I seem to have run out of words. The few phrasings I manage to pull together over and over again are far too familiar. I feel lost, I inevitably write. I've lost something. Maybe this 'writing' has never been easy, precisely, but here I flounder in a manner I cannot pinpoint. It used to be easier, right? I have nothing new to say; I lack color. I don't want to whine. Rather, I want to fix myself before any difference is noticed. I lack the muster to create something solid enough to say aloud. I feel disjointed, ungrounded, and unendingly transient.
I manage to (sometimes) fool myself with the idea that lies count only in what is said. Yet I am oh so practiced in the art of silence, which can be something very like lying.
The line that separates acceptance from detachment is blurred. Sometimes, in unexpected quiet or crushing noise, the things I have cast aside come back and lock the breath inside my chest. To pause against the rush is to urgently attempt to recollect and restore all things. I ate lunch an hour late today. I need to send an email. There is homework to tackle, more homework than I can accomplish in twelve lifetimes. He... no. No, I can't. Not now. It hurts.
I like to forget the cracks.
There are a lot of things I like to forget about myself, and often do by either design or total accident. I like to forget great swathes of time, and often do. I like to forget, especially, that I spent six years of my childhood overseas. My memories lack distinction, skewed just so to promote the most graceful of stomach flips. I remember then in a tangle of bleached picture memories and bitter whisperings; I like to pretend that then wasn't. I like to pretend that then is completely removed from now.
I like to forget that my father is problematic and that the years I have spent painfully toeing the line (et freaking cetera) are a nearly direct result of this, erm, "difficulty." I draw a blank for a moment when questioned about him; he tends to surface just long enough to wreak total havoc while playing the part of the victim, yet even this streamlined approximation doesn't feel fit for sharing with most. I don't hate my father for a heaping conglomeration of reasons, but the fact that so many (acquaintances, often) choose to defend him is head on desk amusing to me and enough to keep me quiet.
For whatever it's worth, writing does feel more difficult now. I have had this post in development for a week and have yet to decide what I mean by it. I switch sentences around at a frantic snail's pace, unable to make head nor tail of what I am saying. The words are all the same.
I want to tell you about college, but I feel as though I have lost the drawstrings with which to pull ends together into something sensical. I want to tell you about the guy who jaunted down the main pathway near the library on a fine Friday morning, hair a flop of wet curls framing sunglasses. He carried a vintage briefcase somehow transformed into a boombox, which sputtered a hip hop beat as he passed.
From my perch on a hanging bench, I watched people for an hour before the fountain behind me was shut off for maintenance. The white noise that had before masked the sound of footsteps and laughter suddenly gone, the already off kilter feeling of familiarity in the air dissipated.
There is an amount of comfort in knowing something well enough to make movements without worrying deeply. The harsh angles of the new are easier to navigate once you have gotten to know them. Yet the longer I consider perspective, the less I am sure of it. The stasis is intermittent. People change, the weather changes, and we move through the shifting chaos.
The all encompassing dilemma.
