Grammatical technicality
It is a game we play
And if only it were so.
You play, you win- you play, you lose.
We play..
For you, whoever you might be, I want to make this clear.
I owe you a great deal.
I address you, make reference to you, blame you and miss you.
But the 'you' I use is not yours to claim.
You flow from one to the other,
sometimes improving reality,
other times adding to the disappointment,
building one failure on top of the other.
This is how I must write,
as though the people I think about were reading,
as though they were one and the same.
As if you were the only thing on my mind.
And- of course- you are.
Uncomfortable
I said: she thinks I am too weak to say no.
You said: what is weakness anyway?
Not knowing it was you.
You were the weakness, I was the one who had to fight it.
When most of your time is spent fighting emotions,
There isn't much space for the ordinary things.
And if you are good at shutting things and people out,
soon enough you find yourself struggling to feel anything at all.
This is not success, this is danger.
Comfortably numb is just a song, not something we should aspire to.
Story of my life.
We write ourselves as stories because it is comforting.
In a world that struggles to find meaning, a story gives us a sense of depth that anchors us to life.
And we never stop.
A constant stride of themes, motifs, aphorisms help us to understand ourselves
and justify us in front of others.
Today I wrote the end of a story long overdue.
This is also a part of writing, of being alive; putting an end to things.
We create some, we leave others behind,
choices that we hope will bring us more wondrous stories to tell.
Some tales are harder to end than others.
You put the fire out, but it blazes up anew every time, inexplicably more aggressive.
I am the writer, I decide.
But some protagonists claim their space and the story fades without them.
So, you compromise, you let him stay.
Waiting quietly for him to make you regret it and he does so, over and over.
When the protagonist starts taking charge of the plot, it's gone too far.
There are two ways of ending a story.
You must have the courage to write it or force the protagonist to quit.
Sometimes it is safer to do both, so he cannot come back to haunt you.
As a writer you become surrounded by ghosts.
Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become one.
Now I want to write about the living.
Now I will write about life.
Et plus le temps nous fait cortège...
Growing up, I suppose, is what this is partly about.
Signing french contracts, planning for the future, imagining more than I have had before.
More than I have wanted to imagine before.
I was waiting for right now, perhaps without knowing it.
Perhaps always.
Letting chances pass me by, thinking "as soon as.."
but never knowing how to end that sentence.
'As soon as I start my life', not realizing that is not something you choose to do.
C'est la vie.
Ceci est la vie.
This may not last but this is now.
Forever is composed of nows.
