My mother wrote on Facebook that air is my element, but I'm dying for something to hang on to. I prefer the precipice to the midst. I've been re-re-re-reading my journal from this summer and it startles me. Who is this person writing these things? The great big drunken scrawls and the pages of tiny, meticulous analysis.

(...) not that [is our worst]; but the cells from an early age
that form out of our breathing; out of a
hope too soon understood; out of our very
destinies. Out of the only a moment ago
still penetrable open air, out of everything looked at. (...) 

Fragments of an elegy, early 1916, Rilke

*

I'm trying to be honest here, I'm not sure why. It feels necessary, it feels dangerous but necessary. I haven't felt that I had anything I needed to write down in so long. (...) My feelings are real no matter what happens to them in the future. I guess this is a stand against time. I don't know what's going to happen. 

Journal 6/7

Funny how I always write in anticipation, but when something actually happens I become mute, living more in memory than in language. Is language what gives me access to the future? I don't know how to write my life as a story, so I never know what to do when plot elements emerge. It is easier to write about life as stasis (which it is not!) 

(...) I lay down here to write about it but I'm not sure I can. But I want to. But I'm afraid. But it feels better to tell than not. But it feels good to have secrets.

Journal, 6/13

*

(...) Must not the crack in the pavement
when, wretched, it senses the surge of grass: must it not
will the whole of spring? The spring of earth.
Does not the moon, so that its image shall find
itself in the village pond, have need of the strange planet's whole
great appearance? How can
the least thing happen unless the future's fulness,
all of time, makes its way towards us, complete? 

Pearls Roll Away, Rilke

*

You know those moments of sudden exposition in movies, when all is transformed and revealed? I had an experience like that last night, when events were suddenly reinterpreted with a new clarity. Total reevaluation. It was mind-blowing in its rapidity. 

Where do I even start? I've always done a bad job maintaining this journal as a consistent record of my life, but I do want it to make sense as a whole so it seems wrong to leave anything significant out. On the other hand, it's really hard to write things in ugly, direct sentences, bald little facts on a page. I'm repulsed by that kind of record. 

Journal, 9/15

*

This reexploration started out making sense but I fell too far in. 

Almost no other sentence I've written since May is appropriate for public sharing.

*

Life is thundering blissful towards death in a stampede of its fumbling green gentleness. 

Only Skin, Joanna Newsom

(You know it's bad when I start listening to Ys, ha! This is me, crying over music in coffee shops every day for a week. This is me, running an hour a day. This is me caring for myself(?))