I can nearly hear you, and yet you're not here. 

My life is moving my limbs through the shadows, dragging my body through this murky light, this great fog of life, my entertainment watching the will-o-the-wisps blinking like heat lightning through the vapor and air.  By the dull burn of day I study French and international football, read about Sumerians and drink coffee with my roommate.  By night I huddle in the darkness with those around me, distracting each other with games and alcohol, living slowly so as not to extinguish the low flames of our lives. 

It is suffocating at times.  I feel the need to stretch my arms out and touch each coast, to lay down across North America and sip the chill waters of the Hudson Bay while dangling my feet in the Gulf of Mexico.  I long to leap across the Atlantic and sit in Upton Park or the Latin Quarter, to learn Parisian in old cafes or discuss Islam with an Algerian over espresso.  I need to have these words paid for, to be supported by genius, to walk upright and ignore the inanities of modern life and focus on the truths beneath the ether.  Where is my staff to handle my daily living arrangements?  I don't need a secretary and I don't need an agent; I need a guide who speaks the language of the locals that inhabit this strange world, for I am only a visitor.

I can hear you singing again, and I haven't for a long time.  Your voice is the breath of God.


Look it up.

Is it sad when you can look at blogging and say, "Why, I remember when it wasn't like this!  In the old days..."

It is strange how good I used to be at this, how writing about my life used to be so easy while writing prose was a little harder.  Now, the inverse is true, though I don't do either enough.  I would sit down at whatever desk I was using at whatever home I was borrowing and pump the blood and liquor in my veins out onto the keyboard.  Maybe being overly dramatic helped - I certainly was that.  Maybe I'm boring now, a late twenty year old with the lifestyle of a college student mixed with the dull monotony of post-party-all-day-hook-up-with-strangers-fall-in-love-every-second-and-make-mistakes-part-of-life.  The key word in that phrase is post.

But there is something in the air again.  I can smell it.  The winds have changed, or the songs I hear have gone stale - something isn't the same, and I can feel that stir of change.  I used to look for a new location when this happened, look to move somewhere and start over or start the same.  But now I'm more cautious, now I know that I can't keep moving forever, that I can't start over every time.  Life is finite (unless we're talking theologically), and I don't want to continue to relocate and have nothing to show from my former lives/residences besides old emails and old girlfriends.  I need to follow one path now until the end. 

But there's that smell, that wind shift.

When the mind fights itself, when it is tugging in two opposite directions with equal force, it stays in one place.  And that's what I'm doing.  Frozen, paralyzed, sitting in one spot and thinking furiously or furiously not thinking with alcohol or whatever fantasy I can use (usually games).  I create elaborate stories in my head about my life and where its going, but my actual life doesn't change much.  I'm saying the same things now that I was four years ago.  I need to get published.  I need to get an advanced degree, or, alternatively, I need to get a good job.  A good job?  Me?  Maybe I should just run again.

It is getting harder to hurt the ones I love by leaving them.  It is getting harder to break up with nice girls to go somewhere else.  Nothing in my life is bad.

I've never been good at living in the middle.

Do you know me?

I am the eye that can see with the lights out.  I am the heart that can beat your blood into streams and past your self-taught glaciers.  My hand is tight and hurting, so more bourbon to the brain to coat the lens to brighten the colors of truth.  My heart is my weapon - it never lies the way others do, it stings me with the real, a scorpion in my breast forever kissing me.  And though you never know, my heart is a mirror, for no knife slides into me that does not enter another.  I say the truth, and gasps like night's wide yawn after dusk open in all corners of us, and the lashing out enters me, and you are hurt with me.  I bleed, but I was blessed with more blood.  I carry scars like a deck of cards, and I am forever and ever a gambler, Amen.

The left arm is on fire now with the right.  

Adieu.  I will brag more on a different morrow.



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