Every once in a while, someone says something that at first listen sounds absolutely preposterous, but after a beat of time passes by – a beat where time itself ceases to have anything resembling a reality or a rhythm – the sentiment you so easily discarded just seconds before begins to make real sense. This is not to say that the bit of truth that’s just been verbally tossed your way will suddenly make your life better. No, my friends – accepting something to be valid that only one moment before seemed nothing but insane is bound to fuck you up at least a little bit.
I sat on my terrace the other night with a gigantic mug of Sleepytime herbal tea and tried in vain to ignore the incessant chirping of crickets who I’m convinced were somehow given microphones by Mother Nature before any of us got to vote on such a matter. Pressing my phone tightly to my ear, I pretended I didn’t hear the workings of the vocal cords of bugs and chatted instead with a friend of mine.
“Here’s what I’ve decided I find interesting about your writing,” she said. Her voice was steady just then, careful almost – as though she was still thinking through what she was about to say. “I love how you can write about something that could be construed as depressing, like the passage of time or hiding emotions from other people or from yourself or something like that, but the way you craft your words makes the whole thing come off as thoughtful and introspective but never full-on sad. I really respect that quality.”
“That’s probably the best thing I could hear,” I told her. “Because I do write about exploring conflicted emotions and about trudging through days where it always feels like the world is pitch-fucking-black, but it doesn’t mean that any of it just makes me sad. Sadness is obviously be a component, but it’s never the only component, and I’m really happy to hear that you’re responding the way I guess I hoped people would.”
When I started this blog over a year ago, I kind of pressed a bunch of buttons on a keyboard, closed my eyes, and hoped for (okay, chanted for) the best. Shockingly, it all somehow ended up working and a site was born – though the fury that crept up inside of me each time I tried to upload and resize a picture was the kind of fury that turned my skin a terrible shade of beet red as I experienced the previously unknown misery of technology-inspired apoplectic rage. And as for figuring out how to create links to amazon.com to check out my books? Yeah, I was never able to master that kind of build-a-blog knowledge.
