Self-indulgence is a dirty word, and yet we are expected to know who we are.
Is it feminine to write the personal?
Tear everything up, Kafka said in his diary. And I hear him loud.
Ash takes my head in his hands. He is naked. I see his tattooed arms and his slick hair. He brings me the moon. He brings the room. Forces everything else to blur and fade. He hasn’t brought me to reality exactly, but a place where there’s only us. This is like memories I hold of spinning out on drugs and becoming overwhelmed. Someone seeing me. Someone taking charge, making me a priority. Working solely to heal me. He puts himself in my focus, makes me feel comforted. Lends me his strength so I feel not one but two. More capable [backed up].
Last night I left my body and walked barefoot along the rooftops. I can still feel the tiles against my soles [souls].
To say everything is narrative is to say everything is time. The true present has no narrative, only infinite depth.
Oh, my desktop sunshine. Infinite souls exist only in the present, so for as long as we live in time (our great love) we cannot touch them. We cannot even fly close.
Stifled, suddenly, by the urgency of intellect. Once, I became the kind of person who does not keep a journal, and I was instantly less real. Less solid. Less than myself.
I couldn’t bear the idea that one thought is as good as any other. Mort. The Prince of Swords.
Male expectations, then. Shielding emotion with THICK LEAD. Leather and spikes. Putting them in a pit to rot so the metal stays smooth and acceptable and infinitely strong. Never saying no, never inviting weakness while all the time displaying nothing but weakness to the male psyche.
Easy. Bait. Doll. Prowl. Gaslight. Prey.
But now. Now is when the manifestation of that invitation shows up.
“You know what you need,” he says, leaving me hanging as he flicks the Zippo, takes another draw from the luminous bong. “You need to find the exit.”
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 between writer and reader, where intrigue fails and where the key to subjectivity may lie. I’m freeing myself up. I join personal beats with character perspectives and notes for plot, as ever to play with boundaries between fiction and reality. I’m looking for the line to ride.
Header image source: Pixabay
C.R. Dudley 