Empty and Full

I don't feel like writing tonight. There is too much roiling around inside me. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to sort it out. I don't want to set it out on paper for anyone to see.

I'm not that much of an exhibitionist.

I have nothing to say. Nothing, and yet much too much. My mind is a library of odd occurrences, strange meetings, failed relationships, and broken hearts. One heart. Broken over and over again. It gets boring after a while.

There are too many people in my life. And yes, of course, you see what I'm getting at, too many and yet not enough. Too many people sort of in my life, but too few where I really want them. If I want them. Perhaps I don't. I look at the list, I look at the line, these mainly men, but even the women, who were here and gone and who pop in now and again, an old lover, a long-ago housemate and occasional lover, a close friend and permanent though rare lover, others I won't mention... I look at their resumes and there it is, right under name, address, phone (land line and cell) and social security numbers to help with the background search: "Emotionally (and otherwise) unavailable."

There are too many memories in my life. Too much sadness, even while, now, I am basically so happy. I'm writing, I'm creating, I have a mentor who is putting me back in touch with something inside myself that had been hiding in a cave for around 45 years, and even then never danced the way it does now. I write and write, every day, and I can see already, in just a few short weeks, the way the poems are improving. They are starting to be good. So I'm happy, and excited, and intellectually stimulated, and shining with an identity that feels like truly mine and not borrowed from someone else. It's mine from long ago, but crystalline, refracting everything around it into dancing rainbows, crystalline but with a molten flowing center inside. A different dance, a slow dance, warm and sensuous, that I was too young to know when the storms of puberty sent down boulders of turmoil to dam up the ancient poetry stream.

I need to find balance. I need to find peace. I keep saying oh yes, everything's ok, it's fine now, I've let it go, and for a while I believe it, and when challenged I say oh no, Sir, you're wrong, I'm fine... but my demon muse can always find new ways to torture me, and he has a bullshit meter so sensitive he can spot self-deception from halfway around the globe. He knows me far better than I know myself, and has from before we even met.

I do think I will be ok. I will find peace. And there are things I do know now, things I do understand, things I do believe now, that have made me feel a lot better. The doubts are gone. But the loss is still there. And the tears do come back. Like now...

I have nothing to say. Really. There isn't anything to say, and besides I'm a lousy typist and I can't see the keyboard when I'm crying. I have nothing to say. All I want is to curl up and cry and be held and cry and then stop crying and still be held.

You can't always get what you want.

Maybe a caning would do instead...