The dog looks like a sheep, looks like a cow, looks like a pharaoh, we say. He flops over, flopped out on the floor. His toenails catch in the tangles of his ears. We sit and watch, too frozen to groom him, too frozen to take him outside. The stink of urine permeates the house but as long as we don’t go outside we can’t smell it. Features that are always present become undetectable. It’s easy to forget how easy it can be to get used to living in filthy, broken, spaces, paralyzed by ideas that are reactivated so frequently that they become invisible. Days and months can pass with nothing happening. It can take days to decide to do a simple task, say, mopping the kitchen floor, cutting the mats out of the dog’s hair, photographing an heirloom to sell on eBay, and in those days the simple task can take on incredible complexity, can become so difficult that it cannot even be attempted. When capable minds are left unchallenged, they invent challenges that do not exist. Jobs become intricate in ways that cannot be seen by others. The struggle seems pointless, and yet there is beauty even here, even in the messes we allow to accumulate around ourselves, the tangles, the piles of unanswered mail, the unfinished projects, the piss soaking into the carpet. How many hours have I sat with someone I loved who asked me what I was thinking and said nothing, nothing, while my heart said listen, listen. Listen to me not talking to you and you will know. Do not ask me to tell you. Then one day I woke up in a community where no one communicates, where we all ask on another “what do you want to do?” and answer “I don’t know; what do you want to do?” After so many rounds of this I really don’t know anymore, none of us do. It has become impossible to detect the feeling of wanting to do something, to untangle it from ideas about what the others might want us to do, from ideas about what they might really want to do themselves.

Thinking about deleting, about hiding, disconnecting, about starting over, the zeal to disappear. Tearing down all the pictures on the walls of my bedroom, after a teenaged argument, making it look as if no one lived there at all, as if by removing all traces of myself from the room in which I spent most of my time I could give myself the space I needed to overcome my limitations. The calm that comes after being ripped apart. Deleting writing, password-protecting, moving to secret spaces with smaller audiences because being seen was too terrifying even though being seen was the only thing I really wanted, if I could only erase the evidence I could start over, notebooks became ruined after a few pages, but I never really saw what it was I was throwing away, I saw a tiny fraction of it, the piece that offended or embarrassed one mind, and only much later would I regret the beauty I had tossed out with it, because the ugliness and the beauty are so intermingled that there is no way to separate them, there can be no filtering out. How many treasures I have thrown away because I could not accept that they were imperfect, and how many dangerous boulders I have let slide past me because I could see with another mind that jewels were imbedded in them. Luck is a product of being connected.

We have all these old photographs of an angel statue in a graveyard, taken by my father one night from every angle, at every distance, and so many years later I put them up on bulletin boards, I hide them in boxes of secret things that mean more to me than can be explained. They have meaning not because they are beautiful photographs, because they are not beautiful photographs, but because he was trying to capture an experience that was beautiful to him, a specific moment of finding this angel, hidden in a cemetery, and he was trying to share it with us, and you can see the dirt on the lens in the flash. And it seems so cliched, like such a joke, but that is what always happens when you try to save an image of a beautiful experience, and that is why I cannot stand to read my own writing, because I know what it is that it’s trying to capture, and it will never be that, and because it isn’t that, I can’t see what it is. So intensely do I long for the tender world that was lost that I fail to see the tender world that is.

Conversations have so much power, it seems like every word we say has the potential to cause so much change, and that alone is enough to terrify me into silence. Everything we do not say has an effect as well, and I find myself in situations where I expect others to understand an inner world I have never shared with them. But there are three bags of dog hair on the floor, there are sheets out drying in the rain. I bought another new notebook recently, and it’s summertime coming, the season of new ideas.

Since I was a teenager, I have aspired to a practice of creating art and then burning it before it can ever be seen. The image of a writer burning her pages every night, but continuing to write in the morning with the knowledge that the words will not persist, that there will be no record, that no praise will ever come, there will be no reward, comes forward again and again as an artistic ideal. This is connected to a belief that the essential is found in the act of creation itself, a specific interaction between the self and something vast, and that the results should be abandoned. There is also a mistake in this though, because it isn’t the art that needs to be burned, but the artist. Results themselves are not a problem, but the hope of a particular outcome is.

Hope of results leads to anxiety and paralysis. My ideas about the effects of my actions, the very ones that I use to justify non-action, are oversimplified and mistaken.

Often I find myself keeping everything hidden, even from myself. If something slips out of my grasp, I try to hide the evidence, shoving it out of sight. I’m afraid to look at these little fragments. They’re stashed in corners, scrawled on the backs of envelopes I happened to have in my bag. They’re in undated, truncated text files with odd names that will make them hard to identify or search for. They’re thrown away and forgotten.

I’ve spent a great deal of time in painful confusion, surrounded by people who could have used my help, but unable to reach out to them, holding myself so far at a distance because I was so certain of my ability to infect. Usually, but not always, I’m aware of my own confusion and desperately want to erase it or at least hide it. I’ve closed myself off in a tiny box because I believed that was the best way to protect the world. I’ve assured myself that silence is a virtue, because I was so afraid of being wrong and misunderstood. I’ve submitted to inertia and allowed precious connections to fall away. I’ve refused to listen to anything else but a listing of my offenses played on repeat. I have wasted so much time indulging in guilt.

In times like these, I often have the thought that I am not alive, not hooked into my own experience. It’s as if everything is dulled and obscured, both memories and present experience of the world. The inability to recall details of my past is even more noticeable to me than my lack of attention in the present. And there is also a sense of being erased from the future. In order to preserve this illusion, I cannot speak, cannot take action, because that might prove the existence of who I am. This should be an lesson that past and present and future are also simultaneous, they all collapse together.

I have a sense that something has been ruined, and sometimes it seems that the cause is familiarity. Once a space has become crusted over with habits, I can no longer see it, I cannot move inside it. The same applies to my own body — How do I delete these extra layers, or at least stop adding new ones? New ideas about what cannot be done, new reasons for doom. I build the boxes and insert myself in them, folding myself up smaller and smaller, with a goal of total disappearance. I cannot remember that I must be beyond the box in order to construct it and to see it, and therefore the thing in the box cannot be all of who I am.

The stories I have the greatest desire to tell all deal with secret things, with love, and sex, and violence, moments of pain and vulnerability and death, with seduction and abandonment, with fragile worlds that disappear. I’ve argued for the value of trauma and suffering, that the path can be found in the very mess we hope to be lead away from. I think this is true. But the line between mysticism and masochism, if it exists, is thin, and my obsession with the intersection can pull me away from reality.

When it becomes a memory, even lightness takes on an incredible weight.

Standing, again, at the threshold, I am filled with terror. I am afraid that, this time, I will simply decide that door is locked, so I will not have to open it.