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diaryland
french inhale
18 January 2006 - 04:27
This is how the book always begins:
For the longest time what mattered most to me was finding a great love. I crossed a continent, mourned my endings for too long, traversed my own personal hell in the hopes of healing, and when I finally stopped looking, I found him.
I am still amazed at how long cinematic images flash across my screen before I understand the theme. Close your lips and fold your hands. * At what point, if any, are two people�s happiness mutually exclusive? * The decisions that will affect the next few months of my life are essentially out of my hands right now, so I'm here to find out what is in my hands. * I have no innocence left; I don't fight anything anymore. I sit and watch my friends destroy their lives, and I don't fight it; I just feel bitter and hopeless. * There was no self, nor even a centerless system to try to make sense of it all. "I" just let go of everything, until I was water, no -- air, no -- void. * I feel so helpless in all this wind.
For many years I was actively depressed. It's hard for me to relate to that person, the voice that always starts the book. I can't imagine crying every day. I can't imagine wrapping so much of myself up in someone that the tiniest gesture from a thousand miles away can make or break my entire week.
Oddly enough, even after the book jumped from sterile bytes of neurotic prose onto silver screen images (when instead of trying to fit life to a fantasy, I find myself awake within a fantasy realized), I still can't relate to the heroine. I still can't relate to myself. The girl typing these words is hesitant to publish them; once she was a gracefully orchestrated living grammar lesson, now she fears her phrasing is awkward, each word a stutter. I can't relate to myself because in my attempts to keep people I love in my life, I've turned into an android. I haven't written for months because I've had nothing to say anymore. I barely have a will to live because I gave up so much of what mattered to me for someone's (my?) lofty idea of "the right way to respond."
I still believe there is a way for people who love each other to choose dramatically different paths and remain close. However, I see now that I've gone far beyond opening my mind to allow another to explore a path I don't prefer; I've sacrificed time, money, experience, personal space, and more to help that person on their(sic) way. How many times have I seen Kale go out of his way for friends when he's clearly too tired, distracted, neglected this past year? How did I forget that those around me are mirrors? How did I relinquish my power, my will? How did I forget myself?
Hello, "swiftly disappearing photograph,/ In my more slowly disappearing hand" (Rilke).
Hello, Donna.
Insert a scene: He breathes the smoke just exhaled from his mouth back in through his nostrils. "This is what got me addicted to cigarettes, you know."
