I write more about what I see when I close my eyes than what’s right ahead of them; I try not to, but it's inevitable; imagination is how I feel something raw and true, pull myself back to a computer or a notebook and empty it all out, or rather empty most of it out and leave the rest, leave the bits I forget and forge new ones as I write.
Everything though, behind the delicate eyelids I call my own, that black sockets which contains the trailing optic nerve that carries precious messages to my brain nestled in darkness (my whole body is illuminated on the outside) is produced from what I see, every-day, monotony and then some strange sweet beauty that sticks out of all the d’habitude, sticks in my brain like chewing gum, ready to be ****** and pressed against the walls of my brain, pulling and tugging at itself like taffy trying to figure itself out. I translate this to written thought, awkward and jumbled words, sometimes something that fits together. It wants to be something, each thought wants to be released into the world.
In a way, each word I write reflects life, but it breathes life into something ordinary, changes the filter setting on the photo perhaps portraying something more alluring, or I’d hope it does, hope that I could make someone feel the way I do when the night is blue, the trees are darker and the hazy glow of streetlights lap my window, dancing in the cool glass pane that separates the world inside from the world outside, the day is not ready for morning, everything's at once still so one could see how heavenly it all was. Maybe I am a newscaster, maybe I am a conspiracy theorist, I say “In case you haven’t seen for yourself, here it is, 5am in the Northern Hemisphere, in a bedroom with pink walls and creeping ivy vines hung across its ceilings, with a warm lamplight that leaves gentle gray shadows on the bed stand that has been painted white, so lovingly, by my mother’s cousin….. this is what it’s like (to me, to a fool, to a nobody) but this, this is from your friend, and I want you to imagine it in your own head and I hope it’s beautiful in your head, as beautiful as it is to me.” I don’t wish sleepless nights on you, but I hope that life blesses you with something of the sort, maybe it’ll change your mind.
not always though
not always do I write about beauty, and sometimes I learn what I think when I write it out
it all feels random but it can’t be, it might not be, there must be some self within me that writes these words with true intention, first thought, best thought.
I cannot write myself into self-hood, existence through some physical tangible proof that is these words on this paper
because my brain knows better
I must be something more than words on paper, I’m a physical body and I am a soul and I am I am. I inhale cold air in the dead of winter and feel it sit like a weight in my lungs, like a punch in my stomach, I taste blood in my throat when I run too far and too fast for my own good and my heart tries to catch up with me, and my sturdy legs buckle at my knees when I’ve walked too far. In some way, these sensations, these memories affirm my livelihood, my existence, my place in the world. I do not have to be great, I do not even have to be good, I am, I am, I am, I create for myself and if I find something valuable in the stale-clumsiness-that-is-sometimes-kind that is my perspective on affairs, my World, then I will give it to you dear reader, not so you will love me or so you will care, but because I like to share wonderful magical little things with the world. Through specificity, of location or experience or taste or shape or color, we find our human universality within one another. We understand that they understand.
I’m making a folder of tiny intimate photos I’ve collected from my camera roll, some are collage bits, one in fact, is a note from a book I found in Rennes with my roommate at the time.
We stopped at a bookstore in town where everything was under 10 Euros, and there were vintage films and books of collage and small chapter books, pocket sized ones (they were 2 Euros), and three men ran the store in rotating shifts, they sat on chairs and played chess and smiled at the onlookers as they passed by, never once advertising their goods. They knew whoever stopped at the stands would care and there were a lot of people who cared in Rennes, about literature and art and love and things that are so often overlooked in the States. I don’t mean to make an indictment of Americans and their culture and their loud cars and silver cities, neither do I condone the French…
I’m getting ahead of myself. The note in any case; it’s written in old French cursive, I couldn’t read it if I tried, but I haven’t tried yet. Maybe I will someday. one day.