Write everyday for however long. 20 minutes is relatively short for writing for 40 minutes and quite long for writing for 3 minutes. There is no such thing as leaving, separating, breaking apart anyway. We stay in and we gr.ow And yes I’ll be using some words again to describe things today.
Yesterday I saw someone singing-stating the obvious, an acoustic concert of somewhat 15 songs. She had poured her heart out past tense and was sharing it present tense because how else. You have to know what you’re talking about better than your audience. At least you have to think you do. I know damn well how that works. I know how it feels. And you know where you come from don’t you?
But my body got tense as I listened to her sing. The whole room was singing along to the songs at some point, except for me I think. Partly because I didn’t know the lyrics but that’s an excuse because you can just learn the lyrics, at least the chorus, and pretend you can sing. I never not sang along to a room of people before. So today I finally collapsed by the shore. There’s something wrong.
I catch myself wanting to write lyrics for musicians. I catch myself wanting to be on the stage. I catch myself also wanting to be behind the scenes most of the time. Maybe off the stage is where I belong. Maybe that’s my stage.
Maybe seeing myself would be enough, more than enough, is what I thought when I decided to stay in the relationship I’m currently in, and I hadn’t felt seen, understood or heard lately. He asked me what changed over breakfast the morning after of the silent car ride. I then went I changed. Love remains to be a crazy thing. My sight is coming back.
I used to send out my newsletters to people who knew me day to day, and I used to talk about those people in the newsletters, and I would still send them anyway. I like what this did. It turned our screens into stages for a brief brief moment in time where we got to be characters mentioned in some story. Of course not everyone was fond of their plotline. One even came up to me, offended at where I’d placed them in the story, and left my life. But I also received love letters, many of them. I will talk about people forever end ever.
Writing surely is my comfort zone. And English has been a good barricade to hide behind, or so I think. I have to come back to English to articulate well what I even hide from myself. No I don’t intellectualize my pain. I am a liar and I pretend to be looking for the truth.
I guess I miss being on stage. I remember loving it so much as a kid in my folklore costume and microphones lined up for the choir. I like that people stop the day to hear me out. I think that’s the sexy thing about the stage - is that you get the illusion of everyone briefly pausing regular scheduling to have a moment for what you have to say. Plus they even pay you for it.
People have all sorts of things running through their minds when they’re staring at the stage. Their thoughts may or may not be about you and that’s the part you kind of get to control - by pushing the buttons in a way that you guide at least their thought patterns. You suggest. You let them enter your world, no, you even drag them there with you, and that’s why I like having my very own vocabulary. Because no one will ever come sit next to you unless you find very clever ways of carrying people into places. I’m not entirely sure whether this is what they call manipulation or not. We all gotta carry each other somewhere. We all think we’re individuals. But take the very significant other out of the picture and try to play catch. That’s one way to go insane and there is nothing wrong with it.
We all think we can just leave. We all think going to the cinema alone works on some level. But then your lover appears on the big screen and we all still keep on stupidly thinking we’re individuals. I’m breaking, not up from you but into pieces. In our robust fragility, we have to learn the lyrics for the songs. We have to sing along to the room.
I love you all,