Skip to main content

Surface tension

 

My vocabulary was the first to go.  Simple words would escape me and I would end up searching around for them like I do for my glasses in the dark. I would come back with inadequate replacements.  I blamed zoom, I blamed stress.  What I never really considered was that maybe I was searching for words when there were none.  

Next came the conversation.  It dried up.  I used to love winding endless discussions like a river with many tributaries, some mountain fed, some coming from deep within the forest.  On really exciting days, the rain fell and made the river overflow. However, the river bed's water evaporated. I think about conversations now fondly like I do of childhood pastimes.  I cannot seem to reach for anything more substantial than what I am eating. or seeing on the internet or of course the weather.  I am boring myself.

These past several months have felt a bit like musical chairs. The music stopped and I was without a chair.  

I knew there was something really different when my imagination became a closed circuit.  Instead of being repopulated with new and interesting dimensions, the rooms of my mind emptied out and decluttered.

I sit right there on the surface.  It is not a stable place to sit. I have no chair. The thin surface won't hold me long, but if I break through, how fall will I fall? Will I know how to swim or will I float right back up to the surface without words or ideas? Or words or ideas I don't know yet?

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I entered August without you.

 I won't visit you this month.  You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you.   I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still.   We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue.  Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision.  They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped.  Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...

The tiny little lie

"What I've discovered is that in art, as in music, there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love."   Lady Gaga "There's a robot.  Do you see Mama his big eyes?  He's a tall Robot and he is right over there."  Do you see him?  Have you seen him before?  I was pleased to realize that I could. When I was about 6 or 7, I occasionally used to lie on my back at the foot of my bed and stare up a patch of stucco on the ceiling.  Repeatedly and for what seemed like ages at a time, I would stare up at a cluster of tiny peaks of stucco that I could see with my 6 year old eyes was a little village inhabited by little creatures (half human, half smurf) marching around it.  It was animated enough by the tiny shadows cast by those t...