I miss this place (this one, not necessarily everything beyond its violet walls (not coincidentally, the same colour as the room I write in)). I miss the slightly schizophrenic relationship I conduct with myself within these pixels.
I write in my notebook, but it’s a different process, writing with a pen in my book with the peacock red and gold against black, with the pocket in the back for a poem, and a couple of photos, and a post of someone else’s. The pages aren’t quite big enough for my awkward-looking, sideways, left-handed way of writing, but my bigger notebook that has a raw spine to open out flat is too big to fit in my bag. What I write seems to have no focus, and it’s not as though I don’t have inspiration. I can’t find the hook, the something that makes me want to explain it to myself. I write, but there’s no reason for the words to move anywhere else, no need for them to be transferred to a typed white page where I can see their form and hear their beat.
Because I can’t get here, the random things that I would post stay in my head, in a knotted confused mass. It seems, all of a sudden, as though there should be a criteria for what is posted. And yet, I couldn’t define what the criteria was previously. There’s a numbing effect to publishing these kinds of thoughts: an on/off switch that determines awareness of how public it is – as though I could keep almost private some things, and open my hands to share others; as though some part of my brain considers this my confessional of sorts, my sorting room for tangled skeins of spun out threads of sensuality and sexuality, and another is dismissive of the right of anyone who chooses public exposure to indignation over interpretation… and those two parts manage to slip by each other without communicating their point of view to the other.
I can see things I’ve written where these two awarenesses nearly touched: where what was intensely personal longed to be written, but I disguised it in obscurity (not out of deference to subject matter, but because I had to dive into it sideways, or see a concept not a sentence). I read back now and sometimes have forgotten what it was that I wrote with such camouflaged urgency, and can no longer even guess, where others are instantly clear to me, and bottom heavy with everything that compelled me to write them, rather than just what I wrote. But outside my head, they sit in pretty words upon the page, and make a different shape, and change the form of what preceded and succeeds them.
There is a list of things I will never write, and those are the things that give me licence to write of other intimacies. I’ll write how my cunt feels, what is going through my head while it feels; lists of what I like, but never of what is said to me or has been said. I’ll write the facts, and flounder in unfinished words if I forget the chronology, but I won’t reveal their underpinnings.
I offer myself freedom, with the usual provisos of respecting the privacy of others, and immediately set about constructing obstacle courses for myself to climb over (You must write the complete truth, and nothing but the truth, only make sure you do it without mentioning that, or revealing this, or letting slip the other and for fuck’s sake, don’t ever talk about you know what). More than an obstacle race it’s like that thing you do where you have to pick up more and more things without dropping them, or put on more and more clothes – but in reverse, so I wind up naked on the finishing line – and suddenly see my reflection, and am astonished at what I have exposed in my haste to keep my secrets close.
It feels, at other times, as though I am running around with a clutch of pins in my hands, desperately pinning the quivering bodies of butterfly thoughts to the earth, and then crouching to dissect them so that I can see what they are made of, and understand why they draw me to them: why does one encounter, one conversation, one touch make me want to examine it, find some connection to some other experience?
If I write about sex it’s because it seems to pull everything along with it in its wake in ways that nothing else I write about can do. It can’t be coincidence that the people I let see me most clearly are my lovers. It’s that cheesewire bite into the soft skin of the psyche that reminds me how the cerebral and the animalistic, the venal and the altruistic are bound together, and wrapped in a layer of emotion.
And that’s what I miss: the proximity, and ease of writing it. I miss the game of writing in private, and leaving what I write on a metaphorical park bench to be picked up by strangers, and screwed up and thrown away, or carefully folded and tucked into a pocket. There is a disconnect between the public and the private that is not rational, and can’t be defended, but it seems it has become necessary to me.