Inside

November 26, 2014

Shapes move in and out of focus on the periphery of my vision, but where I centre I see only puffs of smoke. Today is one of those days where I cannot see anything clearly. I cannot decide whether I am receiving too many impulses, or too few.

I do not write about me often. I mean that I do not write about the Me inside very often. The last time I truly wrote about my feelings is perhaps a decade ago. I wrote sophomoric philosophical notions, juvenile zen koans, that helped me shape my vision of the world. I would write in an attempt to clarify. Perhaps I tried to write to clarify much like one makes a consommé: one reduces the stock to its essence. Now I try to write to clarify much like one focuses a camera: to select a target, and show only that target in all its detail, and deliberately leave the rest unsharp. To truly expose a specific object’s gritty existence.

I titter on minimalism and reduction every day. Sometimes I wish I could distill to purity, other times I wish I could capture ‘reality’, whatever that may truly mean in its outcome.

My thoughts turn feverish and I cannot focus. The puffs of smoke are loud and obnoxious. I long for a cocoon just for me and this text – to sit in the dark and find illumination in my ink-made considerations. Like a hole in a black canvas, like the moon in the night sky, showing me only one thing, a forced selection between all the noise, and I will look at it, and I will take that gamble and hope to God it is the thing I need.