tuesday

These days are dark days, or perhaps light days with the curtains half-open, semi-shut. These days I am leaping from a tower into blackness, or I am rolled up in bed, clutching sheets and blankets.

I'm not sure where I begin or where this story is going, my life's ebbing away and only just beginning. I'm on the right road, but quite lost. I have achieved, and the future spreads out in front of me like an empty plain. I fear I'm a failure.

These words bluster what I want to say. Focusless at the moment and yet driven, I'm almost crazily heading towards some destination. I want to pack up my flat, get the hell out of here. I want to go mad at some festival. I want to walk a dog in the moonlight, by the River Adur. In short, I'm confused.

I get these spells from time to time, in fact, they can stretch on for months. The only real remedy perhaps is to get out of the flat, go walking, do something, anything, to stop the ceaseless mind-chatter, the compulsions, the laziness, the swirling head that takes over.

I feel like I have been dropped from a great height and have landed, splat, on a vacated hillside. All is possibility, and therefore, all is frightening. Too much possibility scares me, but stasis and stagnant boggy fields, empty of flowers, scare me more. I'm running scared, scared of my life, of what I might become if I put my mind to it, of what I might fail to become, if I don't.

I'm reading a book on Harry Crosby, who founded the Black Sun Press and who was found shot dead with his lover in a hotel room in New York in 1929. When they found his body, he wore a black flower in his lapel and his toenails were painted bright red.

I am very afraid of a character like Harry Crosby, and of course, fascinated. I find it hard to conceive of a life without drama and gunshots, excess and vision. But in truth, either my skin and my bones are thinning or I am simply becoming more aware of how sensitive I am to life's madnesses. I can't abide betrayal anymore, I can't abide mind-expanding drugs, or even hangovers, I can't do illicit sex, or even perversion and it feels as though I am turning into a moralist, a radical feminist and an evangelist. Am I simply too long lived to not see through all this junk, or am I getting frailer? Who knows, but though I feel stronger in ways I never thought I was, I also feel more delicate than ever, a china cup who wants warm liquid inside her, without the cracks, without being dropped to the floor. I want no more smashing.

Oh, this is a strange post. There is so much to tell about the facts and figures of my life, but for some reason, here, I want to keep it secret. Change is afoot, but in which direction, God only knows.