the best thing i can give to you, is…leave you alone

Going down an echoing, silent stairway in the early hours of the morning, in the last hours of the night, stepping out into an empty courtyard. The wind takes the smoke and the ash, scatters them into the darkness.

Standing alone, in the cold. It’s quiet everywhere. Except in my head.

Except in my head.

I resolve, every morning, to stay away. To silence the voices, the doubts, the questions, the hopes and the fears. To hoard up my words and keep them for myself, only. Because giving words to you must always make them mean something.

But of course, the resolve is broken, almost as soon as it is made. And along with my words, I find myself inevitably giving you my doubts, my questions, my hopes and my fears.

And no answers seem forthcoming.

well now it’s etched in stone, that i can’t survive alone

Ugh. This is so annoying. These states of mind that allow for nothing else, that demand all of your attention to no purpose except reflection that serves no purpose but to spiral on and on, into impossible conundrums that rational thought cannot solve.

I just want to lie in bed all day and dream of things past.

we’re living in a den of thieves, rummaging for answers in the pages

You remember only in flashes: a long train journey, a weary walk home, a cold burger and soggy fries, clothes all on the floor in past haste.

Cathedrals rush past, and ancient colleges and rivers; houses and staircases, shops and cobbled streets; cushions and cats and hands and feet. Pretended domesticity sitting prettily beside real dilemmas, rain and wind and cold; questions answered by the darkness.

Ah, the things you tell yourself you will never do, or at least, never do again, are the ones you end up doing. The same mistakes, over and over, because you never learn to take care of yourself. Even fear isn’t enough to deter you. But, do you trade momentary satisfaction for forthcoming disappointment? Or do you hedge your bets, take your chances, jump off cliffs in the hope that something, somehow will break your fall?

Oh well, who really knows?

i’m only fooling myself, oh yeah

I’m back in my little room after what turned out to be an idyllic weekend, though Thursday to Monday is an extremely generous definition of a ‘weekend’.

Everything you think you know is just an illusion you made up in your head.

I think.

:)

it’s not a slow dance, this modern romance

As usual, I’ve left my reading for class till the nth hour (literally), so I’m attempting to read very fast. But Derrida, whose reputation for incomprehensibility is notorious, does not lend himself to speed-reading. Contrary to expectation, I’ve found him remarkably exciting, thus far. Reading theory seems to me to be the intellectual’s fix: it’s a way to read about the mundane world in abstract, even astonishing terms. It makes everything new, it peels the layers off, one by one, in a tantalising strip-tease of ideas but what you find underneath is nothing like you expected.

I’ve decided to reform my decadent ways. I’ve been sleeping too many hours a day, watching too much House, spending too much time on Facebook talking to people I really don’t care about except as sounding-boards for my boredom and neglecting the pursuit of potentially intellectual things. And of course, eating way too much junk.

No more of this, I say! Nose to the grindstone, back to the wall, nose in a book, and all the other cliched metaphors you can think of for serious study in response to the peril of being proven second-rate shall be the order of the day.

In other news, Ireland tickets have been bought. Now we just need to find places to stay, things to do and of course, a damn visa that allows us to enter!

—

Ah, I could have spent words uselessly on questioning my actions, recent and imminent, but I’ll save it for another rainy day.