Even still, with the address posted about, I like to think I’m hidden here.
I’ve given the friends who I would like to share this with the URL, but taken care with the words, wanting the best and brightest on showcase. Not the garish, skulking, pissed-off monsters that roam and my halls and use my tender vittles as their chew toys. What I need and want to write about these days is not our best china, put out only for company. It is vacuous, dropped sentence-ridden, whirling dervishes, mean and sad, and hopeful and bracing. It is Maria at the start of the Sound of Music, just feeling herself in the air. Both the good and the ill in equal measure.
It is just word vomit that doesn’t mean change. Or presence. It is just the detritus I have to dig through to get back to sensible creativity. And offering that up to the world as what you do, even if it is an essential part of the process, especially those who lay outside my safety circle, feels like asking someone to come in for Whinging Hour seven days a week. Come see the Incredibly Upset Girl. Marvel at her excessive feelings, ladies and gentlemen! Thrill at her misreading of obvious and overt signs and symbols. All limbs must be kept inside the cart as we may be reaching speeds of 3.
Still. Maybe now and again, you’ll bring tea down to me and Mildred, as we clang our chains together against this radiator, half-hearted in our attempts to escape. I yell up, into the light, yes, Mr. Barnum, I’m a bonafide nov-el-tee. He grumbles and sends down a basket. We have crumpets and gin and orange juice, clink glasses but we’re careful not to break them. There’s no place for the shards to go but in. More than that? I don’t even know how I bear it, can’t imagine it being a delight to anyone other than the mess who produces it.
I’m being facetious. I know how I bear it. I know that it gives me a dark grin to draw the nothingness into somethingness. A power I get nowhere else, no one else. A giddiness sugar pretends at but fails to execute.
Sorry! Sorry! I’m actually a bit exorcised and exercised. A catharsis at the temple doors. Sometimes the voices (not “voices” but the internal dialogue) are so toxic and painful and self-assured that it demands vivisection. It demands a deep dive into the darkness. So yes, I think all sorts of obsidian things about myself all the time. They motivate my behaviors and sabotage me. I believe them when there is evidence to the contrary. I bend myself to their will. I suffer deeply for it and so, too, do many people around me, I’m sure.
People we would leap in front of trains for, people who we would stand in front of and wave our arms shouting, no, no, no, you are marvelous and wonderful and so worthy of love. We look into one another’s eyes, but what we should do is speak into the pits of their souls, their dark shadows, the Mildreds, the monsters that have our dear ones on leashes and say I see you, too. You are not forgotten, you manifestation of fear, of loss, of regret. I know that you are driving my dear one’s heart, but I say to you that she is trustworthy. She can drive herself. She will look out for us and get us home safely. She must struggle to learn, so you cannot protect her, little beast. She is our friend, the both of us, so do not harm her. Her peace is your peace.
It will not listen the first time, but it may begin to believe. We all deserve the break.
I have been obedient to my longer-term desires today rather than the shorter-term ones. Even if I had to muscle my way through. It’s a good practice there, too, just to see how unexpectedly responsive I can be to a good turn done on my own behalf. Perhaps the best plan is to get charged up to say no to a temptation. Wildly excited to tell the bastard cakes our loveliest no.
This is just a day, but if nothing else, we couldn’t live in the pit for much longer. Tomorrow, onward and upward, 7am meetings, starshine. Recall there will always be things to puncture our balloons, so, take the helium whilst we can have it.
