What came after is not an ending and not a beginning. Just a dull buzz, like the distant static that plays in your ears even after the television has been shut off. A succession of diluted notes echoing the sharp rise and fall of something much greater.
I love, but no longer out loud, no longer up close. Without a vessel to hold my affections, I write whimsies instead of confessions.
I dance, but the fervent momentum of my youth has wound down. This body I used to have unwavering faith in has been broken, rebuilt, broken again. My passion is brittle.
I reside in the almost, the in-between. Relishing freedom but undecided whether it is an opportunity or a chasm. And braver than I've ever been but suspended in this space where dreams and practicalities fail to intersect. A kaleidoscope of lives hover before me, yet I can't bring myself to reach out and grasp one with any sense of surety. How can I choose a life when I have failed to commit to a self?
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree...
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home... and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor... and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America...
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
- Excerpts from "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath
No comments:
Post a Comment