I wonder sometimes if I only search for homes to have a place to escape from. I relish so keenly, running away from them, I worry it might be the real thick attraction that lingers even when vapors of familiar desire have dissipated from my mouth, and I’m left just kicking up the dust and folding laundry I have no interest in. I fear sometimes I might be a wandering heart by nature, and if it’s not my eyes, and my legs, is that more excusable, or should I still feel terrified deep inside about the great big loneliness that gapes at the bottom of my bell-clover feet?
All the therapy in the world can’t teach you to pretend you’re something you’re really not. We say good people would do this or that, except it’s an arbitrary description based on almost no facts. What do people like you or I know of good people? We weren’t given them to learn in childhood, and as such, have only faulty, at best, understanding of what’s supposed to be human life. I wish I knew what people mean to say when they say it at me, and not just this muddled merger of what I expect of them, and what I’ve heard before.
I think, in ways, I’ll disappoint myself if I turn out to be what you said, but also worry, increasingly, I haven’t got enough luck to escape my born fate. I’m frightened that the romanticism you attach to the word isn’t enough to build a whole pilfered life on, that I’ll regret I’m not who I thought I’d be.
But the truth is, it terrifies me. Fills me with sick, the way in which you’d box my head and define the lapels on my coat, and what worries me most is the tendency I notice inside not so much to let myself be defined by you, but more so to define myself. I’m scared, really, of picking just one stop, of saying this rather than that, and it’s not for fear of making the wrong choice, but rather that of life around me expiring. I think the more I run from the wicked, foul things you noticed inside me, the more likely they are to hatch. Only, I can’t very well stay here, either. I leave myself no choice if I linger here. And so, what then? What how?
I worry sometimes I enjoy freedom too much, and wish I could explain it to either one of you, except I’m drawn inexplicably to people who’ve never known freedom. Or people who know nothing but, and I find I’ve nothing to talk about to either. I hold out my tongue to strange men to taste what they’ve made come of their life – is that sick? Should I not be drawn to things I don’t understand, and have little space for inside? And would you hate me if you smelled all the lives I’ve swirled around my mouth?
Is it sick to be curious about people and their lives? Walking the thin, blue rope between curiosity and fear, so heavy on the rag-time I don’t honestly know what I’ve done to deserve to be here. I think sometime, for every bit of me I work to fix, I come across something that doesn’t seem to actually want fixing. Forces me to wonder if really, the mistake’s perennially cleverer than its maker, or if it’s really just me, struggling as every other day to make something of my life.
I don’t remember exactly when I became convinced that life was something in need of fixing, but I’ve thought it increasingly lately. I know I’ve noted around me all the people who’d really rather not, how I blamed, but also pitied them secretly. I’ve seen the ways in which life turns malodorous when you avoid looking at it too keenly, and I’ve seen the way that, in turn, gnaws your presence at the edges, and I don’t want that to happen to me.
I think, increasingly, the part of me that’s desperate to fix comes up brawling against the part that’s happy frolicking in the mud, and I don’t know who should win, if either.
I watch from the sidelines men reminding me of other men, reminding me of corners I cut, and turns I failed to make. And I don’t miss them, but I love the open question of my life too much, I think, sometimes, to ever want to finish it into a dot. How is it that one dot’s an ending, and three turn into a question, and will I ever quit my greed, and learn how to be happy with just one? It’s not so much wanting as it’s the thrill of not knowing, of sitting here free, spinning. Wandering.
Soundtrack to these thoughts, as follows (as it is, after all, Tuesday, and @ablaze thinks we should talk about music, which I love to):
I don't know the way songs work, but I know listening to this made me cry on the street yesterday. There's something about it that speaks to me, to the way I've carried myself as a secret a long time now. And that's impossibly precious.
I know something you don't know
Somehow in the dead of night, we're like bunny and the reptile
I need something you don't seem to need
A sweeter goodbye, I'm like a fruit bat hangin' tight
And then there's this beautiful man's accent. This, together with the above, have been my writing soundtrack for the week.
And ultimately, still, in my Charlotte Gainsbourg mood. Though less for writing and more for existing in. :)
Any cover of a Dylan song is usually quite good. It's not very hard when you have such amazing source material to work from. I can't help you with the other part. I've never lived more than half hour away from where I grew up.
The second song turned out to be the one I enjoyed most. Hehe
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Cool tunes!
Happy Three Tune Tuesday!
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hey @honeydue There’s so much quiet truth in this — that tension between fixing and just being. Your words linger like a song you don’t want to end.
Ah the the urge to fix and define a life versus the desire to wander and think that will help you stay undefined - as if they're mutually exclusive. One day, you'll realise that even if you are in the one spot for a long time, you can still refuse definition - life is fluid. You just have to surround yourself with people who embrace fluidity. That's the real problem.
And yeah, feeling boxed in sucks. I guess I address it with new projects - the mind ventures, rather than the foot ones. It's easier for you, in Europe, to travel, and if you are forever a wanderer, that is not a bad think. We can be both - a settler, a wanderer. There's things that will become fixed that you will accept and embrace, and things that you think are fixed that will float away and be forgotten.