i wonder what to say about it. waiting for the words, i see, in idleness, the light across the keyboard. other light spills across the backs of books that stand upright on their shelves. i don't know why it's there, where it is, like that. just forgotten, there. on the desk, more books, more papers, more things. and the words are yet to come.
last night, i was thinking about things. i remember what it's like to like things. and i remember what it's like to dislike things. to be glad for owning something. and to be sad for owning something. to love a thing, to hate a thing... same thing. last night, i suddenly felt neither. i looked around at all the things i used to own. they were much the same as they'd always been. yet at the same time, it was all so very different. the things didn't belong to anybody, suddenly. suddenly, nobody owned any of it. every thing was at my use, but not at my command, nor at my disposal. i could pick up any thing without wanting to treasure it or destroy it.
if i owned something, i owned it because i owned it. and if i didn't, it was because i didn't.
peculiar. it felt like i suddenly had more time, now that i no longer thought as i had before.
i grow easily used to doing things in certain ways. thinking in certain ways. thinking. learning in certain ways. understanding. grasping. getting an idea. planning. building. creating order. creating structures. drawing. making sentences. making sense. creating sense. certain motion.
but it makes me laugh, every now and then, to notice how habitual it is. up comes a thought, and here's this old road, right there, all ready. the motion is the same. the motion of understanding. but, from time to time, it just so happens that it builds up to nothing. a thought, proceeding in this familiar motion, becomes nothing. no answer at the end of the road. usually there is. usually, something is understood. some shape is grasped, some structure made. but when there's nothing, there's confusion. that's when i notice how i am. and so i laugh, not on purpose, but because it's hilarious. like a good prank.
i don't know good words for it. suddenly i just notice that i'm (thinking) fumbling at water, trying to fold it into a box, or build a house or a bicycle out of it. trying to make some shape that i might then use. but nothing comes of it. i approach things with the general assumption that there's something there to be understood. that there is 'a point'. something to 'get'. it's only when i reach the end and find nothing (here, slip and fall off the edge of the world) that i realize that i was looking for something specific.
every time i start writing about one thing, i end up writing also about another thing. i start writing about encounters, and soon find that i'm writing about intentionality. from intentionality, i wander off to instinct. i become mired in concepts, brooding over which contains which, which gives birth to which, which counters which, which kills which, while the moon rises and falls, and orion might raise his sword for the first time ever, for all i knew.
like eating sand off paper plates.
but i have oranges, too.
and maybe i can just go on from there. let the written pages remain, and write more, to show why the questions that i've asked are as inessential as their answers. there's going to be a period in the end. the void that prevails before the first word, during the other words, and after the period - that may be why i write in the first place. no longer trying to force it into words (capturing scents of you and you into jars), i find it somehow comforting, that it's there, in between each word, in each word, in the hollow of my o's, like the air that accepts every sound ever uttered, and a horizon that welcomes every step, regardless of who takes it.
sunshine and clouds.
