My poor, poor notebook. Its pages get more traffic than it can ever hope to withstand. I suppose the same could be said of my mind: when it starts, it never wants to stop. So, here below are some of last night's thoughts for you to peruse.
6/16/09
Ahh, what is wrong with us? We set up this illusion of elegance, of Hollywood-perfect blissfulness. We create this image to soothe our anxieties and low self-esteems, our doubts, while provoking a bone-deep jealousy and yearning for what we know can’t be just around the corner, or down the block. Life isn’t this way, and it ruins us.
I just watched The Truth about Cats & Dogs and if you’ve ever seen it, you’d just know. This thing that we do, out of books, and movies, and so on, creates this great big fallacy out of life. They make it seem easy, even when they don’t. Because the beauty of books and movies is that they have a definitive beginning, an agonizing middle, and a typical end. It’s all mapped out with a surety, through difficulties, through heartbreak. We can easily define when things are going to get better and end happily ever after. If you’ve read The Thirteenth Tale, you’ll understand what I mean. Life doesn’t go on without these things, this trifecta.
Yet life is nothing like this. It takes a huge slap in the face for realization to set in that The Truth about Cats & Dogs doesn’t set the typical pattern. Those kinds of movies aren’t exactly the truth. The guy doesn’t always fall in love with the complete, physical opposite of the tall blonde and beautiful, whether or not the blonde is a complete and utter idiot. And it’s movies just like that that make us want to believe it does happen.
Stories like that which make me want to believe it. Life is the reality I have to wake up to in the morning, however. A reality which fairly pulls my heart out of my chest with a desperate yearning for the very illusions that surround us every day. It makes the things I do seem hollow, like fillers, meaningless babble in the middle of a story as I wait for the real stuff to begin. This ache in my chest makes me feel smaller in the midst of galaxies. I feel like an ant among giants, seeing things from a wholly different perspective, and completely incapable of reconciling the two points of view. Sometimes, I get a sense that overpowers other thoughts, the impression that there is an entire lifetime full of things that I am missing out on. I even feel like I’m doing something wrong, that my actions prevent the cessation of this terrible, throbbing pain inside my chest. And I can feel it, too, it isn’t just a vague idea in my mind. It’s there, pulsing with its own life, every time I breathe.
I have tried to be patient, tried to talk reason to myself in the darkest hours. Hell, I’ve even written stories and poems to calm the protests, and lay to rest the images and ideas, hopes and wistful, wishful scenes within my heart. And it works, too, for a while. But the wrong thing, the precise placement of key events and phrases, the – how do you say? – celestial alignment of specific words, which trigger memories, work against me. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, too many things seem to spark volatile, significant memories in my mind’s eye. My imagination quickly takes over.
Quite simply, I can’t find the words to describe how I feel anymore, except maybe blank, vague, restless, distant, or apathetic. But that isn’t it either. It’s a distinct perspective I’m looking from, a peculiar side of things from which I observe the world. Perhaps I am too cognizant of the lack of what I see. I know there’s something missing, and the realization almost kills me with the knowledge. It’s all bound up within me, bursting with frankness, too much of the truth for blind acceptance, because I can see it nearly everywhere I look.
There is something vital, something elemental, that is quite simply missing from my life, missing from the world around me, something that starves my words and hollows my meanings and makes everything I do utterly pointless.
I wrote the phrase down an hour ago, before I even understood it, I think. It was all by itself, in that sort of stark honesty we all seem to shy away from, but that the stories we see and read seem to want to force back upon our consciousness. I wrote this sentence before I actually knew how far down it spreads its roots, before I could see how right it really is. I don’t want to accept that this is the reason things appear empty or unimportant, but when I truly sort through it all, it becomes undeniable. When I look back on all I’ve written, I know that it’s true.
Essentially: I want to fall in love.
And until I do, I am quite sure I will continue to wonder just what it is in life that I don’t see. Until I do, all my stories of love will continue to fall flat on themselves, too heavy with uncertainty, too structurally flawed, to support the ideas they stand for.
In this instance, it simply isn’t sustaining enough to imagine.
As you get to the end, this may seem like the answer, the bulk of my words a worthy enough explanation, but it’s not. For me, it is incomplete, still. Perhaps because, if I want to be especially cruel to myself and my memory, I know that I already missed out on my chance. I missed out on my chance two years ago when I fucked everything up. But like all things, I only realized it too late. Much too late, because, you see, he’s dead. How bittersweet can life get, when you see a picture, or remember? Countless times, I remember. I did tonight. I even wrote a poem about it. But, that wasn’t enough to stop me thinking. Damnation, why must I think so much?! All I want to do is sink into oblivion, sink into the nothingness and sleep. But my mind doesn’t listen to my heart. It never really has.
And that, my friends, is the actual answer.
If I had listened closely, if I hadn’t followed through on the wrong train of thought, if I hadn’t jumped to conclusions and just listened to the common sense my heart was hinting at, I wouldn’t be in this situation.
Love was never about impulsive thoughts which inevitably lead to impulsive, foolish actions. It’s about impulsive emotions that inevitably lead you to the right person. It was never about what you didn’t want to do, didn’t want to happen, didn’t want to feel, but instead, all the things you never thought you could do or feel. Love is about uncovering that hidden part of yourself which you always wondered about. Love is finding the right kind of reality, and reconciling those two, separate points of perspective.
And if it isn’t, then what is the need to find it even about? Because clearly, I don’t understand anymore.
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