i thought i felt your shape but i was wrong.
Once upon a time, there was a novel in me. Or so I thought. Maybe it was never there. Maybe my education has killed it. Maybe I was just naïve, wide-eyed at the world of literature, aspiring to write not just to write, but to be known. Whatever it was, I’m not sure I feel it any longer. Let me extend a metaphor and say the novel is my soul. This soul of mine has not grown recently. In fact I don’t think it’s even shown its face. My classes eat away at it. The cold eats away at it. The people I’ve met eat away at it. For as much book intelligence thrives here, so little does individuality, so little does spontaneity, so little does life. I am in the heart of Maine surrounded by people intent on making it to Wall-Street or China or your local Doctor’s office and buying wives or marrying rich and all of a sudden waking up in their lives realizing they have a suburban house, two kids to feed and a mini-van.
Something in me has been extinguished. My pneuma, my atman, my anima. I read fantasy books like they are reality in some effort to change my scenery. I haven’t met one person who has inspired me to think differently. What was it about home that allowed for such a range of personality, of thought, of aspiration?
It’s possible to feel bad for these people, but I suppose their dreams are more pragmatic than mine. Who’s to say which is better? Well if they won’t, I will. Take your life seriously, but don’t expect there to be any path. It’s the trouble with the way we’re brought up, the trouble with poems by Robert Frost, that we think our lives lead down a straight line. Maybe there’s a divergence, but you’re never going to be able to turn back. We just keep spinning the wheel; hoping to draw the card with the highest salary, land on a lucky space, intent on arriving to retire at the Millionaire mansion. But what if life’s not like that? What if it’s just a board with no directions? What if you can turn left and right, spin in circles, move backward, forward? What if you could move off the board? Would you end up where you wanted to go? Would you still be moving in a direction?
Is all of this naïve, without direction? Am I merely experiencing the loss that everyone experiences at eighteen, the loss of direction, of place, of time and meaning? Is this a rant I’ll look back on at sixty and laugh at? Or is there really something wrong with how I’m living? How everyone else is living? Can the world truly be spinning living breathing incorrectly? I speak in all honesty because I truly haven’t an answer. I write this down, free to criticism, because at least that may provide direction. I want to know, want to know, want to know if I’m doing what I do to arrive at a desk job suburbia blandness soul vacancy easter thanksgiving christmas death?