i've been reflecting on why i tend to be so incremental about things. it's like my heart doesn't have the capacity for grand emotions. i can only capture fragmented moments, little vignettes. sometimes they pretend at greatness, sometimes they can be evocative, but they are like the broken fragments of a mirror, capturing only a tiny portion of some larger, unguessed image. i can't see things whole. i can't feel things whole. in narratives, as well, i cannot envision the entire arc of the story. i can only capture brief snapshots of things, snippets of conversations, etc.
i have wondered why my heart is like this. i have often spoken before about how different i feel. or rather, how i don't have the capacity to feel. how my impressions are like these muffled vibrations... i am guessing at a message whispered through a concrete, unfeeling wall.
i have blamed people, like my brother, for this. i have said that my brother took the "high path" of feeling, the place where he is allowed to complete the circuit of his desires, and express his thoughts in arcs of neon, impossible to deny, impossible to ignore... whereas i am like a morning fog... if i act, it is without apparent intention, a molecule here and there, until i obscure vision...
yasunari kawabata wrote a book called the "master of go." in my mind, i envisioned it as the conflict between my brother, who is forceful and violent in his assertion of his desires, and the "master," who is inscrutable, ordinary, and who works "in increments" that are hard to read. the book chronicled the loss of the master to the "new way of playing," the style of logic and "strategy" (in a derogatory sense). i have always liked to believe in the master's style, of living in a way that was at once both natural and simple, and intuitive and impossible to read or defend against... again, like the morning fog... before you know it, formations have arisen from the mist... i have longed to be that sort of way. the way of intention, it has always stunk of my brother... i have always claimed that my brother "stole" that pathway from me. he was the "king of the hill" with regards to his desires, so i had to learn to walk a different path. i blame him, but at the same time, i wouldn't want to, or perhaps, i wasn't capable of, being like him...
i blame him, because my way of being, of living, of conceiving, of communicating, is likely frustrating to those around me, and to myself. my own desires are always muted, or unsynchronized. there are times when i wish i could have been like me, when i could feel my own desire clearly like a broad river of light, connecting me with the world... i wish feelings could flow from me with the force of their own pressure. but the current within me is weak, meandering, mysterious... sometimes stagnant. but mostly subtle to the point of dissolution... and i hate that at times.
this makes me kind. in the sense of harmless. but i am not the "bold" kindness, the kind of kindness that demands gratitude. i have always preferred to help people and disappear in the helping. because frankly, any sort of praise stinks of my brother's way of being, of him interposing himself between the sun and the earth, as though it were he that was the blessing that kept the fucking universe alive. i HATE that. i don't know exactly why i hate it so much, especially because i long for myself to be like that in certain moments to free me...
because i am the way that i am, i have always looked to others to "free" me... to "read" the subtle inscrutable feelings that i myself have a hard time feeling and freeing, and to thence translate me into some clear message of love. it was always good intentions, after all... and i felt that if only someone could feel my signal, then i would be understood, and a circuit could be closed... but no one has the time or capacity to do this. angels, maybe... but no one real, no one human. and to be honest, i'm not sure if they would be reading something within me, or actually rewriting me into some sort of figure that i really wasn't. that's the thing about fog and clouds. it's all subject to interpretation... maybe only a reflection of the shape of the observer's mind... maybe that's all i am, is a shapeless, formless thing that just longs to be solid, held... but which is only a transitory phenomena between falling water and rising water...
i don't know how to write any more. most of the time, purposive writing, writing to complete a play or a story, it just seems to "lose its steam." again, i think i'm not meant for long form (or even short form) narrative. it isn't how i live my life, or experience time. i am fragmentary... and i don't know how to accurately capture that in narrative form of any length... i have ideas of how to write with my heart in it, but most of the time, i have a hard time even feeling if i have a heart. it is so distant. it is so frustrating...
it would be easier if i really didn't have a heart, but i do have something, something with inertia and weight, that resists all efforts to move indiscriminately... it is like a heavy bear tied to a chain or something. i can't speak to it, and it could kill me or eat me, but it mostly just sleeps, and keeps me from moving forward... it is my burden, my weight. yes, that's what my heart is like sometimes, a grumbling mass, sleeping and reluctant and indecipherable.
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