Wednesday, May 16, 2007

boredom is an ugly burden

I assault them with the only thing that currently brings me joy, special lines of king, queen, knave: select, sleek, compact sentences that have captured my attention and yet, upon the next reading may thrill me no more than some other line of perfection that appeals to that future me, enlivened by the turn of phrase that seems so succint.

it occurs to me that this will be my world for a while, a series of indulgences that live as attempts at fending off my mind's rampant need to be satisfied and excited about someone. For now, there is no someone, a complete lack of horses on the racetrack, I sit in empty stands with the tickets of thrilled gamblers at my feet and wonder why it is that I'm still around when so many other pressing errands of life are waiting to fill my time.

the truth is I have been gambling so long and hard and with such long shots that I find I must retrain my body and brain to behave differently. I have stumbled upon this sad truth before, but now that so much time has passed, I see that it is only going to keep passing and I will keep sitting here making up imaginary races to lend some semblance of familarity to my days, when in fact, this jarring emptiness is what I should respect.

trying to figure out where it went wrong, replaying the race in my mind, fending off hindsight: these keep me awake at night.