Bones

I am a horrid journaler. I always have been. I think up new, inventive ways to journal, in attempts to keep my attention and remind myself of the worth in recorded thought. No sooner have I conceived such ideas than I begin to accept the fruition they'll never see.

I record my thoughts to get them out of my head. All I want, really, is somebody who will take them from me. I don't need to write them down; it's all mercurial and transient and nothing sticks. It sticks to paper and nothing else. As I continue to mull over and evaluate McCandless's proposition that "happiness is only real when shared," I find myself oscillating between the all and nothing approaches. Nothing is real unless shared. Everything is real, even when un-shared. Entire philosophies have been built upon each.

I'm digressing.

I don't want to keep a journal. I want to think my thoughts and lose them as they leave, the same way I lose everything else. They will survive inside of me until I forget them, or inside of those I tell.

Too much of me looks over my shoulder, where I imagine the someone I'd love is waiting for me to turn around.

Why can't they just catch up?

***

I am a linear thinker, but not lately, and it's messing with me. Can you tell? Of course there's worth in recorded thought. To posit anything else meets immediate scrutiny. Something to do with its lack of basis.

What have I been doing here for five years? Recording thought. Its worth spans a vast spectrum, but everything that isn't nothing is something.

Blah blah blah.

This is all aftermath of my sudden suspicion that none of my bones are writer's bones.

True, they're no one's but mine.

But what are they for? If not writing, if not higher learning, if not befriending, if not traveling, if not loving...

Well. They're for some of those things. Must be, if I say so. I am their only judge.

They're for, perhaps, a little bit of everything.

Dockbound

In another life--the one in which my uncle makes clocks and I collect old, mismatched spoons, the one in which my favorite series is Anne of Green Gables and I pepper conversation with in-context passages of Thoreau's Walden, the one in which my brother's been gone for years and I never learned to whistle--in this life that's not my own, I grew up near a marina. I can tie seven reliable boat-docking knots, and I know how to scale a fish. Every local fisherman and fisherwoman knows my name like they do their boat's, and they cast their nets like I cast glances--with the careful precision expert risk-taking requires. I've never ventured from home. I've never had reason more pressing than the paradoxical desire of a dockbound gypsy. I embody the domestic adage "grown and groomed," and I don't resent it often.

***

The towels are in the dryer and the Saab's oil is fresh. Your mom called. Your dad won his match. Nancy said Dan is re-staining the deck next weekend, and would you be willing to help him? I didn't speak for you. I watered the mums on the windowsill, but I fear the tomatoes are past repair. I unsubscribed you from Men's Health and TIME. The library carries new issues within the week of release. I wonder if you're on your way. It's alright, Mr. Kim said they're catering an event tonight and so it would take a bit longer than normal. I called Paul back and told him we went a different way with the molding, and he said it was fine. Did you remember your brother's birthday? The card is next to the toaster. There's a special on tonight I thought we could watch. It's about that man who killed all those people in Minnesota. Something about the mind of a killer. Can you imagine? All those people. I can't imagine. There was a story in the news about a little boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, he killed his neighbor's cat. They say that's how it starts, those killers. I say it starts when someone didn't raise them properly. Too many parents working all the time. They've got to put food on the table for those killers of theirs. I ran into Martha at the store today and she said Mel is retiring as soon as they figure out which route to take from here to New England. On their boat! Can you imagine? I've never been to New England. I wonder if their winters are as bad as they say. I do hope you'll be home soon. I have so much to tell you.

Unemployed

Loving someone is an invincible feeling. Interesting, given the volatility of love. But for what it is and the purpose it provides, it accomplishes almost everything you'd want to, and it does it all at once. If you're me, travel with someone you love, and the "almost" fades away.

Sometimes I wish I hadn't loved anybody yet. Not because it's passed, but because the contrast between life in love and life without spans a length broad enough to sadden me. I suppose it's the lack of anything that pulls us to reclaim what's lacking, but a pull you have no control over begins to feel like a drag through the mud.

No one likes to perform as a shade of what they could be. Most commonly, that's coined as "selling yourself short," if you believe doing so is possible. That's why sudden unemployment is such a source of grief and depression for those struggling with it. Productivity and purpose as they knew it formerly disappear without saying goodbye. I consider living life between loves as living life between jobs. The latter is but a shadow in comparison, but when I think of performing as a shade of what I could be, I think of what I'm doing at any point that I'm not composing phrases of devotion in my head and conjuring ways to make one person smile. In fact, I do it anyway. But the person isn't real.

I don't think I so highly regarded knowing someone as well as they'll allow me--and even better than that--before I'd been in love. It's become my goal in any relationship I have. So much so that if I recognize the person in question has either given that part of them to someone else, or doesn't care for me to have it, I don't care much to have them. I think it's important that I've recognized this, because it's not terribly healthy. It doesn't render me a very good friend. Yet I can't shake the desire for the greatest opportunity of knowledge of any one person. I don't believe this is an original or even rare desire; it's a pride any soul well-versed in companionship would take. But it seems I prefer loneliness to anything less than the gold. Perhaps understandable, considering how precious the gold.

But isn't silver nice, too?

The answer is a dialogue between my head and my heart, and I'm not sure which says which.

"Yes."

"But you can have it."

Underscores

Hey! So. I woke up this morning with a heavy feeling. If I hadn't worked today, it might have consumed me. It was more of the same; no need to verbalize the sensations. But I sorted through it. Or it sorted through me? Either way.

Anyway, so I'm thinking about ambition and goals and how you can spend all your time dreaming of who you'll be, but who were you while you dreamed?

I'm doing my laundry, washing my sheets. Drinking water. Cleaning my kitchen. Adult-esque things, yes? Maybe? Dusting off the ol' Ingrid mp3s. "I want to change the world; instead, I sleep." All we can do is keep breathing.

I'm looking forward to so much! An entire week at the beach with the family and friends. Friends visiting. Asheville with Becky! Motorcycle course. St. Louis. Chicago.

Man, I just.... just the prospect of travel calms me down. Knowing it will happen makes me want to shriek with glee. Into a pillow, so I don't frighten anyone.

I'm praying about L'Abri, Alaska, and Haiti. I'm praying about school, work, church, and love, and the absence of each, as they apply.

Like a certain favorite and recently very stressed-alternating-with-very excited roommate likes to remind me, you're only lonely if you consider yourself bad company. Or something like that? I don't want to be lonely anymore.

So I won't be.

Bleep bleep beedle ee dee, yup

Hi. I am on my lunch break at work. I am typing this on my tiny phone. I wanted to say that I'm a bit tired of being such a drag all the time. I couldn't sleep last night and realized with a start that I'd like to put all the time I smush into thinking into learning instead. I spend so much time in my head. Granted, I often feel trapped there, but who doesn't like a challenge? I don't want to be so stormy all the time. We all have enough of that. So from now on, I'll post more of the sunshine. I might try a music posting project my brother suggested. Or upload my instagram pictures. And surely, when I have no one to turn while I'm sifting through the dark, I'll turn to you, but I'll steer some clear skies this way, too. Something good this way comes. Anyway, it's time for me to go. Forgive any typos... this post is proofread-free. Good day to you! Good day to me.

Ballooning

I feel like an alarmist when I post such things in the public eye, but then I remember it's my portal that readers choose to partake in, not some platform upon which I assume responsibility to said readers.

that doesn't mean I don't love you.

:)

by "such things," I mean that I don't know where it came from and I can't explain its intermittence, but I believe I am fighting a depression and that I will do so in some degree for the rest of my life.

I've come across numerous postings lately, on tumblr, postsecret, assorted blogs, etc., where people relay their transition from thinking people who say they battle depression are dramatic, stagnant hypochondriacs to recognizing that they are overcome with a struggle they would rid themselves of as soon as shown how to. I tried never to subscribe to the first evaluation, but the second stands in new light.

Perhaps it's not a depression. I don't even really know what that means. In taking inventory of the trends this blog has taken, you know as well as I do that my grasp on my psyche is some balance of intricate and ignorant. I suppose I am just sad sometimes... some deep, overwhelming, weighty, isolating, paralyzing, exhausting form of sad. Maybe I'll grow out of it.

I wonder if I'll be waiting to grow out of it thirty years from now.

Knowing and living in the joy of the Lord does not translate to happiness. That's okay.

Sometimes I imagine that each of my woes is tied to a balloon or a bird that floats and flies away. I would like to take fewer things seriously and to be more fun and not to have a reason to express these feelings at all. But in my consideration that no time is wasted, I am left to gather that nothing that requires it is wasted, either. Whatever fills your life has filled your life. One of those philosophical mumbo jumbos that sounds overly simple but could spin your head like a carousel if you let it.

I'm just me, though, and this is part of it. I don't smile as often as people would like me to, and I laugh at myself more often than people understand. I don't intend to separate myself from humanity; while it's true that I rarely come across people I feel can process some of my wavelengths, I assume that most people feel the same way about themselves. I am no more than one more creation, living under and within the human condition, yelling a whisper about things everyone already knows. And at the same time, there has never been another with the same set of genes, experiences, and thoughts.

It's whatever.

Thanks for reading. I want to tell you that secretly, I'm pretty fun. That I know a few good jokes, and that I'm a good candidate for listening to you talk about anything that excites you. But then I'd be defending myself, and I don't want to do that here.

ttfn, little chickadees. and something dramatic and inspiring, like

Godspeed.

Morsels

sometimes I catch myself trying to force thoughts into status-sized morsels, and then I remember that's what this is for.

I just want... so many experiences. adventures. destinations. the rearview mirror. I always want to go. to go and be gone.

and some day I may want roots, an anchor, lead feet, down payments...

and some days I want to love somebody, more than I want to be loved, though I refuse to invest the first without affirmation of the latter, and it strikes me today that I'd rather the gypsy adventure than the adventure in love. that one I've tried.

it strikes me today that I dread salesmanship for the same reason any stretch of time without a transition in sight makes my skin feel four sizes too small: fear of rejection.

no one leaves you if you leave first.

unoriginal and straightforward. nothing to dissect and nothing to wonder. but it's there, and it's true.

and the parallel causes me a bit of pain, somewhere southeast of my heart, as though my abdomen maps the country and Georgia throbs with the stagnance of overripe produce.

perhaps tattoos, for me, are a manifestation of this pain.

I hate to run, but I love to run away, and I crave the out-of-breath feeling--the one that arriving in a new place borrows from exercise, the addictive cocktail of discomfort and adrenaline--I crave it every moment it's gone.