I think I may have momentarily lost it, the magic of words.
There were many times in the past when it had been so easy: indeed, I saw them hibernate but after a brief rest the words came out and flooded me and at the end of that period I felt like I’ve sated the beast. But for weeks and weeks and weeks now, I’ve been coaxing the words out of my head; there’s just a lot going on in there and I knew I needed to say something. I’ve tried. But for weeks and weeks and weeks now, I’ve always turned up empty handed.
I’ve been rewriting this lead-in a dozen times:
“As March rolls in,” was how it began. Then it was, “Now that March is drawing to a close.” And the last version had been, “April’s halfway through.” I’ve been wasting weeks away and nothing that came out made me feel like moving forward. Don’t get me wrong, there have been lovely pinheads on my 2017 map thus far. Enough material to show for. Sparse peaks, but peaks nonetheless. Graphika in January where I ran into friends from a previous lifetime; Korea in February where we celebrated A’s 40th; that impromptu March trip to Bora with E and C which was exactly what we needed that time; the many weekends with V and N when we drove around for whatnots. All things considered, I should say life is alright, you know?
Yet it fluctuates and again here I am, immobilized, words frozen, and for the first time in a long time, I’m having a difficult time articulating how I feel inside. But I’ll try. So bear with me as I do my mumbo psycho spin on these things, and let’s see if tonight’s attempt at writing it down will be a success.
For the most part, the last couple of months had been a microcosm of how all of my life feels like. And I’ve constantly written about this, like I’m in-between phases, never quite getting to ‘it’, whatever the definition of ‘it’ may be. Tough to be going after something when ‘it’ is sortov a moving target. And in hindsight, not really a moving target but rather something that I’ve mostly shared with somebody. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why I felt run down, because hard as I try it wasn’t my pace. All my life I’ve latched onto somebody else’s goal and molded it onto my own. Fighting somebody else’s fight, living their dreams, waiting on someone else to say stop or go, or this is it, jump! It got tiresome, it was.
Even so, that shared goal had kept me going for so many years, decades, a lifetime. My parent’s separation, where I took my mom’s side because being opposed to my dad’s was the shared goal. My marriage, where I stood by R through hell and high water, because that’s what a wife would do; the goal was to earn — what was it, our ‘first hundred’ — and that sure kept me going, until that too tired me out. Life has always given me something to fight for and to side with, and as I sit here on my bed, I suddenly realize I feel empty because there’s really nothing for me to fight for because I never really knew what I wanted out of my life.
Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Bad because, I’m 41, and you’d think I would already be a whiz at figuring out what I want out of life; good because, so what if I’m 41, yes I can still conjure my own dream. Momentarily lost, still can’t figure it out but maybe for now I just need to embrace this ‘this’, take it for a spin, let it settle in.
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Pictured: My banig, a handwoven mat for sleeping or sitting
Finally Dee 