There are feelings we acquire about years, vast clumps of time we can lend no words to, or atleast, no few words. We can speak of them only in volumes or sensations, for if some stranger on the street were to inquire, how were those 2 years or that 6 months, you’d know. You’d stare him dumbly in the eyes, but your mind would be bathing in the tepid tea of history. You’d know.
I know my life in a familiar map I can’t spread out fully in my lap, but can see only folded into little squares of feelings, easy to hold, but impossible to place into he context of a state, a world, a nation. I don’t know how long the rivers of my expectations flow after they’d dripped off the page of my immediate 28 miles. My life is patches of adolescence to examine separately from the patches of infancy. Yet the feeling of these patches, their over-riding color, is common.

I could call it awkwardness or humiliation, but to lend it a term is to deprive it of its meat: the ability to scare me, to slip too easily under my skin and, (my mind wanders), never come out.

It’s the feeling of being caught doing something we all do but don’t speak of, that somehow, in its universality, is more sacred:
Picking noses. Scraping the dust out of a paper cut. Examining our own shit. It’s more menial than masturbation. More self-absorbed than popping zits. It’s something I can’t give origin to any more than I can stop giving it my attention. I think perhaps it’s what allows me to so easily believe I am homosexual, clinically insane, anorexic, and then to so easily stop believing it. It’s the feeling of inexplicable 4 am hysterias that I transcribe into inevitably dissatisfactory poetry.

It’s digging fingernails into innocent skin. It’s pulling out individual hairs.

When I was a kid, a really little kid, littler than 3 or 4 or self-awareness, I thought I’d be a criminal when I grew up. It wasn’t a wish so much as an inevitability, something that, like growing breasts, was uncomfortable but unavoidable.
It was untouchable.
It was awkward.

I am fascinated by awkward.

I tried to write a poem about awkward conversations the other day. I wanted it to be hard-hitting slam poem. It went like this:

You breathe uneven and self-aware
You bare
Your naked ass to everyone
And they feel too bad to laugh at you.

That’s as far as I got. My (poorly written) righteous indignation at the enigma of the awkward conversation then tapered out.
I feel like tonight I’m picking it up again.

I began this strange, humiliating meditation to figure myself out but I’m growing impatient and a revelation seems neither fitting nor forth-coming.

I take comfort in the experience that uncomfortability precedes revelation, and discomfort in the proverb that a watched pot never boils.

Tonight, I’ll be up watching pots.

Labels: By Ana