Honestly
May 24, 2010
I do not know where my day went. Therefore, it feels as if I’ve lost a day, rather than gained experience. Most of the thoughts & feelings that I’ve thought or felt today were not in any way new or unfamiliar. Still, I could not deal with or handle them with any of the expertise one would fairly assume would come with repeated exposure to such thoughts or feelings – or anything for that matter. That painful slide down the gullet, the force fed realisation that I’m going to get fuck all done today because I am fuck all. Ever so distant from everyone & everything I love. This, I am used to.
Appalling lack of concentration. My myopic focus inverts; all that is available to me is the piercing present surrounding, not the fleeting foreground. Someone talks to me & all I can hear is the grumble of a bus round the corner. I am not depressed – I am distracted when what I want is to be grounded. This ache radiates like fire from my bones; it’s in my tissue, fibrous & taut. Dull but dense humming in each part of me, feedback from a concert that’s about to begin or has just ended. Instrumental – I can’t make sense of it but it means something, or at least it has made me feel, even if it is only an anaesthetic. This is it, the numbness that signals the pain will be sought out & ripped apart. I will wake, sewn up, one part the less but altogether better.
I have to write. I will be fine, I am fine. Merely ‘one of those Godawful fucking black days where nothing is pleasing & everything is an excuse for anger’ – if I had the energy to be angry, if I had the courage to say what pleased me. There, breathe out, let go, let go of me, my life, those around me. Let me work, let me thrive, not just barely survive.
This, I am used to – but that doesn’t mean I’m good at it.
“”Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
Said Mark Danielewski.
If you forget to count time for long enough, you go slippy. Enormous guilt comes from living without account or evidence. I suppose you know that better than me because you wrote it down. You wrote it down *well*, more importantly. If something is pretty enough you earn back a few minutes or a few faint whispers of sensation.