Too Much Silence
<<2003-04-24 - 11:22 a.m.>>

Résumé! Oh God. Renewing my passport! Kill me.

Panic! Now!

Except I'm serious.

The fact that I hate all my melodrama only compounds the problem.

Interestingly, I have a poem in my head for the first time in too long.

What is this terseness? Why are my sentences clipped, why can't I speak? What's going on? Why am I all knotted up inside?

It doesn't help that TF is down. I have faith that soon it will be back up, oh yes I do.

Last night Tim and I lay face to face on my bed, eyelines crossing somewhere above the middleplace between us, and I was humming with the closeness and then, once again, resorted to other people's words. I read him Spencer Short instead of saying, "You know, it might be a good idea for me to kiss you now."

Why can't I get comfortable? Why so uneasy? Why this, why now, why here, et cetera?

I fidget and my digestive tract is one big quicksand swamp.

The only person who calms me down seems to be Eddie, which is strange and bizarre. We met for forty-five minutes yesterday, ostensibly about Intro to Philosophy. He told me I have a "precocious synthetic intelligence." He told me about his dream job at UCLA and how it was kind of offered to him but Reed wouldn't release him from his contract (this prefaced, to ensure its confidentiality, "I'm speaking to you as a friend...").

The anxiety came back as soon as I left.

I can't live like this. It's no good. I can't get anything done. Seriously. I am NOT KIDDING. I can't get ANYTHING done. The amount that I can get done? Nil. I am incapable of productivity.

I am incapacitated. I am incapable. I am voracious and all the wrong shape for this physical world.

And Plotinus made me cry yesterday.

I can't even think of the summer with euphoria. I have lost my ability to see. I can't look beyond the end of this week, and I can't really even see that. My vision is directed blurrily at the ground a few feet in front of my feet, which means that I can't take the small steps that I need to be taking and that I can't look forward to the more distant future.

And Plotinus made me cry. Jesus.

Scribbling bits of the not-even-half-formed poem in class this morning, I could feel tears cohering in my throat. I could fel my eyes filling up. All this from bluntness like

And there is something
in my throat,
there is the burden
of too much silence.

The idea is partition, me from the world. The idea is other people's words: Plath for John, Spencer Short for Tim. And gaze: Odalisque and Avedon portraiture and Dutch still-life. And language: natural partition theory and maybe Whorfian linguistic relativity.

My poem-plans are always, always, too ambitious. They wither and die in my ribcage.

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