There have been several posts now that I have saved and not posted, so many things that have gone through my mind and been written but not shared. I’m mostly okay with that, but since I’m looking at the first night alone in weeks, I have some things to think about.
Mostly sad things. Ain’t that the way? There’s something about being alone in the hours of the night that are dark and quiet and in between warm and cool—especially when you’re pretty sure you won’t be able to fend off the insomnia for more than two nights in a row and you just had two nights of less-than natural sleep—something that brings out the parts of you that ask all the hard questions.
So I’m taking out my computer for the first time in weeks, completely aware of the fact that I don’t actually have Internet access on it, and though I’m tempted to search for the perfect Tom Waits song (which would express It to exactness, and I’m sure it must exist, but I don’t have it and looking will only frustrate me), I end up flipping through to find all of the songs that I used to listen to when I was sad, or to make me sad, and it makes me wonder.
I’m not sure I used to feel things as fully as I do now. I used to live inside my head (still do, mostly; only I don’t understand what’s in there), attaching myself to ideas of absent persons and using Shakespearean monologues to make myself feel something I could diagram.
There have been bad things that have happened. Bad things that I’ve done, combined with a streak of ill luck that isn’t even worth the whining. I have trouble, now, talking to people. In some ways, it’s because I don’t think they understand. There have been a lot of people with whom I used to be close that I’ve tried to tell things, and they either don’t react or they simply don’t understand. I cause them discomfort. But the bigger truth is, I don’t understand. I don’t really know if I’ve grown or changed at all, if I’ve gotten anything from these experiences, or if I’m just reproducing every tired facsimile I can remember.
It’s been about a year since I can trace it.
I wish that I knew of ways in which I’d grown. If I could find something of which I would be proud, something bigger than getting the best grades thus far in college despite the mono—something real—maybe the past wouldn’t bother me so much.
It really does. Which makes me wonder: Do I live in it? Am I as foolish as the ancient peoples my mind has collected, the ones who live in ruins and will never believe that the present or future could be as good as the past?
Can one really change if one can’t see the truth of a state of being?
Do I really drift along on the edges of things, unable to jump into a definition of self, unable to accept things like hope, too much in my head to know, or feel, or experience?
Maybe I really am living in the past, because I paused after asking the white screen that question, and listened more closely to one of those old songs, and it gave me an answer of sorts. (I wonder if that prophetic dolphin still lives in the Walker.)
It’s funny that I’m looking to songs I used to listen to a lot, especially since I haven’t really listened to much music in general of late. Not for months. I’ve even purchased music in this time, played it maybe once, and put it away.
I sort of hate the idea of tapping all this out and putting it somewhere people could see it, as I always do, but especially because this kind of truthful, questioning mood is not something I want people to witness. But to be honest, I feel myself rising in a nondramatic crescendo, approaching an unseen precipice, and I have to follow it to its end.
I hope that people remember Michael Jackson for the incredible talent he had and brought to innumerable observers, not for being damaged or for whatever allegations have been brought against him. If I could find that beautiful passage Margaret Cho wrote about listening to his records so much as an ugly, sad child that she had to buy them multiple times, I’d copy it.
It’s sad, isn’t it? Where do we lose it, that bright, confident thing he had at first? Was it a performance, or did the things that happened to him eventually outweigh whatever he had inside him? Is that how it happens? Or does it happen the way it happens to my brother and(or?) sister, how I’m scared it’s happening to me; that they can’t see themselves, and so can’t control what they’re becoming?
Why can it be that our perceptions are so volatile, so skewed, so completely unstable that even a truth told right to our faces is impossible to believe?
… And now I’m babbling. If this particular careening vehicle of thought was supposed to arrive at a conclusion, it missed.
“I.” “I.” “i.” It doesn’t seem to write well, does it? The third person is more effective when using one’s self to access other people, but I can never seem to keep my tenses straight.
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