Forgetting Is Getting By

It'd seem I've forgotten this space, this particular burrow, but in truth, unhindered: I haven't. I just haven't known what to say. Instead of working, I'm searching out words.

We've these peculiar habits of dilating time, stretching moments out of their shrink wrap and from the past pulling them to the present. Nowhere do I notice this more so, perhaps, than in still-undefined interactions, be it in that blurry space between stranger and friend or in another like spaces. But again, I still haven't told you anything. We're sliding into fall, though, the season of forgetting, and perhaps there's something to that.

I've these two tough weeks behind me, weekend visits bookending, starting into these school years and the cacophonous crazy - and yet I don't know what stories to tell you from any of it. Of granite slabs or rain-soaked hikes, of gang signs at a dinner table or unthinking destruction, of students before and after and now, maybe - but even in those tales I still haven't even a good lede. All the stories I can think of point to the shortest story I know: 'I'm tired.' The shortest may also be most true, of course; 'succinct,' a friend once told me, is the most beautiful word in the English language; 'you,' she said, 'should learn it.' In other hackneyed phrasing? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I find myself these nights passing out at inopportune times. This is both metaphorical and literal, sleeping as that which marks our passing days floats by. 'Whiskey whisket whiksey!,' I wrote a friend, exuberant in the throes of this elixir, less thinking and more celebrating - and then I was full, with no room for more, and I slept. Sliding through these uneven nights, I slept. I haven't been writing except in dreams.

I suppose there's a heaviness in my words I haven't a name for. You'd understand, I think, but I don't know how else to say it.