I’m your apple-eating heathen
I don’t like to write anymore. I know that this is strange and completely out of canon for me, but writing just makes me unhappy. How much misery have I recorded in the last hundred or so posts on this website? How much of my soul have a bared to a cavernous spectatorship that will not comfort me?
When I write poetry I have to allow a mania to overtake me. I become obsessed with words, repeating little snippets of lines over and over again, pacing and humming and crying all over a few little words. I do not want to do that anymore. When I write in my journal, my feelings of anger and disgust are only amplified. I write only to be reminded that I am alone in this. That there is no one for me to speak to.
Really, though, that isn’t the case. Really everyone understands, and if I’d just set down my 5-dollar words for a minute I’d see that. Really my emotions are basic and human and universal. Really my loneliness is a wall of pseudo-intellectualism I’ve built around myself.
So I don’t really do it anymore. I don’t need the anxiety.
But I came here to say this anyway.
Everything I thought I knew about my world has changed.
All of the most stable couples have broken up. I have been watching my friend surge and rumble with the changes of growth that are, after all, inevitable. I have watched this tear apart the group that was built painstakingly.
All of the kids that I thought of as the “sketchiest” have changed their ways. The death of a friend and teammate has become a catalyst for a more-legal style of living.
Everyone is learning that they are not immortal. That life is not permanent. Things change.
I’m watching it happen and it’s changing me too. My belief in eternity is just one more part of an innocence that I won’t get back.
And so instead I listen to music that reminds me of the-time-back-when, the-time-before. I have a playlist for a time that I’ve come to understand and I live in a confusing place where nothing is certain. Nothing at all is certain.
Here, here I used to say “except that I love him.” I would imagine that my love is the only stable thing in the world, but I know better now. Things will inevitably change. Perhaps we’ll grow apart. Perhaps we’ll grow together. But our love will not remain the same love one way or another.
June 27th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
This is what causes the deadening of nerves, the loss of bright, simple clarity, the falling embrace of inevitability. Not the bad things, not the evil. Not the hard times or the loss of good times or the mistakes we make over and over. Those are all patterns we can incorporate into an eternal youth.
No, the slide into age is caused by a growing realization: not that we were wrong and are right now, or less wrong… but that it didn’t matter and doesn’t. The angles change, the players change, the ability to reflect meaningfully (may) improve… but we look at “that time before,” and “this time now,” and sense that the only real difference is quantitative.
If you can learn to love life, despite the fact that it is not ever going to provide you with shiny tokens in a reasonably rational manner, you win.