Moving Inside

Moving inside

The tear was there before I started, before I said a word,

Such feelings mixed of guilt of rage which pushed up hard inside.

A twist of nerves so physical, the thought becomes so felt.

And no logic nor calm reasoning can trim them down to size.

The remedy to thoughts so grave, to shatterings of hope,

Lies merely in a human touch, a word, a subtle brush.

My friend was there with such a word, well-mulled, prepared with love,

The only wish he had – I saw – was to wash my worries clean.

He uttered this considered cure, confined it to my ears,

But this alone does not suffice to stem the flow of tears.

His arms don’t reach to wipe my cheek, or calm the pulsing flow,

Of panicked blood which rushes through to redden both my cheeks.

Once all is said my ears are dumb, my skin now yearns for help,

A contact friendly, physical, and human, all in one,

To fill the gap of family and lovers still to find.

No arm strikes out, no head just tilts, no offering to grasp,

I see another wet globe form, my troubles aren’t my own.

The Unknown

It's what we fear more than anything but it's also what we cling to for comfort and promise.
It's how some of us reason religion.
Sometimes we get a sexual tingle from thinking there's a stranger lurking in the dark.
And we always, always, think we can control it.
Sometimes maybe it's better to just trust and try and appease it by making sure the known is as tip-top as possible.

That's how I'm going to live from this second on. As far as I know, it's a good idea.

PS. In writing this I've realised it's impossible for me to try and write the word in the title without omitting the first 'n'. Clearly, spelling of phenomenon which inspire is also something unkown to me.
Try it for yourself.

Labels

The menu to the right hand-side of my computer screen includes, in first place, 'labels'. It makes me think a lot, looking at this word. It makes me think about how much we strive to do this for everything, from insects, to relationships, to foodstuffs and to types of bogeys. And it also makes me think about the impossibility since a young age for me to label anything to do with myself.

Even the unpredictable 'I'm always like this, that's just how spontaneous I am', or 'I've always been a bit shy'. I can't work up the objectiveness to do it. I'm incapable of being consistent, aknowledging it, and projecting it. So I bounce off the people around me, I act how I want to act in that instance, and my presence and conversation is shaped almost entirely by the context of that given moment. I'm extremely good and moulding myself to the label-givers around me, but don't carry my own one for all to see and recognise. Is that a bad thing? Maybe I need to pencil some labels in temporarily to try and decide which fits me best. Or maybe I'll just be label-less, like an anonymous piece of second-hand clothing or a contraband bottle of wine.

There's a line, and I've crossed it - even though I was meant to be below it.

Today i started the Live Below the Line challenge. It's not going so well. It started with the best of intentions. I had some squidgyfied (meaning slightly past its best) spinach, some value rice, and a few bunches of herbs to get me through the first day, with some chewy sweets thrown into my work backpack for good measure in case I got a sugar low and couldn't concentrate on my world-saving work.

But then Jeannette brought chocolate in. And Damien had lots of leftover roast meat that was going to go to waste...so instead of sticking to the challenge which I'd harked on about for weeks, I went for utilitariansim. Is me proving to myself and my peers that I can scrimp and suffer and save and starve for five days really worth letting purchased and processed food go to waste? Is that really what awareness-raising is about ? Or is it more sensitive and sensible to use up all the shockingly shoddy foods we produce and sell for extortiante profits on this side of the economic divide in order to prevent additional wastage ? And also to prevent me from spending what little money I earn on even more nutrition-free crap.

There's a further argument (oh yes, this can get worse) : I have good friends. I know decent people. I frequent sociable people. Thereby, food and sociability go hand in sticky hand. To top off the plying of cooked and packaged goods thrown at me during the deskjob, upon returning home to my gourmet flatshare, I was flipped at by some fresh pancakes, which were justified solely by the explanation 'yes but you didn't buy them, I'm giving them to you' (also accompanied by some faux-champagen which Lucinda had left for us after a flying visit to Paris). It's a fair excuse and one which, frankly, if I were to turn my nose up at, would make me think I had even less heart than those people who forget that there are starving suffering (for real) people on the other side of the world/channel/road.

Hello old friend.

Writers are known to take brief breaks, in order to delve back into the world of the living, and neglect for a small moment the world that spills out of the tip of one's fingers; though no less real, this world is not as tangible or as ultimately satisfying, in my sensation-driven existence. 

However, the break I have taken from writing for purely egotistical purposes such as this one is neither brief nor explainable. So I shan't try and justify it, and I certainly shan't try and shorten the past, as both of these ambitions seem as dead-end to me as my desire to learn to play a new musical instrument (perhaps I'll come back to this soon). 

What I can explain, right here, right now, is the purpose of this blog. Because the truth is that this blog is not meant to be read. On the contrary, if you read it, you'd be doing it a mis-service. It is to be written. Which writer, however hopeless, however obnoxious or tireless, writes in order to be read? If they do, they should be shot ink at from the top of their pen. For writing is a purely egotistical experience. I realised this a short while ago, whilst I was doing some freelance journalism for an increasingly popular online travel journal. The purpose of the writing wasn't for people to really glean useful tidbits to aid them on their journeys of discovery. It was to prove to myself that I could write for money, and research thoroughly enough for an article to be respectably objective and coherent. Of course, the fact that what I had written from my Parisian living room could perhaps be of use to an American tourist travelling through South America gave me infinite joy, but that wasn't what got me behind my computer every evening after a day at the office. 

And so there is no non-egotistical reason for me to write this. I'm just going to do it. Because although I'm still Claire and I still make half-baked observations, I've seen and lived and felt a fair few things since I left Mexico and wrote my last blog article almost three years ago. But I haven't quite moved far enough in my life, for my liking. So by writing this I'm going to try and get moving even more. By 'moving' I mean learning from the things I live. Because there's no point in doing things if they don't make you do better things afterwards.