am i an onion, ripe, vibrating with sadness, trembling before the incisive knife of others, until age peels me to the weird hard core & leaves me bitter, tearless? i am coating my stomach with alcohol so that when real pain hits, i will be numb & fortress-like. i aspire to be inviolable, i want to allow myself to be invidious, i want to express what i feel and how i feel it at the moment that i do, without restrictions. i want to be able to be wholly myself regardless of the judgement of others.
today i saw a beautiful woman walking down the street. later, i saw an ugly young man. both of them inspired the same feeling inside of me, a plucked string, a snapped string. the moon roiled fecklessly in the clouds, illuminating them like a flashlight under the sheets. at times, it cast a wary eye out on the streets below. drunks didn't notice it. a sheen on the asphalt, not quite ice. the light dandruff of snow from an immature storm the night before. i am afraid to meet the eyes of anyone, because i know that i will give myself away as freely as i give myself away in these pages. that's not true - no one gives themselves away, there's always a reserved bit of gourmet cuisine that one keeps tucked in the pantry of oneself, that they share only with the closest of friends. an aged bottle of whisky, a bit of crumbling cheese.
i am frantic by nature, i am discursive, long-winded and opinionated, though i am not any of these things. i am consumed with the reflection of myself that i see in the eyes of other people. how many times i have said "other people" in this entry, lacking another word for what i mean to say ... friends, acquaintances, neighbors at the bar, co-workers, strangers on the street, cashiers, waitresses ... at times i feel like my nervousness is going to overwhelm me, like a tidal wave, smashing everything i've built up inside of myself. i am convinced that i lie so well and so often that i've lied myself into a movie i'm filming about my severely over-dramatized life. though i'm in therapy, i have little respect for my therapist and don't know if she's the right fit - though she has definitely said some interesting things -
perhaps i would be none of these negative things if i simply ceased to give them credence; will them out of my mind, and thus, out of my personality. i could be anything i want to be, isn't that right? well, if that's true, then how i am so clearly not myself? how am i not who i would like to be?
tonight i want to gorge myself on the full moon, but i am restless - i hunger for something more, something new. i should take myself & my notebook to a bar and just sit, look, and write. but the inevitable crashing conclusion of that is impotence, sadness, disgust, and ultimately, rage either quelled or enhanced by the sudden & rapid intake of alcohol. but boredom is the other option, that vast gray nothing filled only by the stale smell of cigarettes and possibly the mindless chatter of television: painless lasers in the eyes ...
i am missing something fundamental in my life, and that something is inspiration. i need a new muse. i lack that center of idolatry in my life, there is no one i know that i idolize: every idol has fallen, and so i am standing in the midst of this plaster ruin wondering if my face, too, will fall off, if my limbs will detach & my chest cave in, and how long will it take for this erosion to occur? too long. i speed it up with dramatic intensity.
i am come so far, and i feel i've not yet taken a step.
furthermore, how does one judge the distance from here to there when here is a mire you're stuck in? is a destination even attainable? is here the destination, achieved, but without my singular, defined knowledge of it?
a friend of mine once told me that she felt she should have died a long time ago, and that she constantly inhabited this hinterland, an odd, abstracted place. she was coping with her feeling of being singular, of being entirely herself, and could not reconcile herself with those she saw around her. once you are dead, you have become yourself, you have achieved apotheosis: you are no longer a continuing being, you have ceased. you become a model for the past tense, you slip in & out of memory, comfortable finally as an abstraction. you are inked, set in stone.
and so here i am, a river continuing to the sea.
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