Book of Unimportant Secrets

Driving home the night after daylight savings time goes into effect is a very surreal experience.  It’s strange that we all just accept such an arbitrary and not at all subtle change in our sensation of temporality.  We just say okay.  Except for Arizona and Hawaii and parts of Indiana, of course, but the rest of us participate or are forced to participate in the erasure of sixty minutes of our lives so that a few months later, we can have them back.

And so night comes close, fast.  The day is lopped off at its ankles and it falls in a heap, a corpse dispatched by this looming force.  We do not slowly adjust to this theft and battery.  We drink coffee, we stare, we race home as though these darkened hours spend themselves a little faster than those of just a day ago.   And we feel this way because it’s true.  Today is a day of threatened time and a national circadian rhythm snagged on political exigencies.  Beyond all that is the great coming of winter we cannot stave off, no matter how many minutes we put into our piggy banks and cookie jars.  There is a pressure in this time of year to make things final, finished, good enough to make it through.   We don’t necessarily have to store food or manage our survival like animals in the raw elements, but we do have things to fear.  We do have reasons to nest and hide away.  This is a natural part of a natural cycle.

The road is quiet the way I go, and an eye must be kept out for deer that push further down the mesas to forage for their dinner.  It’s harder now, in the opaque storm-gray sky, to pick out the little details, the antler points from the spare, dry branches.  Rabbit eyes from road reflections.   I am trying to calm down all the wrenched nerves and hitched shoulder blades that the workload of the day bound together in a knot above my head.  All this in a 25 minute drive around the edge of the mesa.  The minimal traffic, the dying light, my gnawing stomach makes me want to race and

push further down the mesas to forage for their dinner.  It’s harder now, in the opaque storm-gray sky, to pick out the little details, the antler points from the spare, dry branches.  Rabbit eyes from road reflections.   I am trying to calm down all the wrenched nerves and hitched shoulder blades that the workload of the day bound together in a knot above my head.  All this in a 25 minute drive around the edge of the mesa.  The minimal traffic, the dying light and my gnawing stomach makes me want to race around curves not meant for speed.  This is the kind of place that every house should have a “If you lived here, you’d be home by now” sign.  Every house is unique, sparsely situated, old enough to have a story onto itself.   There are other, faster ways to go, and safer than pushing 45 in 25’s hairpin curves.

I have always said it’s good to have goals.  I think it’s time to reignite The Great Plan.  A plan to reignite a faltering life in all the important areas I can currently define.  A plan for happiness.  A plan for Greatness.  A plan for a future that means more than inertia.  Not all at once, but sensibly.  It’s a plan, that’s how those work, I’ve heard.  It’s very Gatsbian and maybe I should have a sense of shame about airing this kind of personal “laundry” or disatisfaction with the wide and disapproving eye of the internet.  But the internet has no such eye, I’ve learned that well enough, and if you read this and disapprove of my frankness and my dissatisfied attitude, there’s other blogs and other people who are plan-less and I’m sure they’ll be happy to have you.

Aspects that need fixing.

Self: body image, weight, health
Money: planning, organized, saving
Writing: poems, consistency, publishing, completion, accepting the role and its demands
Home: organized, clean, decorated

Love:  a friendship, a humanity, a hand extended, following threads, not making The Great Plan distract me from other clues and other hopes.

Work: gaining control, resolving issues in a timely way, not letting it emotionally hollow out my soul

Misc.: human warmth, showing appreciation where it’s due, smoting the spectre of depression, relaxing, enjoying fandom, enjoying life and not living by terror, being creative and not so self-critical, losing control now and again

These are the things I can think of at the moment.  Ways I am right now that leave me unhappy, leave me frozen.  I want to find a center.  All those Great people manage these things, not perfectly and I’m not aiming for perfection, but they don’t let these things run roughshod over their whole lives.  Or at least, they don’t let it show.

I want to make some changes, is what I’m saying, darlings.  I want a life that’s bigger, stronger, faster, sleeker, whatever comparative you want to apply.  I don’t want to accept this status quo.

So, things.  I took a walk today with my mother.  She wanted me to open up about the way things have been getting me down lately and I wanted to, too.  It’s just a huge state of mind.  Feeling ground down and undermined and failing and lonely and forgotten and unwanted and put upon and irritated and ashamed and hopeful and tired and frightened and weak and regretful and all of this stuff.  This giant, hazy ball of bullshit that seeing her care about me made rise to the surface.  I wasn’t ready to be fixed, I just wanted to feel like I didn’t need to numb it.  It didn’t exactly work because it seems to exasperate her that I can’t quantify what’s bothering me so that she can help me figure it out.  It’s hard to say my whole life is fucked right now and that I am feeling all these things in this diet that I otherwise would choose not to feel.  I have the time to feel them.

I just need some sleep and to shake it loose.  There’s sunlight shining somewhere.  We can do this.  Somehow.

There are three songs on my wedding song list.  Soon to be four.  I don’t need any spectacular ivory napkins at .80 cents each.  I don’t need a big hall that I don’t know enough people to fill.

I need a place and a time and someone to stand there with.

Things are very weird in their stillness, a stillness I am just beginning to sense is flaking away with the onset of autumn.  I hate winter with a fear and fury that is only broken by the holidays and rest that stud its one long black night with light

This year I am all about autumn.  I am all about a dark sky.  Yellow leaves.  Curling up. There’s wind pushing the trees slightly to the left.  Feels like the heavens have opened their vents.  The moon’s position in the sky.  Things waning, calming down.  Feeling like there’s been a good day’s work and things coming to harvest for future projects.  The heat leaving my fevered head.  Realizations.   Hanging up our coats and pulling out our boots and gloves.  Taking things in off the line.   Re-assessing possibilities and redrawing boundaries.

I still want to wake up tangled in his sheets.  French press coffee.  Shop at Crate and Barrel and find the tethers that keep me bound to where I am, what I am, how I am suddenly tied to new buoys dipping and hiccuping further out into the boundless sea.   I am not kidding myself, now, except of course for the fact that there’s still a hope, now smaller and manageable in pocket-size, that I feel something that can or would be reciprocated.  I can’t stop that, though, no more than I can stop breathing.

I can just stop expecting so explicitly.  I can tamp it down.   I can stop parsing language.  Damning the universe, counting minutes, checking websites, tapping at the door of a greater and greater obsession.  I know what’s on the other side now.  Just a big drop-off and no big cushion at the bottom.  I can mind it so it doesn’t get out of proportion.  I can force my eyes’ gaze into his, into the face of the thing I so desire, to look at it for truth and not for the gloss of fantasy.   I can ignore the pain and loneliness I feel in his heart in the light of a universe that is in pain and craving company.  I can frame it just so and stop blushing in his presence.  I can grow up.

But…what are the actual advantages of that?  No friendship, no outlet, no goal.  Another thing behind lock and key?

No.  This is autumn and nothing has to be so.  This is the season of witchcraft and preparing for true hibernation.  So we must play and gather those last rosebuds and say what we mean and tear up the sacred ground even if we have to make recompense by playing the music of absolution and regret twenty-four hours for as long as the teflon tents poke up into an ambivalent and equitable sky.

I’ve had a momentous week, though only a few people know the extent of it. Fewer still know that this week has probably changed my life. Maybe I’m the only one who knows that and I only know that because I’ve stopped to take a breath and realize. It’s not a full knowing yet. I am happy though, because it’s not something that can be eroded. Or disavowed. Or forgotten. It’s a benchmark. It’s a cut ribbon. It’s done. I’ll write more about it soon, I think. It may or may not be what you think. But you probably don’t know me well enough to guess. That’s okay, we’re really just getting started here.

I am supposed to start figuring things out. I’ve decided this. At least in terms of my writing life. I’m supposed to find a form and if it’s the right one, follow it. It’s sound advice. I’m supposed to do a lot of things. I’m not always managing it. However, I am marching, careening really, towards something not really on any list or any advisement I’ve ever been given. It’s nothing I have instructions on or any reckoning of, moreover, no serious chance of success. But working towards love feels like a worthwhile pastime. I’m a big lover of love. Romantic ideals and Anne of Green Gables outlines of what and why and how have been a part of my life since I first discovered they existed.

This is not how I think this should go. It’s Moonlighting. It’s snark. It’s repartee. It’s flirting. Or is it? I am feeling like I am making a fool of myself. Like a cooler head would recognize that I’m either provoking something I’m not equipped to deal with or I’m piling on the rain gear and the pith helmet to face the onslaught of nothing. Of being a gently let-down eager beaver with her breasts on display like I don’t understand it’s just a game. There’s nothing worse than being the one who takes it seriously first and falling off that high wire. I know I like playing the game. I know I like what it feels like when I think I’m winning.

So. why I write. Why I want to write. And from there, a form is going to emerge. A form that I have always leaned towards will be recalled and I will sink into like stepping into a cool, clear, blue tide. A rightness and a fluidity and a continuous motion will take place. And I will lose my ambivalence like I’ve lost it about him. I can only tell you that I think one reason that I write is that I have been a solitary person for so long, so untrusting, so overlooked in lots of ways that I have come to find important that reaching out into the darkness for help is terrifying. Because either you’ll find something at the end of your arm or you won’t. So my characters are self-contained, and they’re promised someone, but it never works out. There’s just this gaping need to say J’existe! That I’m not nothing. That I have thought and ideas and I want to tell someone what I feel about love even if I don’t know that what I feel is experientially what I will feel. But I’m coming from a thoughtful place. That I have lived and seen and I don’t want to hold all of this within. That people like me aren’t worthless. That the position and needs and thoughts I have are okay. I think I write to say that what is…is…somehow okay. That there’s at least art in being alone. That the struggle to definition and self-shape is a worthy one. I stop there because what the fuck do I know about anything?

I know he isn’t right for me. That is a given. I know that other girls would find this simple, because my whole life they’ve managed what I’ve found to be so utterly

elusive. They would sally forth and conquer or leave it be. They would decide they wanted him to want them and go about the business of flirting that into existence. They, those unspeakably other women, would find their way to a movie, to a wine bottle, to a bedroom floor. They wouldn’t march about sick and giddy and silent and wrenched one way and down the other with terrible thoughts and coquettishly snappy rejoinders. Or maybe they would. I don’t want to speak for other women. Maybe we would all fall to such assignations with equally failed aplomb. Maybe they would feel white and red and shackled to the no and bound to the yes with both riding in opposite directions.

I know that he likes me inasmuch as he sees something kindred in a land of strange, he sees something that bends a little his way. That’s a way in which I like him, too.

I feel like a Bennet girl tabulating if there is something in our communications that says that implication and innuendo have to be acknowledged. An attentive woman. That’s all I am. A nice girl who comes around. I am not right for him. I’m too young. I’m not pretty enough, I’m too pretty, I’m the wrong kind of pretty.

There’s just this thing. This pull that sends me to see him. To not remove myself as a option. To breathe the boulder toward something happening between us. To want to talk to him, to tell him when things happen, good or bad. To hear his opinions on anything, on everything. To see him being sweet to a little child, to hear his snide remarks, to be quiet in his presence and not feel like there’s a time limit before it cascades into awkwardness.

This was supposed to be about writing. But writing is supposed to be about something. And that something, for me, is about risk. Which is what I was supposed to be writing about when I started. I did take a risk and met someone. And it led me here, having had this epoch, and the only answer, the only plan is just to carry on with risking. To live through fuck-up after fuck-up and to go there and be sick and silent and giddy and stand in front of him, j’existing, breasts on display, wit on my lips, my hands flailing for anything that might grab them from the lurking, murky darkness.

So I’m working on it. When wordpress gets bitchy with the keyboard, it really bugs me.  I also feel like if I type a ton of shit regarding how I can’t type

The sky is absolutely nutty right now.  It is pouring and pouring and it sounds like we’re going to all wash away in a terrible, biblical flood.  And now…not five minutes later, it’s gone.  We just have some booming lightning and thunder that seems to be trailing off.  Hopefully, there won’t be too much damage to look at in the morning.  Wow, random.

Things on my mind at the moment, now that the storm has magically passed.  Pie making.  Lightning and thunder not quite gone, holy shit.   I really love Clannad, even their instrumentals or possibly I love their instrumentals most of all.  They relax the muscles in my back.  I’m thinking about how I have not managed to kill the almost dandelion rooted craving for Chipotle.  I don’t know what they put in those burrito bowls, but I feel there should be some kind of governmental investigation like they had with cigarrettes for the public good.  I am trying to eat okay.  Lose a little weight and not to please any one particular person though that all plays a role in it, but just to do it and relax about it for a while.  Maybe that’s not possible, but that’s the headgame I’m playing today.

There are some interesting situationsing arisingt wrk.

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