from Today’s Journal (3/23/08)

March 23, 2008

Another Sunday, another disconnected day contemplating what is and what should be. The shambles that is my life and whether there is any hope in it. Thoughts of killing myself (let’s be honest, though I admit I am drawn to the gentle euphemisms and slippery, soft phrases “move on” and “end it” and “take my own life” as if it were something that could be taken and if taken could be held) are followed instantly– even faster than instantly since they interrupt the first thoughts– with hopeful ideas. Tactics to avoid losing it all when the truth of what I am finally becomes clear to everyone around me. The pragmatism of assuming that the past really is past and I can start by doing just a few things better and it will work out. The momentarily calming consideration that there is no self and at any rate my existence is but a spark spawned from a lightning strike deep in an unexplored wood, a tiny fire that never caught flame.

Another day of checklists and checkmarks, to-dos and to-be-dones. Bullet lists of minimal existence, spars of a half-done, undone ship.

The catalog of interventions taking notice of every misstep, every moment of wrong mind and wrong thought, would be infinite. A classic regressive loop like the diarist intent on logging every moment of every day including the act of logging the tiny moments itself.

And to what end? I’m drunk with the random broken firings of synaptic chaos, collections and connections. I can follow the line for a moment, remember the flash of insight that lead me to break the neck of the bottle and drink in the first place, but in a moment I’m back in the blackout where everything is as electrified and bright now as it will be invisible later, leaving only after images that don’t quite cohere.

Even as I write these words I wonder why I do. Who will read them? Not me; not likely. Until someday they burn, slowly and with the feeble flame of stacked paper. Probably not even on purpose, not even as a gesture of defiance or willful amnesia, but one more forgotten thing weighing down one more old box that smolders for a day or a week, buried in the consumer discards, the microwave crisping sleeves and sodden diapers, the empty cans and carefully torn junk mail.

It will be lost as surely as the dinosaurs that lumbered against each other. Lost as surely as proto-islands and protozoa. Lost as surely as the note I folded carefully and passed, trembling, to Tracy, who sat in front of me in 8th grade, begging her to tell me if she felt like I did because time seemed to stop when she wasn’t around and (I was proud of this next bit) every sound of the stars was contained in her name and they were one to me when I spoke it. Tracy. Stars.

As lost as the note she held unopened in her perfect palm until it disappeared like the conjurer’s proffered coin, here but not here, and I with it.

Tags: AtRandom, journal