August 2, 2012

• The wind may be beautiful

  Even the skies look different over foreign seas.

  Honesty used to be easier. There was a time when I could come to the computer and write everything down, and that would solve things for a time. Now it feels so empty, just writing things down. Isn’t there more to meet our feelings than just writing? Or is that all there is? The only home they’ll ever find is these paltry words?

  I don’t like that artists eventually just keep doing what they find out ‘works’.

  As you grow older you learn that a lot of the things that people older than you said you would learn you don’t actually learn. It is a weird way of talking, to say ‘When you’re in your twenties, you learn…’ or ‘When you get your first job, you learn…’ because that means the speaker thinks that everyone will learn things exactly the way they learned them. But I’ve heard people say they’ve learned a lot of things that I never ended up learning, even as I got to their age. ‘Eventually you learn that people are just selfish, and you shouldn’t trust them’. ‘Eventually you learn to just not care what other people think.’ ‘You learn that professors say things and they don’t really mean them.’

  Not much of a guide to life. Even the guides to life are not much guides.

  Sometimes ‘weird’ can be the most hateful word in the English language. Of course sometimes it is playful and everyone is laughing, enjoying each other’s differences. Other times it draws a line in the sand between the people who get to count as humans and those who don’t.

  Where did your family go? Where are you now? Do you think three feet taller has any merit on the universe’s scale? Do you remember waking up from the last novel you read? Did you forget about the line between the things you’ve done and the things you’ve only heard about? Have you awoken to a smile from God?

  Your thoughts read the world like fiction when you aren’t feeling anything.

  In-between the things I say I’m hoping it will turn out better next time. That something major will start making sense the next relationship-move we make with our mouths.

  I’m sorry I thank the Lord for my food and not for the person sitting across from me.

  I’m bipolar. And I’m ok with that, sometimes.

  There are many people in the world who are living life on low. We live life on high in our heads, but always have it set on medium on the outside.

  Why did Hemingway kill himself? Was it a disease, or did he just forget everything, or was it the emptiness he felt in Paris all over again? Was he crazy? And if he was crazy was it his fault, or how does that work?

  Every man should experience sadness for what he is.

  One thing that you can only feel as you get older is the simple feeling of a lot having happened. You can’t have that any sooner than when it’s finally true. Not the real feeling anyway. I wonder what it will be like when I’m forty. I feel like when I’m forty there will be a time when I’ll be shaking someone’s hand, meeting them for the first time, and we’ll both be smiling and hoping to become friends when I’ll stop suddenly and say, ‘Who are we kidding.This won’t work. So much has happened already.’

  It really only takes one conversation with someone to understand them in the rest of their silences. You catch the bus home with them and at home they get bored and invite you to go for a walk. Later that night you breathe in the cool park air with the stars hammocked in the moon above and you sit cupped in the squeaky chain swings as they say: ‘I like snow. I wait all year for it.Whenever it’s around I feel like I can talk to anybody with a smile on my face.’ And from then on you can step into their silences.

  Some people’s silences are locked up pretty tight.

  Having a child is such a terrifying thing. Childhoods are when you go from knowledge of nothing to knowledge of everything. What if you messed that up? Is there something bigger you could make a mistake about?

  The phrase ‘well-adjusted’ is a very unhelpful one. Well-adjusted to what? If you just mean adjusted to the fact that adults have deadlines and responsibilities and the need for some manners, all well and good. But it cannot mean well-adjusted to the stars, to seeing out your eyes, to the fact that you can hurt other people. Well-adjustment there means failure, for no human should settle into those.

  I look up and it still lets me know deep inside that there is so much more to know about what is going on. And it hurts.

  The test you should use for deciding what to do in life is the ‘you didn’t test’. For this test you imagine yourself at the end of your life and as you are about to die an unknown person comes up to you and says “You didn’t _____” and you fill in the blank with the thing you are considering. “You didn’t go to China” “You didn’t write a song” “You didn’t love”. The ones that hurt you the most to hear are what is important to you.

  I got horribly sick over the weekend and I felt ways I had never felt before and I had to work and I got angry at God that nothing made sense anymore. I got home at five in the morning and thought about writing but I knew that wouldn’t do anything and I felt I should try to forget it all so I climbed into bed. I was better by Monday but right before going to work I found that something I had been working on for almost a year had been destroyed and I got very upset. At work I was sullen and smeared across the glass. Then later I went to a concert at a house and there was a girl there with a harp and she played the most beautiful music I have ever heard and I started to cry during one of her songs, and I said sorry to God that I had forgotten, that I’d been such a fool.

  I don’t know how to close this chapter, how to start the next one. So much happened in that house.

  ‘It is too much’ I sometimes whisper.

  God is bigger than our hearts, and the wind may be beautiful. Things change, and in my fearful moments I think it is up to us whether they do so for good or bad. And so I pray for you to break into our hearts in these days with a whole new love.

  • 10:43 pm
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