the stillness is the move

Sometimes you have to write, you are compelled to let the words out, and other times you have to not write, keep everything inside, gestate, let things settle and become sensible. Or in this case, you have to keep silent because otherwise all that will come out is an incoherent meeepzs! In other words, too much has been going on and it has been too overwhelming.

And my coping mechanism has been to go back to what I know best. Which might be words, but is mostly playing it close to the vest. Don't ask me. I can't tell you. Or more accurately- don't ask me. I won't tell you. These things, these confusions, these mazes and labyrinths, they are of my own design, and they are altogether mine. About such bewilderment, I am a bit selfish.

Only because I don't know how to put them into the right words. The words are there, but they are like clouds above my head, and if I reach to pull them down into print, they will dissolve to fog or sprinkle down rain. I have to leave them floating for now, I have to let them stretch out against the bright blue sky.

Too much, and not enough to tell, it seems. I am going to San Francisco next week. For a month, I will pretend I live there again. Except I will be doing a poor performance. My luck, well, who am I to complain about bad luck, because really, in the scheme of things, my luck has been nothing to bemoan. But there is a certain poetry in this, returning to the city in which I felt most me at one time, only to find myself in negotiations as to how many weekends I can leave San Francisco. Seriously? Seriously. Who is this person, having these negotiations, navigating these waters? Surely not me. Every time there is such a discussion, every time the chess match resumes, I am split wide open. One half of me finds this hilarious, wholly amusing, and rather revels in the absurdity of it all. The other half balks, is horrified, and wonders how it is possible that so much energy could be expended on something not entirely of my own making. It occurs to me- everything has been about me first for so long that I haven't a good handle on the concept of compromise.

And this, in turn, sparks a whole new line of thought. Pied Piper and I were chatting about this noise, and I had made a passing remark about how this relationship foolishness stopped stressing me out once I realized that no one can really dismantle me anymore. No one has that sort of power over me anymore, except perhaps for me. He thought it was a rather obvious thing, apparently. But to me, it was a revelation. And it took all this time to see that I'm not her anymore. No one even knows her anymore, so no one else would bother to notice. They don't know that she used to bend over backwards to make things work, took everything on her own shoulders, and then would, wounded and saddened, sit waiting for a call that never came. To write it down now, to put the words down now, well, of course, she is long gone. I wouldn't recognize her either. I used to think I would be sorry, the day that I saw her disappear. I used to think that, despite her stupidity, there was a kind of romance to it, the way she was unswerving in her devotion. And then comes one more revelation- she is not really gone. She just got a little more selective, and she became me.