I don't post here much anymore for a variety of reasons. It feels both too public and permanent to be completely honest in-- and without honesty, the whole thing is bunk, isn't it? I wouldn't be surprised if this was the beginning of the end for blogger and me. Seems my personal thoughts, the ones I've enjoyed posting to see what people thought of them or what shape they took upon revisitation, are better suited for the margins of legal pads-- where they can remain in ink, spared the embarrassment of internet immortalization, and me their eventual betrayal.

I most often haven't words to excuse the fits of anxiety I'm sometimes prone to. They come in flash floods and dissipate with equal unpredictability. For any number of reasons, I seize up with terror, draw scenarios in the sand and cast the sample in concrete. Then I unhinge my jaws and swallow the whole thing in one, where it sits in my belly a stone-- its etchings enhanced by stomach acid.

Everything now feels like setup for the next season. What comes and goes when one ends?

But if I were to say anything here with clarity, it would be that I am desperately afraid.

Artax

It's 51 degrees out, cloudless and blue, a Sunday made for walks past cafes, through grassy city squares down to the water where great barges crawl like they're just left to float where they do. Reminds me of Savannah, so practiced at formality it manages prim in 90% humidity.

I could use a parachute.

As March begins, it burrows inside me spinier than I expected, and I expected it to hurt terribly. Ironic that with the sun and the warmer weather, so [nearly] ending my hibernationesque retreat from myself, comes this month of rejection, change, and difficult decisions.

In the hollow part inside me, left by the wilting of a child's garden: wonder, amusement, trust, belief, faith-- I feel this detachment and loneliness pressing out like gas expanding within me, or dark water pushing at the sides of a pipe-- finding imperfections to gnaw at until it bursts.

I wonder if there exists a spring to water myself from.

Sometimes I get shakes when I realize I see things too romantically or fantastically. I worry that if I'm not good enough even at what I'm good at, well, what use is there for me? And losing the good things. And being stuck somewhere/here.

Will I be like Artax, overcome and doomed?