt into yet another spring. I have been someone I did not know I would be. I have found things I never would have wished to be true. I still feel like I know someone and he still acts as though I never knew him. I was someone to him, once. I was someone real. And now he pushes me away; he pulls me apart. I can never understand those people, the people who can throw others away as though it never mattered. I guess I can't understand the idea of deluding yourself. I can't understand lying to yourself and behaving as though nothing was ever any different than it is now, at this second.

Youth is a fleeting thing. It is something that, if you are observant, you understand at the time that it will not last. I remember being so very young, being in elementary school and thinking of how quickly the time passed. And when I thought about how quickly the time passed I always thought about how that had always been true to me, how I always had thought the time passed quickly. And I understood that I would not feel the same way in a few years. I knew that soon, all this time I had tossed aside and wished would be through with, would mean something very different to me. I remember sitting, in wait, for a spelling test that I had not studied one bit for
and I remember wishing that the day was over and done with. But, I also remember knowing that maybe today I want this day done for, over with, but in the future I knew I would look back on this time and I would remember it clearly. I guess that's part of what is so hard about being so young. You are so aware and so yourself. You are so full inside yourself, so immensely embodied in who you actually are as opposed to who you think you ought to be. You have so few experiences behind you that the only person you are is entirely you. And I suppose that is equally upsetting as nerve-wracking.

I wish that I knew someone more than I do. I wish I could see someone else more than I do. I wish I could know myself more than I do. I wish I could see these words more often than I do.

Friday, October 13, 2006

The Darkest Blues


The days are so short now, they end so suddenly and the sun just sinks in the sky. The slow, sparkling summer sunsets are soon to be only a memory. The cold is already creeping in, callous and crisp. I am already dreading waking up and stepping out onto a frozen floor, my feet cringing. My only consolation lies in the snow, the perfect white sheets of frost which cover the ground, the windows. And in the fall leaves which are still shifting, still clinging to skinny branches, still holding onto the last bits of green.

Today the sky was crystal blue with little scattered specks of clouds. I woke up cold from terrible nightmares. They were vivid and graphic and violent. It is hard for me to think of them. I am trying to forget them. People are out in the streets tonight; I can hear them, drunkenly spewing undirected obscenities. They are often there, beneath me, making a ruckus, running amok and screaming threats at one another. I try to ignore them but I often must hear their shouting matches and their words shake the air.

I am home alone, something that happens rarely with roommates. And I often yearn to be alone with my thoughts, to let them simmer and shatter and slide around without any outside influences. But, each time I find myself alone I stare blankly into the darkness and I fill with a vague fear, an undefined sadness. I look out into the emptiness and into the artifically lit street and I feel the weight of all that needs to be done, of all that needs to be written. I stare out from eyes which do not feel like mine. And there is a silence somewhere that should be filled with words.

Life sometimes passes over me like a shadow, unfelt, barely seen. I sit here, soaking myself in the words I speak, in the words I cannot speak. I attempt to articulate something serious, something worthy of even my own re-reading. The ghosts of my past gather around me. They stare in silence; they wait for me. And I am always grasping for air, struggling to see what lies before me. I am always caught between the layers of the years I have lived. I am always calculating the worth of each day. I weigh out the words I have written and I judge them; I am them. Even now, I am looking at the paragraphs before this one, wondering if once tomorrow arrives, if I will feel like today was a day well-lived.

I have squirmed inside a sickness which is only just now subsiding. This week has been merely a mirage. I have watched things happen and I have not felt that I was the one they were happening to. But, I have also been overwhelmed by the same feelings I have always felt, the same feelings which never leave but which fester and glow inside me. I hold them there and I could not let go if I tried. Everything that happens to me happens to me so wholly that I can only stand back and watch it. I hide inside myself, inside my memories, inside the reflected images of the things I think of doing.

I want to move through a foreign landscape; I want to speak in another tongue. I want to build a thousand new memories to quiet the things I see everyday. All of the places here are coated in all the things that happened before. The old associations haunt my present. I can never figure how what to let go of and what to keep tight against my chest. I am always searching for a change in the people I know. I am always searching for a change in myself, a change I constantly try to encourage. I am losing the things I am trying to say.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Some Vague But Vibrant Visions.


I am sitting, sinking, soaked in the definitions of distances, those dire miles measured out in tense timetables. There is a shaky silence echoing, evasive, in my head and I cannot catch it, cannot make it something of substance. I saw a city today, a city I rarely see, and I wandered through it, inch by inch, inhaling it's pace. I swam through the movement of all the motionless things. I had no real destination- only a vague idea of one, a loose list of numbered, lettered streets, littered with things I couldn't afford to care to look at. I wished you were there. I thought of your pace, of the way you hold your shoulders when you walk. The city rose up around me- the buildings broad and bright- bustling with business in the afternoon light. I thought in words rarely- in motions and movement, in fast-moving footsteps. I thought in the sounds my feet made on the ground, in the reflection of the sun on the stylish glasses of the people walking past.
The sun shone starkly, stretching out far beyond the clouds which covered it, breaking brightly through those bubbly bunches. The air was cool and the breeze brushed the back of my neck. I moved briskly, beaming beneath the busy sky, the busy streets. People hustled past me, their destinations decisively designated, delegated. They are so deliberate, their demeanor poised and perfect, precocious. And I am slumped forward fading into the far away sound of my footsteps. I am observing the city sky, the sidewalks, strangers.

I fell asleep on the train and I dreamed of a distant landscape layered with all types of terrain. A vast ocean sunk straight out into a dense desert which shifted swiftly into an Antarctic ice patch. And I walked through each one, alone, unafraid. I expected something, some manner of movement, some striking season to overtake the land. They sky suddenly broke and a hard but scattered rain soaked the landscape only in spots. I saw someone standing far off in the distance. He was looking out toward the horizon, hands on hips, searching. And he looked down in front of him in disbelief and I moved toward him but never got any closer.

My thoughts were vibrant and I could taste them in the back of my throat. I was suddenly standing by him and his eyes glowed a golden green, like moss, and I reached out to touch him. He blinked and his eyes changed color. I thought of all the distance I had traveled. I didn't know how I had traversed such tumultuous terrain. An then the sky dimmed and I was on a boat. It was a steamliner and I could stare out into the shining sea. I saw a storm ahead but wasn't scared. I clutched an anonymous letter in my fist. I searched through oddly lit rooms for evidence of it's author. Sometimes the sun shone through the windows and sometimes I thought I could see the moon and stars.

This is all a story.

"We all play at existing without thinking about it- the most advanced of us thinking only about thinking- under the vast stillness of the stars." So says Pessoa. I wish I wrote more about living and less about thinking about living. The people we write live; they see their lives, they feel them. But, in order to see things you must see them through someone's eyes. I suppose it is just more difficult to see things from someone else's eyes and therefore more challenging.

The train is shaking my seat; I am thinking about thinking, thinking about writing, thinking about all the things bobbing about on the brink of my written thoughts. I am hiding something from myself. Some wealth of words, some wordless wisdom only felt in feelings and only escaping on the edges of these vague but vibrant visions.