lovelier light

Take all the things that I've said that he stole
Put 'em in a sack
Swing 'em over my shoulder
Turn on my heels
Step out of this sight
Try to live in a lovelier light

this post is depressing

I have the next four hours blocked out to sit in a coffee shop to do my own work. To read and write on my dissertation, to drink coffee, and to not lesson plan or respond to student e-mails, etc. These four hours are a gift, but I am having trouble feeling that. Outside it is wet and gray and the atmosphere feels thick and heavy. I feel down, I feel weighed down.

My partner woke me up around one this morning, hugging me in tears, after waking up from a dream that he had lost me. Not just that he had lost me but that I had been murdered and the dream seemed to last for weeks, he tells me after awhile of holding each other in that early pre-dawn haze. We are both, I think, remembering to be amazed by each other's being here, by waking up to find that we are both still here.

We've talked about the reality of someday losing each other, not frequently, but we have thought and talked about it, usually with lots of tears. I know that depression changes for many of us our relationship to our own lives. I understood this better when coming out of my deepest period of depression. I think I was maybe more at peace with death then than now. Because I had spent so much time deciding the decision to continue living over and over, I could somehow see the possibility of death as a blessing. I no longer understand this truth as fully, and it is strange to remember crying so much about life and death for such different reasons.

I suppose that is a pretty obvious part of why I feel down today. The other part is that two unremarkable things happened this morning to remind me that outside our home, I feel fairly alone. I feel disconnected from the people in my life, in overt and in subtle ways. I have felt like this for awhile now, and I sometimes feel like I am not really here, like I died along time ago and am now just going through the motions, like a zombie. I know that this is probably another kind of depression, which v confirms. I just don't really know completely the way out of it. How to find my way back to my own body, to feel attached to, connected to, invested in, the life of this woman who is typing on a keyboard, tugging at her sleeves, pausing to lean on her fist, staring alternatively at the screen and out the window.

I feel the heaviness in my chest, and I smell the coffee coming out of my pores, so I know I must still be here. I cry when my partner and I talk about dying, so I know that I must still feel things. I don't remember if the heaviness was in my chest when I woke up this morning. I know the heaviness is not always here or it would not be remarkable. I know that I did not feel like this two days ago or the day before that but I remember feeling it around yesterday afternoon when I revisited the facebook page of someone who died in June.

This morning in the shower I ask my partner how I died, in his dream. And he says that someone shot me at  Bed, Beth, and Beyond. Like most real things, it is so strange and unusual and mundane and ordinary that I can see why it upset him so much.

movement

Got together with a friend and colleague yesterday to talk about our current writing goals, and yes, consume some whiskey. She tells me that she hopes to finish her current chapter by the end of the semester, and I tell her that I hope to do aerobic exercise three times a week, yoga twice a week, and to write something, even a few sentences, everyday. Sentences unrelated to my dissertation. Just to get my fingers moving. Just to get my body moving, to clear my mind, to begin creating a calm and vibrant space in which I can begin to trace the contours of This Stupid Project (title in progress). My friend understands and approves of these as appropriate writing goals.

I am nearly, nearly ABD, so naturally my real goal is to just forfuckssake write a draft of my proposal, finally. I am so close, you see, I just need to figure out the whole shape of my project and write it up to the different likings of three or five different faculty members and in the process continue. reading. so much shit. But I am also so very stuck. I have been stuck for so long that it is hard to even imagine the way to becoming unstuck.

I wrote these words down yesterday:

I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to think about it . . . We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand. - C. Day Lewis

To remind myself that I don't need to have everything figured out when I sit down to write. To remind myself that in the act of writing I will discover the areas that need more thought and exploration, to remind myself that I am not yet meant to be An Expert.

missing

In a journal, newly purchased, I write that I need to start writing again, that I need to get back into the habit of observing in words. I read this phrase in Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway. I am on page four of this book. I am on page four or ten or fifteen of so many books, discarded in stacks on tables and shelves and floors around my apartment.

I have an afternoon free. I do not write my dissertation. I do not read more on x and y and c topics in philosophy. I do not even read about how to write a dissertation, or how to find the motivation to write a dissertation. I read a book on narrative craft in hopes of finding some motivation or inspiration to write anything at all today. I stop reading on page four. I write down that I need to get back into the habit of observing in words, that I need to start writing again. I open this page. I type that I need to get back into the habit of observing in words.

There was a time when I thought in prose, in narrative language, and poetry. When I was a storyteller. When my inner voice was at heart that of a writer.

She is gone, but before I can write that the question is there, Where did she go?

I hear this question in v's voice because it is a question that she asks me all the time: If you are not fully here, if you are not in your body, where are you? Where do you go?

I never have an answer to this question; it is always nowhere or I don't know.