reluctant to mitigate.

 

 

 

….

 

the hour between one a.m., when the library closes, and two, the nocturnal creeping hour, I was suspended from my normal routine, and so I drove my little toyota filled with apple cores and blankets and looseleaf note papers and molding coffee containers out University Avenue and with lucid movement found myself turning onto S.E. 29th lane. Two deers across a dewy field. a sky waiting earnestly clear; something I forget exists nowadays. Things that have remained eeriely familiar since my childhood. And those burgeoning cedars, rotund and imposing, composing a sentenil around the property. the ranch-style gate. dark driveway gaping behind it, and somewhere a brooding ranch-house, among a bed of weeds. then the lake, placid, tar-topped. writhing with snakes. a box-set of nightmares from my childhood and all forthcoming formative thoughts stem from this location. Still, when I dream heavily, the ghosts are conjured here. I know it, when I come back to this place. and panic. because it sits, complacently, after all time has passed. If time is linear, if there have been deaths, then how is it that I can return and these things-the tangible world-sits still, unchanged? It seems impossible. If we, the mortal, are in constant rotation, then should earth to be decaying? I am not for this stop-motion. I want to go somewhere where the redux occurs as fast and organic as the movement of seasons. I want to see a mountain slip into stone, to crumble and fade, a nebula burst forth from a star…all of this should be happening in my own negotiable time.

but it’s not.

and then suddenly, in that witching early hour, I realized what I’ve been running from, incessantly since childhood. A chill runs through me, because I believed, once, that I could run from it. If I forgot this place, then it would cease to exist. I believed that the reason it had caught up to others was that they had given up, had stopped running. had been overtaken. I failed to acknowledge heredity. 

the real catch, here, is that realizing madness solidifies it. sometimes I hear it, humming. somewhere under my thoughts.   

 

 

without theory there is chaos. with theory there’s madness. yes?

 

it’s a conundrum that I see no escape from. I just want to be happy. Can I be content, and cogniscent? I threw away thoughts for a bit but that was a floundering expirience that got me know where. then I read, and read, and read and things expand expotentially; the world is too fierce to be contained…that’s madness…

 

where’s the neutral option? when can I stop making “I” statements? I just want to…observe…for a while.

 

 

p.s. I just realized the uncanny amount of errors in this text. it’s comforting. it means I’m simply tired. not crazy.