Oh, it’s been that type of a morning, that type of a day. Unshowered and wearing yesterday’s jeans for most of the day, I’ve been caught between reading and writing and going through old word documents.
One document was a poem I wrote equating unrequited love and unwanted attention to the emails that still arrive after hitting unsubscribe. Another was a spreadsheet listing 40 some jobs that I applied to in 2019 (boy did I want to move to either North Carolina or California – more than half of my applications were in those two states). Many many documents contained abandoned and forgotten lines of poetry, scraps of paragraphs, scraps of letters/emails never sent – sometimes all three in one doc. Dreams, or what was remembered from them, written down and dated. There are at least 350 of these things in my documents folder. More in a few subfolders. I don’t know what to do with all of this – which means I won’t do much of anything with it and then, once again, forget about it/them.
Before that dive, I was looking at old blog posts – some still in draft form, some made private and hidden, some published. I quickly grew numb and bored with the content. Jeez, why does this thing even exist. I suppose a precursor to the re-reading has been a week-long nagging desire to go back, edit, revise, delete, or start over. Faced with the enormity of that task (over 1,700 posts) and the distance I’ve let grow over these past five or six years, I gave up.
Before that I was re-reading poems from Ada Limón. I’ve seen Limón read twice, and it occurred to me that she reminds me of the better side of someone I used to date – a slightly goofy warmth, the absentmindedness of someone in love with the details of the world, an artist’s eye, a poet’s heart, a dreamer often untethered to reality.
I returned to each activity (reading Limón, reading old documents, reading old blog posts) in a willy-nilly sort of way. Sometimes, I’d chastise myself: it’s gorgeous out, why am I wasting my time with this? I should be down by the water, or taking a walk, or or or. Sometimes, I’d get confused in the timeline. Documents and letters time-stamped from when an edit was made as opposed to when it was written. Then I’d chastise myself for not being more organized. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if the subject was real or fiction. A note written (but not sent) to a woman in Austin was only verified by a note written to someone else (but not sent) saying how wild it was to see someone on a dating site who had the same name, profession, hair style, and was about the same age as someone I once dated.
I showered, put the same jeans back on, read some more. At times I’d pause feeling conflicted over what I should eat for dinner (order out, grocery store sushi, frozen pizza); I’d contemplate my timeline before leaving for a concert – knowing I’ll go the lazy way and order food.
Some of the files on my computer are titled “stuff” with a date. These are usually running lists of things I’ve been thinking and writing. Sometimes they have good lines. From one, “I’m already mending tomorrow with pieces of today.” From another, “she was a woman accustomed to living a life always on the edge of maybe.” and “the only honest thing he did was leave.” If I remember them, maybe I’ll work them in somewhere.
I’m not sure how I feel about having spent the day staring up my own butthole by reading my own writing, but now it’s time to leave. A concert awaits, along with a healthy 2.5 mile walk, and maybe one back.