Words have failed me. I don't know how it happened, or when. All I know is that blank pages used to be empty with possibility and I dreaded them a lot less than I do now. Creativity and promise used to mix with the blood in my veins. Now all that's in there is coffee and some nostalgia combined with the want for European cities and gelato. I think I stopped believing in reality when I was at the castle, because we all were focusing on the present instead of the future. I've never gotten over that. It was a semester of self discovery and perfection that was cut short and ended with sleepiness and impatience in an airport in Detroit. One three month period of clarity that stands out in the years of discomfort and "ugh, shoot me now"s that seem to define specific weeks in Boston. This is the week that everyone is unhappy and everything goes wrong; the last thing I want to concentrate on right now is schoolwork, and the blank pages my papers are supposed to be written on are screaming at me because I haven't started. When I was four, I wanted to be a writer. That continued until I was nineteen, and now I stay away from it as much as I can. I've lost the ability to concentrate. My want for anything un-material is almost gone; I've stopped craving love and friendship and now only want to buy shoes, dresses, television on DVD, and books. Maybe a few more pillows to fall into and rest on. Continuous plane tickets to elsewhere. Everything I want to see and do has a monetary value. Paris for 900, Barcelona for 800, New Zealand for 1300, Dubrovnik for 1000. The dots on Orbitz's website blink in time to the Jason Mraz song softly coming out of my speakers, but don't help. Our name is our virtue.
Castle.
I think this is the first time I've read anything of yours that was actual writing --does that make sense? Not a typical blog entry or a paper. It really is very poetic.
ReplyDeleteI miss it too. I think the downside of the Castle is that it was SO good that it becomes this sort of paragon of youth which nothing else can, at least superficially, live up to. It's hard to find anything that compares, and maybe nothing will for a while, but I have no doubt at all that you WILL find that sort of happiness again --maybe even in LA.
I don't really write anymore. I had a separate LJ for my writing but haven't updated it in a while.
ReplyDeleteThe thing about the castle was that whenever you (general you, not specific) felt a down, there was a high almost immediately after that would make it better. I'm probably remembering it as more positive than it really was, but the bad things were so minimal that it's hard not to. But here, bad things come one after another and good things are few and far between.
Admitting that you've lost it might be the first step to finding it?
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