I like to be able to disappear at a moments notice.
Years ago this affinity for vanishing acts might only have arisen in the form of a swapped phone number or a new privacy setting on a peer-to-peer network. Lately, however, its taken more drastic actions.
I completely erased all involvement in peer-to-peer networking. I not only switched numbers with my mother, but changed it completely. I ignored emails from various concerned acquaintances. I refused to reply even when my fingers itched to either confirm that I was alive, or give them a piece of my mind.
In a way its as if I'm running from myself. Well, not myself really, but a former self. Unlike people who think they can change and get away with having all the friends they did in their former lives, I flush my entire system. I buy new clothes. I throw out things I used before. I dye my hair. I gain or lose weight, though its not my choice exactly.
I feel in control when I do this. And honestly, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Aside from being a terrible friend to nearly every almost-friendship I've ventured, I think its perfectly acceptable to go underground when I feel like it.
Its just so bizarre, really! I keep everyone at arms length. I haven't had a friend that I didn't feel awkward around since I was eight years old.
Her name was Candice Cook and I adored her. A few years ago I saw her at a drug and alcohol saturated college party. She was sitting in some guy's lap on a lawn chair and when we recognized each other it was as if we were looking in a mirror and finding ourselves oddly embarrassed. She informed me that she had been kicked off of the university cheerleading squad and I remarked that I had similarly been kicked out of a private university. We smiled at each other, but there was a wall of about fifteen years between us that neither of us was willing to scale.
Who am I protecting? Is it myself, or other people?
I think there's something about creative flair that forces one into silent introspection. I have literally broken up with guys before because I wanted nothing more than to sit on my patio or an overlook out in the country and read read read. I wanted to lose myself and then rebuild.
Its kind of like spending hours and hours meticulously building an entire city out of legos and then becoming overly excited by the idea of disassembling it in a crash of your fists for a whole new creation.
I find it hard to connect with people. I love writing and correspondence. I could probably email myself into a romantic fantasy if I wanted. I've written before about a boy I met in a chatroom when I was 14 years old. I was completely in love with the idea of him, and the whole thing reincarnated itself when I started writing to a particularly insecure debate student from Alabama a couple years back.
Real life is never as amazing as the things my creative mind dreams up.
If I could only be satisfied by it.
In any case, I suppose I'm writing really to apologize for all this vanishing.
Per the above statements, you may gather that the only place I really feel like myself is here. In black and white. Rarely do I regret the words that I write. Yet I frequently regret things I do or say.
And if you were to ask me if I was sorry for dredging up the past in my earlier numbered entries, the answer is NO. Because I feel that I made something terribly ugly and troubling beautiful. And when I do that I don't feel so bad about it anymore. Its like, okay, so that was supposed to happen. I have a place to put it now.
I can't vanish from this writing arena any more.
I can't.
And as a friend told me a while back: all I need to do is finish something, and I can finally let go and try to get it out there and published.
Which, according to the poorly written YA novels I'm devouring lately, should not be that difficult.
Please accept my apology, that is, if you're still listening.
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