Grinning wooden faces

It's almost a magic: tonight I've waited until the last minute to get started on a paper that I need to have drafted ~4 pages by 6pm tomorrow. All I've known before 8pm was a vague topic: puppets. Since then, I am introduced to a world of imagination in and of itself, and now have a promising structure that should easily lead me to something coherent by tomorrow evening.

Artistic expression continues as the only thing consistently keeping me lucid. The thought "If this world was without music, then I would have killed myself years ago" visits with standard frequency. Maybe it's not true . . . that if there was still theatre, or literature, or just any single form to contemplate and draw new ideas from, I'd stay in the game.

If there is no one in this world that will ever comprehend me as an individual, there is enough comfort that there are some (at least) who can comprehend art in interesting ways.

"Tonight could be different"

This week I've been on the periphery of revelation, pulled between thoughts of burning & the human condition. I want to invoke flames and love songs, to share delirium and to revoke masks.

I'm finally able to decipher a lyric in a Kid, You'll Move Mountains song that, the first time I heard it, filled me with melancholy and mysticism:

"I never bat these eyes in fear that everything leaves me in that blink"

sings Nina as Nate builds a drumbeat to a perfect climax, with Jim chiming in shouting "Start to break" near the end.

It's fear and trembling, Kierkegaard's leap into black smoke, and I keep pausing with phantom understandings--at one moment in awe of the world as a complex system, at the next devastated by the belligerence of appearances. It becomes unclear for me what smiles I can trust, and then which I should endear. It becomes more difficult to endure, and a paralysis sets in.

It has something to do with my birthday just around the corner, and then with graduation barely a block further down. Beginnings and endings, and the commingling of vertices. It's Raimi Matthews' "Patterns within patterns, plans within plans."

It's too big to pin down alone . . .

I am tempted to close my eyes and run away, to find desert or frozen tundra, to oversee an ocean from a cliff-top. Life will move if I stop lifting my fingers, and I feel like staring past mundane ceilings, into and beyond oblivion, to complete a widespread vision that no one else is capable of.

Yet, I am bounded here . . . meandering cogently between depression and enlightenment.

"The shadow, it covers your face . . ."

I'll turn 23 in a week. To celebrate, I'll go to all my classes and be back home around 9 and will probably be very tired but think I need to do homework that I won't get around to and then I'll rush to do it in the morning.

I'd rather drive. To the desert, perhaps . . . somewhere remote, somewhere it'd take weeks to find a missing person. I'd rather explore and discover, to return newly emerged with a robust energy I've been lacking for most of the year.

Some have recently asked me "How are you?" and my responses keep amounting to "I'm terrified, but ok day-to-day." I'm becoming less sure about the day-to-day . . . they keep creeping by, and then I'm closer to the probability that I'll have to begin a 'normal career path' after I graduate.

"What's wrong with that?" I can imagine in the voice of the many. "It's what everyone does, and everyone's fine with it."

It's getting harder for me to see the point in trying to prove, and then proceed to justify, how I'm not everyone. How, in fact, I'm vibrantly opposed to everyone. If I successfully convince everyone, then I show them how they don't understand me. If I fail to convince everyone, then I know their understanding of me is flawed.

I've been striving towards the Zarathustrian ideal, believing myself capable of staying on my feet as everyone necessarily attempts to pull me down. The weight magnifies exponentially. It manifests in apathy, in lessening appetite . . . in the constant voice behind my internal narrative that asks "Why should anyone care?"

Most of anyone is everyone, after all . . . I'm just someone, and my someone is one without the nets and scaffolding everyone so often relies on.

I'm told to "hold out hope," but the voices so freely offering this advice are always those who've already settled. It's impossible to ask them what hope there's ever been . . . they've never been me, and the ones who have demonstrated knowledge of abyss-gazing, of looking deeply into the darkness of human potential, always end up agreeing that hope really is a sham.

I don't know what to do next.