1
I'm 45,000 words into the first draft of my novel, The Edgar Allan Poe Simulator, and I keep thinking about love and what it means to love. I've been writing slowly for someone who no longer has a day job (Something that as someone who has always had A JOB, I struggle to explain to uber drivers and girls at parties, because I still give a fuck that people find me valuable.) But I also go for long walks in the woods with my dogs, and read books, and go see my therapist, and play video games about killing zombies, and drink beer, and listen to music. Every day when I wake I crawl out of the mouth of the thing that used to be me, my feet snagged on sharp, bottom-dweller teeth, and wash the slime out of my hair.
It's not easy, relearning how to be human.
2
When I was a child I used to write hidden clues for people to find, sending them on treasure hunts. I write for myself clues in my stories. These almost koan-like phrases, that I turn over and over in my head as I'm sleeping, driving, in the shower.
The one that I wrote for myself in Edgar Allan Poe Simulator is: "The things that you love will always find their way back to you."
The protagonist's wife is dead. He speaks to dead girls that pile up in gothic mansions, searching for the cure that will reverse all effects of sickness.
It doesn't make any sense to me, on the surface. "The things that you love will always find their way back to you." Not from someone who has shaped their entire world around loss, and the disastrous results of trying to mitigate loss.
Of course, the things you love don't come back to you. You find them and then you lose them, over and over again. There is no cosmic force that brings them back to you. I'm pretty sure Camus (Or was it Sartre? I keep getting boring existentialist philosophers with chronic depression mixed up) was very clear on this subject.
So what the hell does it mean?
3
She said to me, "The reason you can't love anyone is because you don't love yourself."
I think this is fucking nonsense, but I do know it's true that I hate myself. I do know it's true that I don't love anyone, not really, not in the other way that people love.
I want to say, staring at the bent corner of the rug in the living room, "Well, you don't love me either."
Instead I go out to the backyard and stare into the swimming pool and cry. I imagine putting my head under the water and drowning myself like a rat. Drowning myself like a rabid animal - a mercy killing, really - my head would pop off my shoulders with the sheer force of my death, and sink to the bottom of the pool trailing streams of blood.
But maybe I can learn to love. That's ultimately why I decide that I'm okay with letting myself live - because I WANT to learn how to love. And that's enough for now.
4
I feel real. Each object in space has its own kind of noise, and I'd been ignoring it for so long that the hiss of the sky and the brightness of lights and the way that wood grain ripples in patterns like a seismic graph give me a headache.
He said that I'd learn to handle it - all that noise - that at first it was overwhelming but soon it'd be normal.
In reality is where love exists.
I never knew that we could live here, in reality, every day for the rest of our lives.
5
When I was a child I wanted to grow up and be a writer, but I never understood that meant having to look outside the window.
Except that's the ONLY thing it means.
Seeing everything rise and converge, with its own privilege and understanding of its existence. Somewhere thousands of miles away, a man is dancing on an airplane. Somewhere thousands of miles, there's a dog howling at the moon, and it thinks the moon belongs to him. Somewhere, a girl's hands are synchronized with the rhythm of the way you type on your keyboard.
You did not become a writer to write about the way an ouroborous chokes itself.
You did not become a writer to close the window.
Somewhere a snake sheds.
And maybe the thing that crawls out of the worn, dusty too-tight green skin, looks a little bit like me.
6
Everything you love will find its way back to you.
Well, okay, what is love? Is it champagne and roses? To have and to hold? Is love a feeling like a gorge rising in your throat? I used to say I HATE FALLING IN LOVE because I thought LOVE made me feel like I was carrying a twenty pound sack of sand on my shoulders, and it made my palms sweat, and it made it difficult to sleep.
I HATE FALLING IN LOVE. I wrote this in many journals. Because I felt it akin to a process that meant my skin would have to be ripped off so a new skin could be resewn on top, and I'd have to start cutting my hair in whatever way the girl/boy/entity liked and wear the perfume of their dead mother and I'd have to cook the hamburgers with salsa just like their father did.
I HATE FALLING IN LOVE.
Wait, why are you letting me keep my skin?
Wait, why are you keeping the door open?
Wait, you mean I can just be here?
Love, I think, has come to mean knowing what a thing is, and appreciating what a thing is, and wanting that thing to exist around you - being itself.
I can do this. I can love. I can love
you.
I take a knife. I cut the sandbags that are on my shoulders. The sand that pours out, releasing the strain, reminds me of the living wings of the angels in the book of Ezekiel.
7
I'm working on a novel for the first time in over two years. I think that maybe I will look down and I've fallen into the center of it. That my stomach is a hole and my hands have forgotten how to construct sentences and my hands are sweaty little demons.
The universe cackles. "What made you think, you had anything left to say, when all the travesties were written out? When every way that people hurt you has been transcribed?"
I attach little scrolls to doves feet.
On the scrolls I write
PLEASE
I WANT TO STOP WRITING ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO HURT ME.
I send the doves to Nepal. I send them to mountains, to drink mountain mist and carry the words to God. But they keep dying in my front lawn.
This is their way of telling me that I have to do all this fucking work myself.
8
I want to remember what it feels like, to be awake.
I want to remember the way that in the center of the flower that grows in the concrete cracks and in the book laying on the floor and in the the red bull can Robert left on the shower love can rise from its center because I want those things to exist and I want them to be here and I want to be here with them.
The things that you love, will always find their way back to you.
Because love can be inside of anything. It is not an enigmatic, immutable quality. It is real. More real than sandbags and "HERE I FUCKING GOT YOU A HALLMARK CARD ARE YOU HAPPY." More real than the engagement ring I wore, always kind of laughing when you did it because it seemed so silly. More real than the thousands of ways that you wrote about cutting yourself into pieces and calling it LOVE.
It isn't an assortment of chemicals. It isn't the way the turtles mate on half-submerged logs.
It is that, and it is more than that. It is a logical constant of the universe. It is the requirement for any thing's existence.
I want to remember what it feels,
because love is always here. Whether I want it to be or not.
9
I am working a book. It is called The Edgar Allan Poe Simulator. It is about how love changes the world. It is about how love sits at the center.
It is also about Edgar Allan Poe. But that's just incidental.
10
I am working on a book. I'm allowed to do that now. I'm allowed to read books and run in the woods and drink beer and listen to music. I'm allowed to put one word in front of the other because love will always find its way back to you.
[Note: This is an older journal, written back in 2016. I'm actually now on the third draft of EAPS, but I wanted to preserve my progress]
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Stock photo from Pixabay
Self portrait by me canon t51
Some of my other posts you may be interested in:
[Poem] I Think One Day You Will Disappear
Why I Prefer Being Alone [Writer's Journal]
[Journal] A Monster Wants To Be A Girl // Healing From PTSD
Nine Things I Learned From Reading A Lot Of Books
[Short Story] CrystalMouth: An Excerpt from My Book Ecstatic Inferno
[Short Story] The Azalea Girl and Her Paingod
[Fictional Memoir] In The Palace of Bones & Champagne
How to Have Fun Writing Again
[Journal] How I Broke Through The Barrier of Dreams // Cognitive and Disassociation Techniques