#interlocutions

[dustlines]

Always annoyed when I want to scroll instead of work. It's like, no, there are things to do, even things you want to do. Get to it.

I have an inner-manager voice for myself. I relax for a second, and suddenly I am teenage me, not allowed to sit down, no matter how bad it gets. I can almost feel the taste of that god-awful plastic cup from back then: a required thing so disgusting that people would hide cans inside of it, just to taste metal in their water instead of microplastics.

"Time to lean" is metaphorical. There is no time. There is no time. There is no time ever to waste.

[dustlines]

So much of life is not spoken about. We're in a world in which it feels like everything is being shared, but that has never been the case. Still, there are machines learning how to summarize and condense every visible facet of a life, stacking us up like lines on a receipt and using conjecture to assume the rest of the iceberg. As time spreads on, you must remember: you are more than what is seen. Be defined by more than the summary. Keep being who only you can be.

[dustlines]

Wonder if it's too late to be an aesthetic. Time has built itself around me, and I carry it like a backpack. I have spent such an awfully massive amount of effort trying to swathe myself in shapes other than my own, assuming what I am would be subject to disbelief and disregard, unless it was mingled with the familiar. After this self-imposed affliction, I need the kind of introspection that turns the microscopic into the infinite. I am a soft touch, but that's not the whole picture, and it's not the point, except for when it is. It's odd to feel the edges when you tear through something that doesn't have a name. I see razor bones and button nose, and I wonder who can even tell what's inherent or imposed. Always thought there was something here that everyone assumed the worst of, but no, most don't really work that way. The world has enough stumbling blocks without turning on yourself or someone else. You're probably okay. We're probably all at least a little bit okay. You're not inherently wrong; you're just watching yourself through a fictional gaze. We tell ourselves others will think awful things if we don't guard against it, and maybe some might, but most people just don't have the time. Even if they did, I doubt it changes much. You're fine (probably), and I'm fine (probably). You don't have to look the way you think you must.

[dustlines]

Tumblr really feels different to me now. I used to flow through fandoms here with such joy and purpose. Nowadays, I'm mostly working on my own projects in quiet, solemn steadiness, not sharing the effort, because I do not feel ready to share. It's so easy for text to fall into a digital wasteland, and I'm trying to stem the tide of that fall, something whispering in me that no website is guaranteed to last. I left so much of myself scattered across this place, pieces I don't want to lose track of. We exist outside of our pasts, and yet, without it, that existence is foggy with less understanding of the road we took to get here. I'm here because of everything that came before, and I want to hold that glittering monument in my mind. I lost some very valuable pieces recently, and I don't want to let that happen again. I want to be able to forge the shape that is knowing and remembering the self. I want to save what I can, in the moments when this is possible. I want to be and know myself, and where I came from. I want to do so many other things that rest at the edges of these memories, and to get there, I have to keep going.

I really thought one specific task would have been completed soon after February, and yet here I am, in September, wondering if the rest of this month is even enough. If this is not for others, it is for my own peace of mind. I don't want this to keep weighing me down in the back of all things. I want it to stand as a structure, the bones of the past. My wife tells me I have a tendency to predict long tasks can be done faster than they actually can be, but it's difficult to stop hoping for that to happen, when there's so much else to do. I don't know why some things look simple to me, and yet end up taking up so much time, but perhaps that is simply the nature of preservation, at least when done right. In any case, I think I'm enjoying it, mostly. I forgot a lot about the past, or at least suppressed it. Now, I find that some of it was worth recalling.

I hope all are well. I believe I speak differently than I used to, but I am still myself, ultimately, just a bit affected by the world.

[dustlines]

The internet has seemed so hostile lately, but it's not about the people. It's about the trawlers that reap every word and spit out chimeras of thought with no discernable sense of soul, only an aching emptiness where a beating heart should be.

[dustlines]

If people were watches, I'm calibrated so poorly that I can't even tell what time it is.

[dustlines]

Soreness, between the eyes and in the hands. I wanted to tell you stories, but I needed sleep more. There's a buzzing in the wall, and I can't tell what plug is causing it. I never noticed it before now. Should I worry? I think we all worry. At least it's not as bad as the last object that did that... waste of $9, could've bought a taste of hope with that instead, or half a blender. Why is it that the head notices it when the pressure goes down? What can you even do about that? Special earbuds, water, fear and quietly pushing it down. You can't change the sky, or at least you're not supposed to. There are people who've put plastic into every cloud, and they say you're eating a credit card of the stuff every week, but not to worry, surely, because it's commonplace and everywhere. Seagulls are eating it, maybe even more than you. There are mangled bottles in their stomachs, forever chemicals in burger wraps and your vinyl raincoats. How does a headache matter? In the air, there is a humming sound where we used to hear the birds.

[dustlines]

Haunted by the notion that NaNoWriMo is occuring. My dreams are like the tangled hair in my brush. I haven't been an object of consumption in years, not since The Incident. Whatever my style is now, I don't have names for it. In ways, my style is now more a struggle to mold around something greater than words, something dark, something small, something dug out from under the surface of the deck, a chain that rattles as it's pulled meter after meter up from the raspberry bush-covered ground.

Yes, I make sense, but only to myself. I'm speaking in metaphor, and I'm speaking from memory, and I'm speaking from obfuscation. A limitation has been carved into the sharing. There are marks on the wall to designate how far we've grown, but I've been crouching lower than my own notch inside the wood. I look smaller than I am, and so do you. You're crouching, too. You're bent over because it hurts. Perhaps I'm the same, but we both just make eye contact at our low points and call them bigger and taller than the sky, because what other option is there? Who wants to admit they aren't quite as solid or as confident as they used to be, that an awareness has dawned upon us that, actually, time and gravity have always been what weakened Achilles's heel?

I like to freewrite. I like to open my mind and gaze out. It's better to be where there's air, but maybe not for too long, as maybe what happens to apples is what happens to us. Maybe we oxidize when left out for too long. Maybe exposure must be done more carefully. Maybe I'm haunted by the changes exposures have carved into me, like a frostbite of the mind.

Of course I want to do NaNoWriMo, except there's this: I don't know anymore what I want to say. Before, I wanted to give comfort to everyone else. Now, I just want to beg the world to allow me selfishness so I can recoup, for I don't know what else I can make until I have learned self-restoration. I have oxidized. I have burnt. Were I a penny, I would've turned green. You don't see me, or my original intention; you only see what the air has done to me.

I don't know if this is art. Can any artist ever know what is, or at least what it takes to qualify? I know many things, but I don't know this. I keep waiting to be told.

For the last few years, everything has been different, and while I would not change it, I'm still not sure how to feel about the changes. When I'm here, I feel like I'm talking to myself.