Emerson, My Pathetic Journal and a Couple Llamas

All things left unfinished. Even as I walk from the bath to my bedroom, things drip and evaporate. I mean my thoughts. And where is the trust? If I have no trust, nothing will learn to settle, nothing will uproot from the sky and settle into my allotted plot.

I cough and my sides ache. The shirt drapes over me in the wrong way. I lift up my shirt and assess that I have gained approximately 10 pounds since getting sick and not being able to do my daily running. I feel a heat gathering.

Then a rolling down in my gut. Not hunger, but anger. My breasts hang a bit heavier. My stomach does not sit comfortably around my jeans, but leans over them. Perhaps this is all in my head, but the anger is still present.

You’re so damn lazy, I say to myself.

Of course, what I really mean is that I haven’t been writing. And when I sit down to write, it’s as though I’m running against a chain-link fence, my face cornered against the wires, but I’m watching the neighbor’s llamas stare into the fields.

I wish I were a llama, I think.

What lies next to me at night? I don’t know. A weighted being. A tall guilt. I try and breathe into it. Out goes the heat in my body, and in I am filled with violets. No.

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place divine providence has found for you…We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.”

Emerson. I feel tied to you, somehow. As though my only boat was your dead body.

I am so damn lazy.

I wrote in my journal. Last night, I wrote:

We should let something else move within us. It is always written, whether I write it or not. Don’t I understand? That my mind sometimes fails is inevitable, that my arms freeze in mid-air, mid-sentence, this happens.

So nothing. I don’t look at You. But why do I rush what I already own?

This journal. Writing in a journal, not good enough. Not good enough, my own pathetic word-garden. It’s not.

So I focus on my weight. As if gaining a few pounds leaves my brain incapable of writing.

Sometimes, I’ll sit and write emails in the dark, trying to find a way to a door I didn’t know I closed. Not a lover, god, nothing as pathetic as that. My own heart.
Emerson, why don’t you climb up here and give me a hand?

Here’s another journal bit. A bit I’d chew into a spitball and throw out at passing cars:

“How can I expect great and wonderful things to pass through me if I am not patient, guided, strong, disciplined?

Can I rediscover this moment, as though it is the most precious moment of my life and I have stumbled upon it, somehow?

Thought: this is my root: this, this self that’s questioning, but not in a worried sense, but in a stretching ones hand out, sense. This is my constant.”

No, not your constant. Silly garden. Words. Like I’ve lost all ability.

Everything unfinished. So I focus on the body. What forms are taking shape. New curves. Creation without my doing.

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”

Emerson. I like how you think. Just as this blubbering attempt is mine. So I move through it. OK. Yes. My face against a chain-link fence. The llamas.

But I want to throw myself into something diligent. Something with age and there it rolls, underneath me, rolls my frustration. A god that never delivers.

I knew a man like that once. He’d talk of my brilliance in abstractions. Praise the shade of my skin. Sometimes. But leave me edged, high in some hayloft between his brain and mine.

I can’t see any way down! I’d yell.

And he’d be in the trees. He’d send notes, every now and then. Something like:

“Try the ladder, under your feet”

And I’d insist, no, no it’s jammed! Tell me about your mother! Your father!

He’d ignore this. As I sent strings of coded intimacies into the wind. I’d send them, as though I was playing strip poker at a bar. As though I was his.

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

Emerson, again. Yes. And so I built stalls for things.

It is easy in the world to live for the world’s opinion.

But Emerson, what would you think of my babbling on like this? What would the currents say to the wire between us? I can’t undo the heat, the anger at myself.

I’ve spoken. Headed strait for the wire and chain-link fence. I knew I’d fail, but damn the llamas, their natural bodies, I’ve spoken.

All things left unfinished. I’ve gained 10 pounds. The water isn’t water once it drips. Evaporates. Between the bath and the bed. Between my journal and the phone call.

I wanted to say something about how I miss cutting myself. But the heat rises instead. And Emerson, not one word, my man. Not one word about society and my truth.