deadly, winking, sniggering

Firstly, I love this description: "…the summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love," - it's the prettiest thing anybody ever got sued by Liberace for.

Secondly, I'm reading (amongst other things) City Boy by Edmund White. I sat down in the park on the way back from work to read some. He was describing the way he'd get home from his crappy publishing job and furiously write in the evenings: "I forced myself to write plays and novels during the evenings after work - anything creative as a break from the torpor of an imagination-killing office job."

I do not write any more. I am just one of many people I know who no longer do the thing they used to be young and crazy for. I have other friends who no longer write, some who no longer direct plays, one who no longer composes music....Are we all just taking breaks from those parts of ourselves, or are they gone for good? Can you really set down something so important and never be able to find it again?

I do not feel like the same person as the one who used to write. My hand does not rush with ink to the page and even my thoughts do not fold and fit themselves around creative ways of expressing things any more.

I feel as though nothing is true enough, and nothing stays still in the same place for long enough to be described. I cannot tell any stories because I do not believe in any of them anymore.

Sometimes though, like today while I was blowing along in the enthusiasm within this book, I feel a glimmer of steel fishing around in the darkness for me. I can still summon the hope that it will hook firmly through my flesh and pull me out into a place where I am so alive that I can believe in the lies of fiction again and find them wonderful.

It is too late and I am too drunk on this feeling to censor myself, this is my naivite in full force.

This week

I feel like my laugh is a little louder this week and my voice is a little stronger. I've spent the late evenings in the garden with my housemates or on the phone with friends.

Mornings are daunting still with another whole day to spread itself out hour by hour ahead of me, but plans are forming around the edges of my weeks and I feel able to look towards them.

I wish all the voices on the phone were people really here. I wish a lot of things in the evenings after work.

Next week will be better I think.

Not looking

I keep trying to think of things to write here, but shying away with the excuse that nothing has happened worth writing about recently. But really, I just can't bear to look too closely at my life at the moment.

I have moved to a new job in a new town and I just have to keep moving because the ends of the evenings alone in my room are so sad that I grit my teeth against them. All of the people I love are elsewhere, and though I like my job and the people there, that can't be my life. I am not this meek lonely person, I'm sure that I used to believe that I could conquer the world, but now it seems as though getting by has become enough.

I can't think of a way to fix this.

Old and New

Same sheets on a different bed.
Same clothes hung on a different rail.
Same person with the same old intentions of being someone different.