introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- shelving it alone and waiting - twentieth of may, 2002 "when i saw the break of day, i wished that i could fly away instead of kneeling in the sand, catching teardrops in my hand. my heart is drenched in wine and you'll be on my mind forever."~norah jones there were all of these dreams before. and there were lies i kept telling myself to make it all seem like it was going well. there were all of these dreams that, when i look at them now, in this unusually cold canadian jet stream gray light of spring, just will never come true. and maybe its just time to start facing it with all of the intensity that i had to keep them alive. they said i could do it when i was really little. they said i had a way with words. and i believed them. my mother, my biggest champion fan, making me believe a little bit at a time that the dream could be...would be...real. only, she was wrong. they said i could do it w hen i was in high school and kept winning those awards for putting a few thoughts together in fragmented sentences...fragmented sentences broken up into lines of poetry. blue ribbons. awards. publishing. and then, i think i felt it glowing all red and hot inside me. there is always something so painful and angsty at that age and then, i think i believed it could happen. but they give those awards every year and my year came and went. they said i could do it when i sat on the sofa in Veloce and penned lines in young-woman handwriting into a little red stenographers notebook, sipping slowly on a three dollar mocha with whipped cream, eyes wandering and noticing with the newness of independence. and they asked me to tell a few of my poems one night and nervously and stuttering, i did. but those people packed up the shop over christmas break and some people came and soaped up the windows and i watched over the years i spent in that small town as the space changed from a pizza shop into a medical supply store and then, even that closed. when i left, it was a vacant box of a memory and a smudged reminder of a girl who didn't exist anymore. and they said i could do it two years ago when the most importent men in my life followed me down the street. i wore a carefully chosen outfit and wavered in my confidence but i paid my two dollars to read something to them in a competitive coming together...and i lost but a lot of people said they liked what they heard. but it didn't matter, i think...because the words fell on the deaf ears of the man i most wanted to hear them. and he never did listen. at least, i don't think so. because he could never see loving me back. and with words like that, how could you pass up a dish like me? no, i don't think he was listening. and they said i could do it when i read to the fifty or seventy people crammed into azio's cafe and i made them cry with my cleverness. words penned with the same pain that made me cut every long lock of hair from my head. the hair grew back but the scars of that pain still remember. and they still make me cringe. and if writing is going to be pain for me, i don't suppose i can force myself to see the point. i've got enough bombarding me and slicing me open, exposing my bloodied flesh to the elements without adding any more of my own mutilations. and so its business classes to be considered, now. reality to face. and a less creative more secure sort of life to claim as my own. and dreams, however realistic and believeable they may have been in the past, are sometimes meant to be put on the shelf to gather a little dust. or maybe a lot of dust. because, you see, this dream...hurts too much. because this dream...is ready to be forgotten. i am ready. bring on the real world. (before i go changing my mind.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .what came before. - .what happened next. a diamond at the bottom of the drain - 20 october 2017 |
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