Possibility

I am contemplating attempting the path towards becoming a professional Lovecraft scholar. The more I dig into his mythology, the more I realize how earnestly his horror speaks to me--antiquated, by now, but peering into all the doors of subconscious terror that have always thrilled me.

In his worlds, the uncertainty of life draws incomprehensibly close--it grasps his protagonists and shakes them until nothing is left, merely to entertain the gawking spectators who could never hope to survive even half such misfortune. The Universe is humanity's enemy, armed with nuclear blade, and we can only face off against it unclothed.

My own work is obsessed with imagining the "impossible"--only a few doors down from Lovecraft's "unnameable," or "that which should not exist yet somehow does." My own work seeks to make fully understood that security is society's greatest lie--much as Lovecraft warns of secret knowledge that unhinges life, sometimes even for those who never open their eyes.

It could be a passing fancy, a short-lived phase that will disappear long before I'm sending in my second-attempt grad school applications. But perhaps it's the middle-ground I've been looking for unwittingly, a way to balance my own creative mission while working within society such that I'm never homeless.

With some hundred pages consumed, I feel a creative kinship with Lovecraft much like Nietzsche resonates philosophically. There is more to explore before making any solid decisions, but the presence of his mythology the last few months has almost been as uncanny as those Eldritch languages and ethereal geometries . . .

Two weeks

Two weeks from now this room will be boxes. My life, as I have lived for the last nine months, will be packaged (unlabeled) and delivered to a forest I learned to hate last year.

One's environment is what one makes of it. If I learn again to loathe the stuffy woods and smokey barrooms, it will be my own fault. But what else can I make of it? I am a collection of memories and experiences propelled by a list of future aspirations--almost none of which can possibly come true where I'm going.

Technically, there is enough green-stuff stashed in pockets that I could set out on my own. Technically, I could move just about anywhere in this country and live comfortably with two or three months to secure a source of more green-stuff.

But then I would be even more alone.

I have learned precisely how slowly I become accustomed to new surroundings. It takes months just to begin trusting the common roads, and further months before I can hope to begin uncovering the secret places that could sing for me. It will take a year before I can forge even a shakey friendship, and by then I hope I will be packing again, only this time to go somewhere with some promise.

Two weeks and the University community that has seen to the blooming of my philosophical life will no longer house me. I will kiss away the lagoon, the cracked sidewalks, the strange cement structure with the word "DREAM" scrawled in careless graffiti. The last few months I've felt increasingly unwelcome in the standard structures, with a thousand young faces I'll never meet speeding by just to wish they could leave.

Forgive my wistfulness--it's already been two years since I last saw Jennifer, yet I've somehow kept moving forward. I'll live, surely . . . and in fact I'm convinced all the negative energy pressing down on me will be something I can overcome and use to fuel the art that keeps my heart beating with the knowledge she never felt the same way.

In a meta way, this post disgusts me--this is how I've been writing since my first blind experiments: some landmark beginning with a steady spiraling horror, and then a flicker pretending to be strong enough to overcome. Honestly, I don't know what'll happen. It might not be alright, and your saying otherwise will never change that.

What I know is in two weeks I'll no longer cringe from the obnoxious bass beats blaring from custom sound-systems. I'll no longer curse the white-skinned 'thug' living above me for yelling at his girlfriend or stomping around as un-ninja-ly as a man can. I'll no longer feel like a local outcast at ever concert, play, and performance, surrounded by peers that seem to know everyone's name but mine.

In two weeks I'll move away--and perhaps I'll move on.