Sometimes, mornings are like a nosebleed.
Some mornings, you feel you don’t wanna write this novel anymore. Some mornings you feel you’d rather write a 50-page treatise on the rings of Saturn. Or the mating rituals of Cuban earthworms.
Friends tell you you’re now living the “good” life. Now you’re calling the shots. Now there’s no specter of a boss casting shadows behind you. Now, you have those two sharp teeth and you’re sinking them into the soft neck of Life As You Want It.
And you wonder: Why does it feel like a frigging nosebleed?
To find true happiness, says a character in Chuck Palahniuk’ novel Invisible Monsters, you have to be like this animal, cut open with all its vital organs quivering and glistening (imagine intestines, liver, pancreas), everything dripping and pulsating. The only way to true happiness is to risk being completely cut open. And somehow, somebody will come to sew you back up.
Like a dutiful kid, I usually keep that in mind. Don’t pretend. Say it straight even if you write it with blood from where your fingernails had been.
But a nosebleed is a nosebleed is a nosebleed. And usually, no one comes, and you take a needle and thread and sew yourself up. And some mornings, I wake up staring at the ceiling trying to filter, weed out, draw a flimsy line between what was dream and what was memory. Which was nightmare and which was real life. Some mornings, I ask myself if there is any difference.
Happiness is cutting yourself open. Completely. But the more I do that, the more my innards rot from sepsis of the fourth order. What little I understand only condemns me to play the patron saint of all the losers in this planet. My empty wallet and empty heart force me to speak for all mediocrity, for all inarticulable smallness, for all those who can’t speak for their own disappointments.
Some mornings, I walk out that door and tell the world Pummel me. Crush me. Send a missile because I’m standing on Ground Zero. Like that rich Chinese lover in Marguerite Duras’s novel, I tell the silent world To destroy me completely. It’s easy; I’m so much weaker than you can possibly imagine.
When I first came here, I intended to take the universe. Now, I’m giving it all back. It’s about time. It’s beginning to end.
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For similar posts, see Random Acts of Strangeness.
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