I found my soul today.
[Back to Land by Wooden Shjips plays]
Oh, when that fog clears. It’s just…
The stink is gone.
The stink is GONE.
Long, sharp acrylic nails painted sapphire blue. Rings on fingers, bangles on wrists. Curling, twisting, dancing.
Embodying the freedom.
Forwards backwards outwards inwards.
And I see the fire has brought smoke. Thick psychedelia.
Small rooms with grubby walls and no furniture. Unless you count the sofa, which is more an extension of body at this point. Crawling, comforting. Drawings on surfaces not meant for it, lines of flight. Scrunched up paper on bare floorboards, poetry not respected. But of course it was never meant to be. It’s not about that.
Stanzas are not treasured in physical form but exhaled. Wisps.
Dissociate into stories.
For years I’ve thought myself to nothing. Pulled away mask after mask – analysed, explained – expecting to find… what? Beneath all of that is pure spirit. An all-knowing, all-connected I [1] that goes way beyond physical boundaries. I = 1. But therein does not lie a useful identity for traversing the plain we roam. For that you’ve got to dial it back, use some of those masks. Cling to them if you must. Present as something.
Trouble is, once you’ve seen behind the curtain…
And that’s how it all gets called into question, all over again.
I associate swimming pools with curling into a ball and being underwater with my eyes screwed up, breath held, hearing only muffled sounds and feeling nothing solid. A pause. Being far away. Suspended. But then I rise, and as I break the surface the sounds become crisp. I rub the water from my eyes and I can see. I am part of a scene. A reality. I can see.
An empty swimming pool is a cruel place because it doesn’t offer this opportunity of cheap rebirth. It represents the very lack of potential to hit reset.
Accidentally casting spells from a state of dissociation. Planting seeds in the beyond.
Beneath the mechanisms.
Mort has always known, always sent messages. He lives in endless frustration at me willfully misinterpreting them. Obfuscation is the big one.
Make them ignore what the user does not want to be seen. Cloak of shadows. Mask of a thousand faces. Ghost in the machine. Dissolve into bats. Shatter into fragments.
Advanced power. Scrawl: hide messages in writing legible only to an intended viewer.
Synchronicity, tiny explosions in the mind. Finally, useful connections are made.
The therapy you needed was there all along.
I’m trying something out here. Looking for patterns, rhythms and connections in journaling and beauty in fragments. I’m looking for the point at which communication breaks down or reconnects between writer and reader, where intrigue fails and where the key to subjectivity may lie. I join personal beats with character perspectives and notes for plot, as ever to play with the boundaries between fiction and reality. I’m looking for the line to ride.
The painting in the header is my own.
C.R. Dudley 