Uncapping a pen, targeting a blank line, opening the curtain on how I feel, and finding: simultaneous terror-grief; an urge for togetherness and recognition that makes me pull out my phone and click on Twitter.
Then I’m moving the pen, forming letters, held by the hard sensation that if I don’t write now, when will I write? When will I exist? Then I’m pausing, rueful that I can be swimming in equanimity at noon, but sometime will always be backed into a corner by that hard sensation, a threat of nothingness if I don’t write something today, don’t form something complete. That’s the desperation that makes me suddenly break off conversation, dash forward, and leap through the closing train doors, leaving my friend on a BART platform; the friend that values brushed teeth, a made bed, and days held with care, not rushed through with objectives, like airport terminals, when you’re late.
Now I’m looking in the mirror, as my hand restarts movement. I notice hair of disturbing height and volume, a wave, spread thick like meringue. And puffy cheeks, patches of red bumps and flaky skin. He writes defensively, I think, as though he could cancel, or even just diminish, his literal narcissism, that made him look in the mirror and himself and admire his hair under the extremely and defensively normal guise of checking on his health and well-being, that made him write this sentence, and this paragraph, and that makes him write at all.
As a matter of rhythm, the hard sensation corners me, and color and meaning all dim, along with wonder and intention, like taking a part a theater set, or watching the Matrix dissolve. And I wake up in a real world of something dim, a stunted wreck. So I need to write something, or learn to paint like those paintings I see myself in, the broken skinny men and women of Egon Schiele I have on my wall; need to make something, anything, real and lasting, concrete, you might say, that I can look at, to know that I am unique, strong, interesting, beautiful. Not whatever I really believe.