No, you're right - it's not Sunday, but I am here now, early for once. I want to sit, I'd like to be a little still and breathe some words into this. this fallow and fawn-coloured blank space. Thinking on me, as I always tend to do, I stumble up to another fragment of myself that i would like to look at. take a long long look at before i go on being, writing like a hazardous fool for you.
i stopped at this familiar trough, standing at the bottom of a hill, and what is this when i bend my head to drink the murky rainwater? brown cloud. i fear my defence is broken, sir, and so is the tap; my lines are down, as these warring metaphors would have it. i would like to rip myself apart and start all over, but the world would not have that. truth be told, neither would the small courage i possess. i'll be honest and tell you how much i disappoint myself. i live vicariously through the praises of others, i'll leech them out of you if i can - believe me when i say that i am desperate for attention and approval. because i am. but why is this so? it's a struggle of humanity, that's what. in such a desperate effort to remove myself from a world (but not so much so that i will cease to Be), i''ve flung myself so far into it that i cannot find a breath in me that isn't from around here. shall i, who seems so ver ry different, be called and shouted and heckled as a foreigner in an alien place. so i aim to please and be quiet. assimilate, try to tessellate this otherness into the straight and seamless.
i am here now. what do i do but carry on living. i shoulder this life like it is some great rock upon my small mass. like i amount to something in the end. I should learn to snip this selfabasing tongue because it is what talked me here to start with. in my head it started when i was small and grew until it was the slobbering mass - no, the weight i felt was not life but was how i saw and spoke and thought of it. i found a name for it in the streets ; depression, they called it. i don't know what to call it. this tongue of mine wagged and spat and said 'how dare you say you are depressed when you still want to live.' like a child in a trance i listened and wanted not to live any more. i would wake up every morning very aware of the fact that i die every day. i let the thoughts of this slow living death inch its way to me, let it touch me with its lukewarm fingers, let it rest and fester upon my body because i didn't care about my body - it would be rotting sooner or later.
i was around nine years old and i thought these were normal things to rest my mind on. i thought living only because you knew you would die was a reasonable way to pass your existence until you finally did pass. a decade on and i'm still clinging to this with one weak little finger. some nights i sleep wondering with a curiosity rather than fear if i will wake again. when i wake i am almost always pleasantly surprised. i am quite disappointed and frustrated with myself for not being able to shake this past so freely, and for once more letting myself fall into disrepair. it's weary work keeping a human inside here.. weary tiresome work. but we try, don't we.
so at nine-or-so i turn my mind to stories, fix myself excitedly to them, the words, the beautiful words. my my, how they'd take my imagination and i'd let them go together, drift together until they'd merge into one blurred silhouette on a blue horizon together. it's hard for a nineteen year old to reverse the damage of a hopeful girl who wanted her whole life to be a word of fiction, a work of art. and now i can't tell one reality from another; i often want one thing but soon realise i liked the sound of it better left unsounded. walking paradoxes were made for philosophy tomes, not human bones, were they not? this is no real way to live and feel in any way fulfilled. i've been biting that tongue (and these nails) not to utter that infamous I Don't Know, but i guess i can't hold it back. at least i'm realising now that i do know some things.. the slow restoration is mov ing me even though i lapse often like this. i sometimes forget that i am not that amalgamation of ideals that i want you to believe i am..that i want to believe i am.. i disappoint because i go on as though I am the first one to feel and think and use these words in this way. i disappoint because i falter and fall short of my own selfmade idea of perfection. falter falter, still i move on. maybe now i won't feel as though i must reject the world entirely to grow in this way.
a tale in my making.
a tale in my making.