Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Silence

I really wish I could say things here in interesting ways. I wish that every time I sat down to these keys and confronted this blank space I could write something worthy of your time and attention.

I can't.

It seems like every time I try, even on those days when something noteworthy has happened, I become overwhelmed by this colossal sense of futility, this absolute certainty that my words are nothing more than noises off, that my presence in the ether is just that - ethereal, ephemeral, futile, fleeting.

I tell myself that words have weight, have value, that the words I put out here are a sort of triumph over the entropy of my day-to-day, that writing online at least has the merit of telling the world that, as Celie says in The Color Purple, "I'm here. Dear God, I'm here!"

But I don't believe me.

This whole world of words and web logs and forums and chat rooms and memes and viral videos and all, all, all of it - well, hell. It's so transitory, it's so easy to erase yourself. And when I erased myself, I made myself sick inside. I tried to carry on, but there was a ghost at the feast. I was sick, sick to the heart about all the things I just decimated, let go, eradicated. I thought drastic measures might help.

I killed my MySpace account. I didn't feel better.

I killed my Twitter account. I still didn't feel better.

I think I know what the problem is here, why I can't seem to fall in love with the words like I once could. I am still so furious that my words could be taken from me, taken by my own hand, even, and just removed from the place where I thought they'd live forever, floating eternally on a sea of bits and bytes and swimming on the surface of an ocean of pixels.

I am betrayed by my own hand.

I am a coward and a fool for letting someone drive me off my own ground.

I want my blog back. I want my identity back.

And, now more than ever, I can't have it back. Because now someone I loved so deeply they were like a part of myself, someone I trusted and knew online and off, someone who could and did read that other space, is no longer someone I trust.

So right when it would be the best thing in the world for my well-being to reclaim my space, I can't.

My heart, my heart. I feel like I'm alone in the world and my dearest friend is the one who cut the lifeline. And I can't go to the safest place, the strongest place in me, my words, to heal the gaping wound.

I hate this. I don't even like this template. I want my old cruddy gray one, and my Flickr badge, and my blogroll (and oh my GOD, that's gone forever, FOREVER), my comfy, ratty sofa, my armchair with the stuffing exploding out of the back, my threadbare carpets, my portraits on the wall.

See? Disjointed mess that I am, I can't even be kind of cohesive. This is going nowhere. I'm stopping. I am stopping.

But oh. Oh, how this sorry state of exile is making me sick with silence.

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