Million Years Ago

It's a terrible love, and I'm walking with spiders
It's a terrible love that I'm walking in... it takes an ocean not to break

These are the waters I these days ply, my oceans: memories, a woman's sex, my own weary legs, booze down the gullet. Overly simplistic, maybe, but no less true for it. So much more's about perspective and what we hope to find, maybe, than any sort of actual skill or effort, so I've whiskey and quiet words that won't find themselves settling into sentences anytime soon. I'd try to explain, but the worst things we write are sometimes also the best, and I haven't a clue where to start, besides. You know as much as I do, maybe.


We expected something, something better than before
We expected something more

"I bet you like her more than you say," a friend says, and it's true, I do; if there's difficulty - well, one of the difficulties, anyways - I've more trouble finding my tongue than in forming the words, words having their own way of bubbling, even if they'll not always fully form. But this friend's still waiting for a response. "Maybe I do," I say, and a memory, another conversation with her - when you say something you mean you couch it or back away, sure enough. Been doing it for years, probably. "Maybe I do... I feel like some of those parts of my head and heart are... well, [not] quite functioning." I think of another friend - perceptive, aren't they, especially when they're not - which, sometimes, I suspect, may be the same thing. Anyways, her theory: my heart'd been crushed, hadn't yet found a way to re-inflate. What the hell do I know, anyways? "I don't know what I feel," I finally write.


It's terrible love... it's quiet company.

"Are you freaking out?," she asks, repeatedly, though maybe only once or twice point-blank. I know at least some of her nuances, anyways. I've been quiet, apparently. But, freaking out - maybe I am, maybe I'm not, I don't know much who I am or what I'm doing these days. Haven't been sleeping much, been eating like shit. Running plenty, apparently - 70+ miles and 15k' vertical a week since Carkeek, almost all trails. Writing, surely - though far more in phrases perpetually orphaned than in sentences, and only rarely with any clue of a coherent idea. Still, as another friend asks, "How'd you get here?" The email I finally send back's a single character in length.


Fall down, find god, just to lose it again
Glue the community together, we were hammering it

I've been thinking this through, this notion of communities - work, family, friends, the circles we draw. Some use pen, maybe, but I think I'm more inclined to pencil most often, myself. Careful I am how I'll connect the strings, careful to keep the distance through which I might yet slip away. Careful to say plenty, without ever quite saying enough. I've no difficulty writing exceedingly kind things to near-complete strangers, nor any difficulty being effusive with those few I've made family - yet there are so many things I've yet to find a way to say when anyone else's concerned. So many times I've seemingly not the vocabulary I'd only moments before. This isn't to say I'm inauthentic, or insincere - I've no trouble in either regard there. Maybe a simpler image: some doors - or windows, even - once shut are not nearly so easily jimmied back open.


Fell down, found love, but I can lose it again
I've been re-reading old emails and notes, pieces here, scattered lines there. What fire I burned with, the whole of me iridescent, hard and bright - such anger, hurt, betrayal! Some of that intensity lingers, somewhere, in the buried dark corners, gathering dust, but waiting for the rare occasion when I'll still feel blood run hot, feel my center glow and build to boil... I've a suspicion, a fear I can't quite shake: what if this is but a trap I'm setting? Could I be, perchance, quite so callous?

It's not coincidental I've been thinking of ghosts - both real and manufactured - and the timeline of shadows. More specifically, I'm interested in the images we construct to fit the shadows of people - people we pretend we've known, or remember once knowing, or that for some particular reason or another hold a special weight on the scales of our memory. "I want to do it all over again just like it was, and I want to re-write it and do it differently," one of those shadows not so long ago wrote, referring to things he'd written once, was less frequently writing now. Reading it, I thought - yes, that's it, exactly. Except, I realize now, it's even more precisely exactly not what I want. I don't want any of it, not really, I don't think, not now, maybe not ever. Sometimes, I think, I just want to forget - and editing the past in the future, "[doing] it all over again... [and doing] it differently," isn't quite that, isn't even close to that. Somewhere else I was reading how, as writers, it's our job not to forget. Because, as the author explained, in forgetting we let the past die - because, as the author continued, when the past dies, so does the experiences, so do our words and the way we might have found meaning in it. I remember thinking then, as I parsed the lines in a quick lull between students - well, then, maybe I don't want to write. It's too much. It's always and forever all too much. Living is just, well, too much. You know what I mean, I think, I hope, maybe. I don't know how else to say it, anyways, so there's that, I suppose.

On the flip side, if forgetting means not having the words, then perhaps I've already forgotten. Past, present, future, all of it, such being my shortage of the "right" words. Maybe we both have, maybe we all have. Or maybe I'm just hopeful. So it goes.

Your mind is racing like a pro, now
Oh my god, it doesn't mean a lot to you
One time you were a glowing young ruffian
Oh my god it was a million years ago