– Wanting to write more, but faced with an old demon of a paradox: that stories need life breathed into them, life that can only be lived because the truth can only be so much stranger than fiction, while living life detracts time from w/riting life into one’s work. Placing faith in the old ritual: that of having a sacrament of absorption, of navigating a long, dark tunnel densely scattered with all manner of sensory images, in the hopes of stumbling into that ever-elusive “creative state” that has not been felt in writing for a long time now. Reading books put off for months, looking at old photos , old notes and drafts, picking up on lucid bits and pieces of dreams both ancient and recent, looking for more lives lived before and forgotten, searching for those which could use a little resuscitation in the form of another piece. The right distance from reality/ies, after all, is the secret to good literature.
– Meeting old friends, mixing them with new ones. Finding that some combinations work, while some don’t. A fickle chemistry, that of temperaments and desires: some mixtures turn acidic over time (a night, a week, a month, a semester, a year), while some brew into their own solutions to a host of problems, while even others brew into an unstable awkwardness, with elements neither growing closer nor drifting apart, with only the future holding what is in store.
– Turned 26 earlier. Supposedly past my physical prime. Still don’t feel like I’ve done anything useful with my life. Last year was supposedly the beginning of a new chapter, too abruptly ended. Am still in a state of limbo: floating along with the uncertainty of it all, jumping from one odd job to another, in the hopes of re-writing that chapter in a new setting when the opportunity comes around once more. Never knew that such a lack of direction could be so painful, perhaps because this is the first time it has been this glaring.
Left Hand, Write Hand 