and i'll walk the seas forever more

(my desire is fatal but it is mine)

1:50am, i bolt upright in bed, bursting with »i must write immediately, i must write even though i cannot even say what it is i must say«

[as usual writing is not an simple process, words do not flow out of me with ease; i have to pull them out, excruciatingly. i cannot move forward until i have gotten it exactly right, articulated It in the single most accurate way.

(although the curse of language is that it will never, can never be a vessel to encapsulate It completely— that requires something else, something else that i’m not sure i’ll ever learn in my lifetime)

so all i can ever do is find the truest words, even if words are never true in their core, only shallow constructed representations. we do our best to cooperate.]

~

Oh my god, I yearn and crave and imagine so much and it’s the most intense and most constant thing about me. it’s so painful and heavy and it is absolutely inescapable. at any moment in time there is a part of me that is stretching outwards in angst. fuck. god i don’t even know. even when there is a very brief moment, like for a few of those last days back in april, where nothing could have been more right, i can’t look back now and say that i was fully there. it’s hard to know if i will ever be able to be completely present or if i will always just be aching towards something else, fatally. none of this is new, at all, and that might be the worst part.

it is to dream; to dream of the future, to dream of the past, to dream of the future by dreaming of the past, wishing to defy time, to return

(to return: to move simultaneously to the past and to the future— a return: where the past and where the future collide. sometimes dangerously. sometimes with liberation. often both. often it is both. without past or future one loses sense of one’s self. sometimes dangerously. sometimes with liberation. often both. often it is both.)

and, always, with the dreaming, a feeling of guttedness. and, sometimes, i don’t realize i am dreaming, not actively; but that feeling is undeniably there. carried along. like i said: inescapable.

the subject of one’s yearning always sits perpetually afar despite any attempt of approach; sometimes one senses this, senses the impossibility of the distance, and then the inevitable fatality. at other times one believes their desire to be an implication of having the subject; one is alongside or inside of the subject of yearning, and desires the continuation of this presence, an infinity. but in always wanting “more”… does one ever even have it in the first place? there is no end and so there is nothing. ¹

~

how ugly desiring is. to be pulled into a too raw, too real state of one’s self. how this ugliness is the only real thing.

“you are not made by yourself, but by the thing that you want.” ~ fanny howe, catholic

~

(has my yearning become a devotion?)

(but i thought devotion was a choice)

in february and march i listened to a certain album about one million times. i had known the album very well for years but one night i suddenly needed to listen to it in a way unlike i ever had needed before; and when it finished i needed to listen to it again, and again, and again and again for two whole months, often multiple times a day, often multiple times in a row. naturally i quickly knew every moment by heart. her breathes as if they were my own. the movements, the gradual increasings of intensity, growing through me. i wanted nothing but to remain encapsulated within that world, within, finally, something so completely real. 9 songs. 42 minutes. i could anticipate every second out of all two-thousand-five-hundred-and-twenty; as if i owned Time itself.²

~

a few weeks ago i caught myself recounting a night i spent with someone who probably doesn’t think about me anymore. i had to recount it in perfect detail, had to contextualize every aspect of it; it was all as if i was telling someone else and not myself. and then through the contextualization i went on to recount an overview of all my encounters and rendezvous of that period of time, all in serious, dedicated detail. i had been reading on my living room couch and at once i realized that i had spent thirty minutes staring vaguely at the plastic blinds to my side and recounting all of this. this has happened countless times. it used to happen multiple times a day. lately it happens a bit less because i am more preoccupied. i don’t know how to feel about that. i don’t want to forget, even though i don’t think i will, and, oddly, i don’t think that that’s what all this recounting was about; i don’t think i kept telling myself these things, these moments and stories, out of fear of forgetting. it is something else and right now i don’t know how to explain what.

i am my sensations; i am my desires; my desires stretch me outward infinitely; my desires confine me inward infinitely; and i am the movement outwards, and i am the movement inwards. at times my desires make me feel so empty, and at other times more full. never, am i alone. inside me are the echoes of my mother’s desire; and inside me is the egg of my future child’s desire, cursed to forever remain unfertilized, forever remain unborn.

(is this entrapment?)

and it is in those times, when it all feels too much for me, to big for me, that i start to believe in god, just for a moment, just for the hope that all of this feeling cannot be only mine, only mine to contain; that it must be part of something larger.

1. there’s some lacanian theory kind of about this isn’t there

2. for some reason i don’t want to explicitly say the album but there are some pretty strong hints. maybe i don’t want to because in a way i’d like it to still remain inside myself in the way it became a part of me. to name something is very powerful