time for an essay
Where or what that center is, I don't know. I don't think anyone can say. It's an indefinable thing, a state of cohesion that only exists when "things are working out," when every aspect of your life fits together like puzzle pieces and at each turn there's a new moment of "ah-hah!". When the universal law of synchronicity is in full swing and the universe is infinite and expanding -- within yourself as well as without.
But the center, for one reason or another, does not hold. Maybe it's because we don't know where it is, and we somehow throw ourselves off-balance by accident, because nothing is a given, and we don't know what the right words are or when the right moment is. That's the easy explanation. But it makes no sense, when things are working so well, and all of a sudden they aren't anymore, and there was no moment of change. One degree of change and a safe entry vector becomes an inferno and then a wisp, evaporating in atmosphere that's too big and too far removed to notice one small loss. "And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, would hardly know that we were gone." But why and where did we move? What did we do wrong, and how do we take it back? Why do we have to heal all over again, when it feels like we've hardly had time to live since the last time?
I wanted to write tonight. I've done nothing worthwhile all day, just sat and alternated between reading and watching Farscape and painting. Not really productive painting, either, just working on small boxes that I'm determined to someday be able to sell at a festival or something. Ten bucks each, maybe. And God knows how much I've spent on materials over time, so I probably won't even make a profit. I wouldn't know. I just want to sell something I've made. I want justification for why I do this. And at the same time, I wonder why it isn't enough just to create. Is it social conditioning, to want recognition for my work? Or is it human nature? And why won't it stop? Why can't I get any peace from this drive to not only create, but to sell? It makes me ill.
I wanted to write tonight, but I couldn't think of anything to say. Someone in a writers' club once told me that I was the first true essayist they'd ever met, and I thought that was the most moving thing I'd ever heard regarding my writing. I adore writing fiction; I play movies in my head and transcribe them, I hear voices and record their words like a dictaophone. It's easy. It's an emotional release. But at the same time, I have such a block when it comes to coming up with my own original ideas that I can't even create an original character outside of an RPG situation. I need a pre-established structure to write fiction, and it's a crutch I become more and more ashamed of every day.
But essays? I hadn't thought about it until that girl, three years my senior and a creative writing major no less, told me that they had never known another writer to whom the essay format came so naturally. And, I suppose, she's right. Is it because, for all my forced attempts throughout the years to write fiction steadily and hone my skills, all of my real daily practice has come from writing blog posts? Clinical fact-dumps, carefully structured and worded to be anything but boring, because dryness is the bane of a decent blog? I never even realized it, never even noticed. But it's true that I've probably turned out more wordage in this LJ than I have of real fiction in over a year. And since my three-year block finally broke last November, I haven't written a real essay since. I scroll back through my posts and they're all "Fic: ---" over and over, four and five subject lines in a row. It makes me proud as a fiction-writer, and I think I finally believe that I will always be able to overcome my blocks, but... as an essayist... I regret the lack of me that's been in this journal lately. I regret that so much of my first semester and a half of college has gone undocumented. I regret it because I don't know if I'll ever truly be able to remember it. Sure, prompts will come up and tease memories out of me that I thought I'd long lost, months and years and decades from now. But I'll never have any evidence. I haven't even taken many pictures.
What's an essayist, anyway? I just thought I spent these posts rambling all over the board. But if I tie them together at the end somehow, I suppose they become essays. What's an essayist? Someone who records a pile of facts and ideas and makes them cohesive somehow? Someone who writes life as it is, this random, disjointed, crazy thing that somehow seems to make sense while you're living it, despite everything?
So I guess I'm an essayist. I can live with that.
I wanted to write something tonight because everything's falling apart, the center isn't holding, and I wanted to turn that into words because it's what I do. My tiny, structured painting wasn't helping. My TV wasn't distracting enough. And even though I didn't have any ideas, the emotion was there, a passive hurt rather than an active one. An aloneness standing on the precipice of loneliness.
I've wanted to cry for a while now. Ever since I finished Wizards at War, which made me cry so hard. Those were clean tears, a cleansing book. I want... a purging. I could say "I want to feel," but I'm not numb. I could say "I want a mess," but the cleanness felt so good. I don't want to hurt myself, I don't want to hurt. This is all like when I went to the dentist two weeks ago with no pain at all and left with three fillings and a new pain that seemed so needless a the time, though I knew it would prevent pain in the long term. And I worried and worried at one of the teeth until it ached so much that I had to go back and get some sanding done. There was nothing wrong with me, nothing at all, and then things changed under me without me noticing until suddenly the metaphorical tooth was hurting and I started worrying at it.
I don't know what happened. I feel tight inside, but my movements are slow. I'm not laughing as much as I was a couple of weeks ago. And I want to cry, but nothing can bring it out. Maybe I only want to cry because it's the only way of purging I know, even though it isn't the right remedy for this particular pain. The problem is, I don't know what the right remedy could be. Except writing.
I worry. More than I think I do, less than other people think I do, and vice versa of both. I do worry. And I need to be alone sometimes, but I do feel loneliness. I don't think I'm lonely now, but there are problems happening that I can't help with, and that removal from others' healing process is always both a relief and a gentle letdown. But when the emotional surgery is over and the wounds have finally been tucked away again under some new bandages, I'll still be here to sit in comfortable silence alongside. And I think that's the only place I want to be.
This post doesn't make much sense, so, so much for the coherency of my "essays." But I am proud of that one piece of praise, maybe more than I'm proud of anything else I've ever done. And I can take comfort in the fact that when the stories won't come, life is always right there, waiting to be written about, and I can do it. It isn't that hard. And I'm apparently a natural at it.
I'm not lonely. I'm not numb. I'm not nostalgic or depressed or in a creative dry spell, although I'm not producing anything.
I feel like singing. That's good. And maybe I'll cry at some point, and that will be good, too.
I think the easiest and most complicated thing to say is that I feel very human right now. And it's hard, but I don't mind it.
"Love is not the easy thing
The only baggage you can bring
Is all that you can't leave behind
You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed, to be seen
You could have flown away
A singing bird in an open cage
Who will only fly, only fly, for freedom
Walk on, walk on.
Stay safe tonight."
walk on, walk on. stay safe tonight.
-sarah