yesterday i felt weird (again). i decided i would drive to the coast. i thought that it seemed nice.
on the way, i stopped at a small roadside market. it had flowers and handmade items displayed at the entrance, and everything was slightly worn or dusty. there were only two other people there: the employee and another customer. i wandered the aisles, reading the labels and lightly grazing my fingers over the fruit— small and soft and scarred, and not perfectly ripe like they might have been a few months ago, because it is early september now: that weird ephemeral period where everything is beginning to lose its fullness and vitality. as i stepped through these isles i felt almost like an apparition, experiencing everything with a lightness. i felt comfortable and natural like this. lately i’ve been doing everything delicately, with a new type of measure and consideration, and a reticence. after making sure to walk through every part of the market, i left without buying anything and continued to the coast.
the moment i parked my car and looked out at the scene ahead, i was met with a sense of eeriness. the fog blended the sea and the sky together in a way that made me feel very vulnerable. it was large and blank and seemingly infinite. i couldn’t spend more than a few seconds looking at it without feeling myself turn away. i don’t know of the last time that i felt this unsettled. i eventually got so anxious that i made myself leave.
in retrospect, i wish i had stayed a little longer and maybe tried to figure out why this ominous scene made me feel so vulnerable. where was this vulnerability coming from, and what did it mean? however, i might just have a selfish desire to create (capitalize?) from my feelings and experiences, which, if i can admit it, i think removes some of their authenticity. so maybe it is better that i left and didn’t try to examine it just to write about it. except i suppose i’m still writing about it anyway right now…
i think i know a quote saying something about how writers spend their lives trying to put one message, one idea, into words, and that with everything they write, they slowly get closer to truly expressing it. (i wish i remembered this quote or knew who it’s from. i feel like maybe it was baldwin?) anyways, i have been thinking about it a lot lately. i want to be writing towards this, i want to somehow put into words the thing that is at my very core— the thing that is my very core. but i have a fear that i will never get close. i worry that i don’t have the same talent with words, with writing, that other people do. i wish words would come to me easier. i feel like i could never come up with something new, unique, and creative to say— but i want to. i want to so badly. i want to make magic with words, like how it’s done in the books i read. i’m only 18 but i worry it’s already too late for me, that i would’ve needed to have been a prodigy at seven years old. besides, i think there is nothing in my mind that makes it unique, that would give me something to say that would be lastingly brilliant. but like i said, i feel a need to try anyway. maybe i’m just selfish and want to leave behind a legacy i am proud of. is this something to be selfish of?
i’ve been sitting here and writing all this for hours. i wonder how long i will have to spend making the slightest alterations to every single sentence before it feels just right. if it keeps being changed, will it eventually develop into something completely different from it’s original, organic self? which one is it’s true self? maybe i should stop talking of my writing as if it is a self, as if it is human. but at the same time, it always seem more real, more alive, than anything else.
the fog blended the sea and the sky together in a way that made me feel very vulnerable. i cannot stop thinking about this very specific image, this experience. it was something so defining that it’s stuck in me now, and i’m so fascinated by it that i don’t want to let it go.
i think i will end my writing and altering and writing and altering here, and post this already. i hope that anyone who is reading this is well.
xoxo,
harlow