I’ve been reading a lot lately. And a character in my book says, as she reads, that the words don’t belong to her. They are and will always be the author’s. And she says all she wants with her life is to be something to somebody.
I feel like I’m recognizing myself. It makes me want to write and put myself on paper and make some other girl sigh out and moan me too to the moon and the small hours of the morning, and the blue Vaseline gleam of her face in the light of her computer screen.
Maybe finding yourself is like art. Maybe the negative space can be more important than the positive, the invisible defining the visible. And maybe if I focus on everything around me, I will know by default. Maybe I will be left with a hole shaped like my soul. Like how when you put a puzzle together you don’t know where the last piece goes until you don’t have anywhere else to put it. How all the other pieces tell you what shape you are.
It’s funny, any time I try to write about myself I end up a puzzle piece. Wondering why when I’m filled I still feel empty.
And lonely, I end up lonely. Every time.
They shouldn’t call it high. It wasn’t like that. Sure, my mind was up there with those fuzzy shapes in the ether wrapping itself like a lonely girl around these hazy truths. And it wasn’t thinking, really, it was like touching with my mind. Mental, emotional antennae. Touching, stroking those unimaginably immense, insane things all melting together in the car or bobbing around the ceiling of that smoky little room upstairs. With the window open and Hendrix talking to us. But high isn’t right. My mind was away, that’s all, but my body was so grounded and messy and sloppy and lonely all over the bed, drawn up in a bundle and splayed out for the world and Hendrix to see.
I want to surround myself with beauty. Beautiful things, beautiful people. Negative space, defining my inside by my outside and my surroundings. It’s what art is about. Interior equals exterior, unless it doesn’t. And you’ll know when you see it, unless you don’t.
I don’t know how to paint this.
I don’t feel like I know anything anymore. I don’t feel like I have anything in me worth expressing. I can only grab at those balloons bobbing around the smoky ceiling when I am full of weed and empty of everything else, and in the morning even those serene dreams have left me.
I end up lonely, every time.
My optimist pleads,
maybe you’re just hard to pin down, baby. maybe you’re just so complicated and tragic and sad and full of wafting inspiration that even you yourself don’t know how to explain it. Maybe you need to look to your negative space. maybe, sweet girl, no one is ever going to understand you because you’re more than what can be understood. and maybe we’re all like that, baby. maybe when it all comes down to it, we’re all shells that don’t start being filled for a long way down into the earth. and maybe humans, the people you see on the street, are a lot denser than you’d think. maybe there is so much packed inside each collection of limbs and features that it’s a miracle we haven’t sunken into the earth. and maybe that’s because the earth is even denser. and maybe everything in the universe is so incredibly dense and packed and full of thought and life and those bobbing balloons all melting different colors and your parents and your sister and the people you know are all sitting around wondering if they will ever be understood either, and, just like you, whether they even want to be. and honey, maybe you don’t know shit, but maybe nobody else does either. and maybe, baby, you’re going to realize this someday. maybe you’re going to be lying awake at night and it’s going to hit you, like that funny combination of letters that night when your stomach was sore with loneliness and the cyclops ceiling of the spare room in your grandmother’s house was watching you with that single, lonely eye. your life is going to mean what you believe it will mean. you will fall in love with who you let yourself fall in love with, and if you don’t loosen up and RELAX, nothing for you is ever going to work itself out.
because you never relax, baby. you never do. and it is so hard for us to see, locked up inside, dense and packed. and being carried around by boys with hands like men, and being touched with those big hands that don’t seem to change from one boy-man to the next, that won’t do you any good. sweetheart, it never will. and baby, you need to grow up. you need to love and hate. and feel things! baby, we swear you do. you hide in your room and in the park and inside your head. and even, lately, when you’ve acted, you’ve felt empty. and we know you felt different, that smoky night when you lay on that bed and felt the world pushing in around you, pushing itself on top of you, and the corners of the room rounding and your head so thick and your mouth nibbling and feeling and feeling so strongly. you used to like to drink, baby, and get out of your head. you used to like the release. but honey you were so empty! and that night, baby, you relaxed. it was a sweet, silent presence and we know you felt that. we know how feeling small comforts you, and how those big hands made you feel so safe because they dwarfed you. we know your life spun in circles around you. and it’s like you read, and they aren’t your words, but it’s like you read: The Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow together in the sea-green deep, and Now spins in circles on the surface. all melting together, spinning circles. and how reality is greater than the sum of its parts. He was right about that too. And they aren’t your words, baby girl, but that doesn’t make them wrong.
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