Forgot the Steps, Can’t Hear the Music

Spring, and I’m still stir crazy, though it’s not the cold weather that cages me. Though I have produced little here recently, I have been writing plenty. Yet I’m not feeling much better for it. Satellite Dance’s transition has been agonizing. I’m no longer sure of its purpose or scope. The harder I try not to mention Julie here, the more channeling I have to do those thoughts to Twickory, and it can’t handle the load. I’m also writing the proverbial letter-never-sent to Julie, apologizing and trying to explain what love did to me and what I did in its name. It should make me feel better to write this, right?–like talking to a friend–but I become focused on all those hopes and regrets, which logic will never erase. What good are words unheard? The desire to explain myself to her is not lessened by the virtual certitude of her having put all this well behind her. I’m still trying to get her attention, still not accepting that she felt none of the fascination for me that I felt for her. That still hurts. I see Twickory as a salvation. I see where the story is going, and I see resolution at the end of the tunnel. The end of Twickory will be the end of this whole goddamned mess. Phoebe will be more real than Julie ever allowed me to know of her, and I will understand why. Those are the hopes. Meanwhile, I’ve sent another postcard, the one with the cat, the books and the glass of wine, to Glen Allen inside Scottish Poems, beside “The Worst of All Loves” by Douglas Dunn. It said, “Crazy me: I miss you.” I have to live with hope as I have to live with writing. Sanctions are artificial and untenable. I had told myself I wouldn’t tag Julie a hundredth time before I’d written my two-hundredth post and that I wouldn’t write about her except as fiction, but how well could I follow either of those mandates and still work out this mess to a resolution? It won’t just go away. That’s why I’m writing. Twickory allows for some detachment, but detachment isn’t always what’s needed. Twickory isn’t always ready for the emotions of the moment, which, if they must be written will have to be written elsewhere. Elsewhere is here, or the unsent letter or the postcard.

I write every chance I get, but the chances are still too few, and I don’t know how to make more. I can’t write in the shower or on my bike. Eating is a begrudged distraction. Reading can’t find a place in my priorities, and as goes my reading, so goes my writing: I can’t seem to engage in a book, and so the writing is choppy and scattered. I’ve become desperate enough for time that I’m willing to pay for it, soliciting someone to transcribe my handwritten Twickory pages. Henrico County employees have an e-mailing list to buy and sell stuff, and I advertised there. A library worker was among the many who answered. He appeared to have the skills, but he works under Julie at Glen Allen, so though I initially felt bitterly mischievous to think of virtually writing under her nose, I didn’t want someone else innocently delivering my acid. I’d also like to keep the library system’s stinking nose out of my business. I won’t say there’s not enough time, only that too much of it is already allocated to something other than writing. Nights get later, but then so do mornings, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed at work. It would seem only fair for writing to compromise my work at the library, considering how badly work has compromised my time to write, but which am I getting paid for?

This dream I’ve deferred I have no intention of denying. The love I seek now is the love I have always sought. It’s the approval I needed to continue confidently in the direction of my passion. And though I can’t make up the love I didn’t receive as a child, I can give myself the approval to do what I need to do to reclaim the passion in my life. The love I seek now is not also the approval to seek it.

And where is the time to do that? The only time left to carve more from is that for which I’ve already carved it–writing. Ah, irony. Am I sealing myself in a vacuum and suffocating the writing I forsake everything else to get done? I have to beat its last breath to the finish line. Spring is not yet the breath of fresh air I need–forty-three degrees for a high today, and work besides–but it needn’t be an airless cage, either. Writing, life–too much, too little.

Despite its artificiality, I keep in mind the formula from Why We Love and have set an arbitrary deadline of the end of the year for finishing Twickory. I don’t know when I’ll finish the letter–maybe never–and then there’s Book Monkey. I’m burning out on the stress of finding the time to get it all done. I’m resenting work more every day, and that’s poisoning my writing. It’s a soul-sucking vortex of diminishing importance and increasing annoyance–a loud brat demanding ever more of what it ever-less needs. Or maybe it just feels that way when I’m sitting on the floor of the storage closet, lunch beside me, writing in my lap, and waving at the automatic light three times a minute to turn it back on as I try to get some peace from the inane nattering in the breakroom. Or maybe it’s when I’ve just pedaled forty-five minutes through the wet dark just to sit down in my rocking chair and scribble till the pen droops. Or when my mind is so clogged with what I don’t have time to write that I can’t say anything–and waste a thousand words saying it. I hate writing about writing. It’s dissipating. The end of the year. God, look at this mess.