the habit of being

At night, the breeze from my open window rolls over me and I cannot stop thinking. It’s as though I have not thought in three years and my mind is playing catch-up. I fall asleep in the bed of my creative youth and wake each morning, early, though there is noplace yet to be. I am anxious and excited. This is the city of my undoing, which I fail to understand.

I’ve left a studio for a laboratory and I embrace it so. I am starved for science, for study, for focus. Here, I am studying perception.

Spark plugs long dead in my head are being replaced. First, I realize the numbness, the frost that has fallen, and it seems I am back here to shake myself out of it, as children shake snow-covered tree limbs.

I don’t know when it was that I stopped talking about the Catastrophe, when I stopped thinking about it, when I simplified it so far that it did not even seem real anymore. Still, five minutes spent reviewing the minute details of two years ago send me shaking and questioning who I am. I cannot pretend to be my pre-traumatic self, even here, even with all the change, the capacity for false starting over, the return of so many feaures that composed my life Before.

I never expected anyone else to understand what happened to me and my first love, as our fantasy crashed into a desert of obsession, manipulation, intense isolation. I lived out my very nightmares in attempt to resurrect our dream. Only my mother, who was most hurt by it, seems to show any comprehesion of the state I was in. It is because I do not fully comprehend it myself that I do not seem to be able to get over it, but instead push it under the rug so that I cannot dwell on it anymore.

I separated myself from that misery so that I could carry on, regain composure, but somehow in the process I cut myself away from all the heightened senses which created such a strong experience in the first place. “What happened to your sincerity?” I was asked, after all that time on the road.

“What happened to your art?” I ask myself now, both afraid to dig up the old gnarly roots, and afraid not to.

Meanwhile, my mother has dreamt that I had a child. A baby girl who was long and who talked at three months. The best dream ever, she says. I put my two middle fingers in the baby’s mouth and a wave of happiness shot through my mother which lasted far into the next morning. When she told me about this, I almost cried, but smiled instead.