After a bizarre 24 hours / Just want me some Armitage / honest, point blank question to self

I’m sitting virtuously at my beloved corner window table at my usual café, drinking a very intense espresso drink to keep myself alert, getting up close and personal with my students’ document collection for the semester, and what I find myself thinking is that I don’t want any more early modern battles, I just want me some Armitage.

The last twenty-four hours have been very chaotic and strange and alternately warm and cold and now I have another unexpected period of free time on my hands. Another opportunity to delay. And then there’s the amazing gift that fell into my lap for the fall. Unanticipated, like several other things that have happened since the middle of August. Questions that I now need to ask myself about the time till December. I don’t want to delay; I don’t want to waste any more time. What if I am going to die when I am seventy? Before? Every day is precious.

After the first confusion I sat down with a pen and wrote (yet another) letter to Richard Armitage that I will never send.

I thought about writing about this all as fantasy, because that’s what I retreated last night to experience. I left the café thinking I could just have another six hours of fantasy before reality had to begin again and I would cuddle up with Fantasy Armitage in my bed and my brain and keep my feet warm and I had that and something nice to eat and I fell asleep toasty and calm and felt loved and cocooned and it was wonderful. I could have made it so good for you in the fantasy, I could have spun out detail after detail, I suppose, I could have rubbed my cheek against my pillow and made rubbing my cheek against his neck real for you in me in words.

And so this is my question, this morning, when I suddenly have time to write that I wasn’t expecting and I sit down and write what burns to be written: what if I just gave up all this other crap?

Specifically, too — what if I gave up all the steps in between? If I stopped trying to connect all the fragments and just spewed them out?

And kept doing that? What if I *only* wrote what I am burning to write? Published the fragments and stopped insisting on glimpsing the whole? Gave up everything else that I’ve been hesitating about for months, years? Never wrote anything out of obligation, until December, when all the rules will change again?

I crank my current song for jamming out to when I need to feel the rhythm in my fingers that presages writing and ask again and again and again

What if?

And then I get something I’m not expecting in my email an hour or so ago and I can tell that if I go that way, at least I wouldn’t be alone. There would be people to travel with. People to lead me.

Keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.

And keep being one person. That’s the trick. All these little pieces don’t fit but I am the same person, have to be the same person. The person and all the pieces.

I think I’m just not someone who knows, or who has learned since 2008, how to be someone who just watches the sun rise and fall. Not living for something more makes me want to drink. For better or worse, I need that thing that gives me a sort of eternal limerance, that gives me a reason for rising in the morning. And I need everything to be intense. This experiment with non-intensity, it hasn’t worked so well. I wish I weren’t always fighting with my feelings of moral obligation.

This blog is a wall you’ve built against desire, someone told me this summer.

Blinding, suffocating want. Not just for Richard Armitage.

Is this the last wall?

~ by Servetus on August 27, 2012.