unchronicled

Ok, I've been pulled back into blogging.

I was reading parts of old blogs. The last period of hyperactive blogging, the beginning of 2008 to the beginning of 2009. I got that feeling of something being so far away but so close. Spring 2008, the tail-end of the abandoned theatre, was two years ago.

And so much has gone unchronicled. My relationship with Taylor (First date on the sea cliffs and the hat and coffee shop and pad thai and Miyazaki), how far I fell and how badly it went. The long summer after the break-up, driving to the therapist's office playing Patrick Wolf's "The Bachelor;" my car smelled like garlic sauce for weeks because of spilled Chinese take-out, then it smelled like the blue-and-green cloth air freshener from Walmart. No doubt, that smell would take me right back again, like a Patrick Wolf song did the other day when my ipod was on shuffle. There's a thing that feels far away and not far away.

And my relationship with Tristan: unchronicled. The top of the Prudential Center and the reflecting pool in October, Salem on Halloween night (the packed train of crazy costumed people at Boston's North Station), vegetable quesadillas in the kitchen, on and on.

Another unchronicled thing, at least unchronicled in journal entries: the actually life-changing creative writing workshops I started taking junior year. The blue walls of the Hoffmann room. Awards ceremony. And: how I have spent all of college scribbling and bemoaning how I don't know what to do with my life, and all along it was staring me in the face. Didn't I ride the bus home in high school through spring-drenched afternoons with the rhythm of poems in my head, then burst through the door to write them down? When I was depressed or anything on the blogs, didn't I intersperse the self-reflective monologues with poetry?

I guess I wanted to keep it down and pretend that what I really wanted in life was something that would be easier. I tried for ages to convince myself that I was a fiction writer -- at least SOME fiction writers actually make money completely from their work; not poets. At least fiction writers get read all the time. Or if I wanted to be a journalist or an editor, museum curator, whatever -- at least there was some way that maybe it could be easy.

And right now I am having daily panic attacks because I applied to grad school for an MFA in poetry and I want to get in more than I have ever wanted anything. And the fear is awful and always there, but there's also: at least I want something.

outside the abandoned theatre

I haven't thought about it in a while. That long walk through the dusty place, then the Ferris wheel and wide sky. The distant strip of sea stays in my mind.

I have been looking more toward the future than the past, but the past is implicated in my worries about the future. Like: Why do I tend to think I'm inadequate? (Flash to the empty dark theatre.) Why do I fear getting trapped? (How the theatre was a maze and it almost never ended.)

I don't want to go back to the dark and claustrophobia. But in flashes I go back numerous times every day. (The sea and exuberant screams. Skipping stones in cold March light, wrapped in her cream-colored shawl. Bare feet on a trampoline. Always, the courtyard gardens.)

A friend appears at my door holding a script and he asks me to continue investigating the abandoned theatre. Maybe now as an archaeologist instead of a prisoner. I am afraid of what bones I might find.

But it's been a long time since I've seen this friend, with whom I escaped, the last time. I miss him. So I agree.