And yes, here we are, back where we always are, back where the confusion and and the ache and the futility and the crazy seem so utterly ridiculous and selfish, self-important, self-indulgent.
Many people, people I know, are struggling with things that are real and serious and not all in their heads. They have loved ones fighting ghosts in desolate faraway places. They are losing their aging grandparents. They are dealing with chronic illnesses and difficult relationships.
And what the hell am I doing, except looking for a place that, for all I know, doesn't really exist.
What am I doing, except trying to make sense of a world that is so confusing, so frightening, so unreal to me, that I keep squeezing my eyes shut and trying to remember how things felt before and trying to believe that it's going to be okay after.
What am I doing, except creating drama, much in the manner of Demi Moore at the end of St. Elmo's Fire.
I never thought I'd be so tired at 32.
I keep feeling like I need to quit. Everything, lately, but the journal in particular.
I've gone back and forth on it for most of this year. Earlier this spring, I started telling people that I was going to quit, actually saying it out loud. I was done.
Back in March, when I was visiting Elise in California, we were driving home from the city one evening and listening to John Mayer's Heavier Things. (And singing along with it, right out loud, with the windows open and the baby in the backseat, still too young to be mortified about it. I have no doubt that when Elise and I are 70 years old, we will still be singing in the car together. We are cool like that.)
Anyway, one of the songs on that CD, "Home Life," is well on its way to being my favorite song ever in the whole world. When it came on, I was telling Elise how much I loved it, and for lack of a better way to explain it, how much I wanted to live inside that song, somehow.
That song is calm, and steady, and peaceful, and straightforward, and practical but not cynical. He refuses to believe that his life is going to be just a string of incompletes. He will marry just once and if it doesn't work out give her half of his stuff and that's fine with him, that's just the way it will be.
When I am listening to that song, and others like it, I sometimes get a feeling of something totally out of my reach. Of peace, I guess. That's the only way I can think to describe it. It's only for a moment, the tiniest fraction of time, but I can feel it, in my soul, this elusive paradigm where everything is right. Like the moment when your windshield wipers move in time to the song on the radio, just for a second, before going back to their own rhythm. It's a moment of sunshine and green lawns and sprinklers. Crackling fireplaces during deep, quiet snowfalls. Old houses, lullabies, twilight. Stillness, contentment.
It's happiness like we can never know in reality because of the world we live in. Because of the things that have happened to us that we can't erase, can't undo, can't avoid, no matter how hard we shut our eyes.
Yet, I am compelled to chase that happiness, as unreachable as it may seem, and I have been fighting the feeling that I need to let go of this before I can try.
I don't know why that is. It's not like I'm bitter about any of it. I have nothing but great affection for this journal, my little corner of the internet, and the community at large. For the last six years, I felt that I finally had a place I belonged, and I revelled in that, took comfort in it. But this world that has in many ways strengthened me and propelled me forward now feels like it is holding me back. Like I look to it to provide something it is incapable of providing.
Now, maybe, it owns too much of me.
I don't know. I'm not making any decisions about it now, I'm not thinking clearly about anything. The responses I've received to the last couple of entries have moved me, made me realize that there are people out there who are pulling for me, and I think that cutting myself off from you would be kind of dumb.
Then again, the weekend of JournalCon will be my six-year anniversary. It almost suggests itself as a denouement.
We'll see what happens.
P.S. If someone wants to try to explain why my CD Creator software opens every time I open CuteHTML, I'd be forever in your debt.
My longest friend. My sister cat.
I love you.