Notice of relocation

It occurred to me that I was being obscure, obtuse and irrelevant. Again.

To avoid doubt, this is a decoded translation of my last post:

• I have a dining table.
• I like chicken.
• I never answer my phone.
• I am soggy.
• I have stopped eating vegetables.
• I did not vote at the last neighbourhood watch election.

These are all the points you need to take from that post. The rest was rubbish.

Oh, and that I am on the run and I have dyed my hair, shaved off my eyebrows, grown a beard, assumed a new identity and moved my blogging to a new location somewhere halfway. Shhhhh.

No, not a suicide note

No, that last post was not a suicide note.

But reading it again I can see why a couple of you could have reached that conclusion. Did you imagine that I drowned in the black torrential rain inside my head? Or was it that you overestimated the extent of my courage? If it was the former, be assured, albeit unconvincingly, that I have splashed it all onto a canvas. It now hangs on the wall above a dining table that is never used, though I suppose I could invite you over to let you spew onto a silver platter your theories in poetics. If it was the latter, then you certainly gave me too much credit. I am still scared-witless chicken shit.

I was also impressed that the imaginative and perhaps slightly dramatic amongst you thought my withdrawal of words from here was akin to my withdrawal from the world. It takes skill to achieve that level of paranoia that even I have not mastered, so I must firstly congratulate you. Then I will say that one of these days I may restore all my words. In the meantime, please stop spamming the Missed Calls log on my mobile phone and I will try harder to place you on my Dialled Numbers List more regularly, okay?

The therapist said medication was not the answer to my getting up a number of times in the middle of the night to check that the stove is off. I don't know whether to be relieved or alarmed. Did she mean that medication was unnecessary, or that I was beyond help? Either way, I did not ask her to elaborate, because she looked as if she was about to divulge to me her secrets, again, and I think I have had enough.

Yes, so it is true that I have been described, helpful as ever, as absorbent. A friend enthusiastically explained, "You are very good at that, a good listener is like a sponge." So, fine, I am a generous soul, but please tell me I should not have to psycho-verbal those whose job it is to listen. Especially if I am the one paying for the time. I really do not think it helpful when she quietly mutters under her breath "Yeah, we both need to work on that." I also find it very disarming when she nods vigorously as if in deep agreement with my detailed description of anxiety attacks, as much as it inflates my self-deprecating narcissistic ego for her to do so.

In any case if I am a sponge then I should make more of an effort to remember to squeeze it all out at the end of the day. Right now I only seem capable of dragging along my sorry waterlogged soul behind me, and letting it bump into and bounce over each and every sleeper in the railway track all the way home.

All I can say is that the twine that held together the pages of my thoughts is hopelessly frayed, weak from overuse, and as burnt-out as I am. It has been falling apart between my fingers, bit by bit. It used to be long enough to wind around the middle of the notebook three times over. Now it does not even reach the opposite end of the page. I had not thought that the jittery words within these pages had stretched on between heaven and earth. In any case, I have to stop dreaming in words and writing backwards, so I will flip the notebook upside down and back to front instead and write from this end, until I am ready and brave enough to meet up with the past, somewhere, halfway.

I suppose this is my long-winded stream-of-consciousness unstructured way of telling you: thank you for your kinds words, and, I am not dead. But I can't yet promise to do much better than that.

Or: I am back, in a word. In a way, in another place. On a whim, and in protest.

This is the way it starts again
This is the way it starts again
This is the way it starts again
Not with a bang but a whimper

A familiar unfamiliar place

I know this place. Yet I do not know this place. All cities look the same. I sift through photograph after photograph, peering at them under a magnifying glass forensically, methodically, then frantically, and then yet intoxicatingly. But one looks exactly like the next, and I whisper to the stars that I could be anywhere.

Except that I am not. They are merely a trick of the light.

What is it about familiar unfamiliar places that makes me want to walk and walk? I have walked many miles – kept walking even when I didn't know where I was, where I was going, or where I might end up. All I know. All I know is that all this does not matter, will not matter, in the end, now or ever. Not to you, and not to me – though in a different way – because as many miles as I swallow into me with my feet stepping one in front of the next, it will never take me to you.

So I think I will stop here, in this hut, walled three sides out of four. Stop the walk. Stop the talk. Have to. There are many words you could have uttered, gestures you could have made, but all I can think of right now is to scrape together every fifty-cent coin I have slavishly saved, to buy the tallest weakest splintering ladder, lean it against this hardening brickwall, and climb my way up and out, rickety after racketing step, one foot over another.

I have not forgotten that you used a word with two letters instead of three. Two, not three. A present tense, causing an ever-present tense. So I will climb up until the air grows thin, until my grip slips with the smell of wet clay dripping down my arms, unformed and unfired. Climb into another dimension intersecting with the fragmented glow of a gentle Gehry river. It is crystal clear yet shimmering magical, soothing yet it is flowing on, passing by, to be pooled in a shallow well elsewhere amongst polished stones polishing. Elsewhere. Somewhere close-by, down-stream. But elsewhere.

A man once told me there would be three significant kidney-shaped stones. In this familiar unfamiliar place, I met the first, said yes to the second, and now have to say goodbye to the third. Don't look back. I will try not to, even though I will.

I met here, I said yes here, and here in this box I will bid you farewell. I leave you all my words. Because they are not mine. There were never mine. You breathed life into them, and now to you they shall return. For without you, I will have no more words.