Monologue

We are now nearly one month into the new year. I feel as though the world has left me in October. I'm only partially here, really. It's been an emotional month, certainly, and that's overwhelming for me. I want to be unshakably strong. Lately I feel like I'm trembling.

I spend my days conscious of the mundane routine I'm trying (badly) to fall into. Whenever I have an idle moment I stuff it with course work or internet. Even just now, I opened my email to avoid rereading the last sentence. I'm afraid of hurting, of feeling. I just won't be able to pull myself out of the hole that I know feeling these feelings will put me in.

So, instead of feeling deeply, I've been skating on the thin surface of existing. I feel as alive as a rock.

Brainpickings has beautiful excerpts from the lives of writers. Sometimes I read them to escape from myself for a little while. Their writing is smooth, and always 'cool'. My writing is clunky and banal. I use too many words, and I always pick the ugly ones. If only I could be Virginia Woolf, or Susan Sontag. Then the emotions would just gush out. I imagine that's what it's like to be a real artist. You feel the idea incubating in you, and then it bursts out unrestrained. Why do I insist on compartmentalizing? Why don't I feel safe? Is there anyone who wouldn't think less of me if they knew all of me?

Sometimes I think about love, and the demons all disappear for a moment. Love keeps me up at night. It distracts me through dull classes. It's the emotional morphine I'm self-prescribing. I don't mean to say he's just a distraction -- he's certainly not. I know that if I was brave enough, I could open up about how I'm feeling. He would be patient with me, I just know it, and I'd end up feeling better. But there's something in the way of developing an emotional relationship on that level, sub-affection. He keeps secrets from me. In fact, he's actually open about having them. How can I possibly feel safe?

I secretly believe that fate led me to him. He has the same vices and the same quiet habits as I do. It's like looking into a (gentle) mirror. Because he is so much like me, I can't help loving him. But he contains all the dark, sticky, musty parts of myself that I wish I didn't have. I know he avoids that deep emotional part, just like I do. It's not that he can't speak on it. He knows that it feels liberating (so liberating!) when it happens. It's a question of feeling safe. Will you still love me when you know my heart completely?  

But love can't always blind me. I'm left alone with my thoughts. It feels like standing in a room full of sharp things. So I sit on the floor of that room, and I play idly with my hair and I check my reflection: a tiny Narcissus blooming in the dark. I'm scared of my most intimate self. I'm scared that there's something in me, buried deeply, that will make me cruel and uncaring. I'm scared that I have the capacity be cold. Most of all, I'm scared that the piece that makes the high emotional points of life so... indescribable -- is broken.
It's terrifying to know the self, it really is.

I want to be unshakably strong. I feel like I'm trembling.