by sundown, i became tame

Dear K-

I didn’t realize you had modified your previous entry. You censored yourself for my sake. A part of me feels relieved. A part of me feels guilty. I don’t want to stifle your creative output. What am I so afraid of? You’re right: no one reads this anyway. If they did, I would feel sorry for them. Such a disconnected, self-centered collection of ramblings spanning 7 years of different lives, different perspectives, different ideals. To the lonely unknown reader, I apologize. I never wrote with you in mind. I never will.

Do you think someday we will be old and grey, our marrow soft as syrup, arthritic joints knobby and immobile, lips cracked and dry, and still be pecking out our correspondence, reading each other’s entries with cloudy eyes and foggy minds?

I hope so.

I hope so.

-k

an adventure from a work in progress

Dear K-

I have been ensnared. Utterly and completely. It is embarrassing, sitting here in the dying light of a summer evening and finding my thoughts continually drifting to him. I'm not sure what I expected. I guess I figured I would be more composed, more restrained, more careful this time. To tread the forest with a light step and always at attention...but I let my guard down and I let him catch me. And now I don't know what to do. I've lost my appetite. I haven't been able to concentrate all day. When I think of him I can't help but smile inwardly. And yet it makes me so nervous. I'm an anxious wreck.

Today at class, while sparring, my instructor kept telling me to relax. He tells me I'm too tense. I don't really understand how one isn't supposed to be tense while someone is throwing punches at you, but I suppose it is something I must learn. It is an order I've received frequently throughout my life: relax. I'm always on edge. Always at attention, expecting the worst. Always ready with the counter. Whenever I enter a room, I immediately note the exits and any suspicious characters that I think I would have trouble beating if things became rough. I don't know why I do that. I sound like some terrible dime store detective novel. But it's true. I don't like feeling vulnerable. I think that's why I feel so uncomfortable with the thought of falling in love. I feel out of control. But it's beautiful, so a part of me doesn't want to do anything to regain command. But every hard wired circuit in my body is screaming in warning.

Eventually, the appetite will return. The novel will fade into the mundane. But I hope the fire he sparks might burn brightly for at least a little while before he tires of me.

Falling,
-k

it hurts until it doesn't

Dear K-

I think about death sometimes. We’re writers: it’s what we do. I try not to focus on it too intently, however. It tends to make me stall out. I freeze. I get anxious all over and then I feel empty.

I cooked dinner for a man this weekend. It made me feel useful. He asked me what I was looking for in a relationship. I told him I was looking for someone I could list as my emergency contact. He smiled, but I wasn’t really joking. I smiled back, though, because it seemed like the polite response.

The night before, I drank a lot of scotch and worked very hard to finish up a piece of writing. I was worried that if things work with the relationship and I become happy, I wouldn’t be able to finish the piece. It’s hard for me to write when I am happy. Everything just seems like drivel. There’s no fire behind it. I’m sure whatever I wrote is god-awful, but at least I got it out there. A stark skeleton is better than a wisp of air. At least I can put flesh on the skeleton, if need be.

Of course, I’m not happy. So I guess there was no need to get drunk and rush the conclusion. The date went well, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes it feels like God is playing a joke on you. In the last two weeks, I’ve had no less than three ex-boyfriends reach out to me, unprovoked, and ask if I want to meet up, talk, hang out, grab a drink, etc. I had a different male friend surprise me with multiple gifts, all of which were thoughtful, but again, unprovoked. It stresses me out. It makes me want to stay indoors and not interact with anyone for a week. What comes to you as a prison sentence, a fever that immobilizes you for days on end, is like a sweet relief to me. Sometimes all I want to do is disappear for a spell.

I think I need to become a ghost for a while. At least until things quiet down again.

-k

Hello Blue Mondays

Dear K,

I know we talked on the phone tonight. That doesn't mean I can't write you a letter. Somedays the whole world seems against a body. I guess my biggest problem isn't that I'm poor or lonely, but that I'm worried that if I die I will not have done anything with my life. I'll just be one more candle snuffed out. I guess this is my big worry over all. I ask myself a question a lot. That question is "what do you need to do to be ok with being dead?" It's a tough question to answer. I hope I know the answer to that question before I die.

I think about dying a lot. Do other people think about dying as much as I do? How often do you think about death? I know you had a close brush with it a while back.

Do you think there's an afterlife?

I kind of don't.

I don't think its nothingness either.

I don't really know what comes next. I know that we only get a few years here, and sometimes those years are brutal, and sometimes they're sweet.

I hope I meet somebody someday. It would be awful to die alone. I'd like to make somebody happy for a lot of years, and then make them sad when I die.

I'm just in a funk. I'll come around the bend I know I will. Don't worry about me. I just need to be morose for a while. I've got let all this bile out. As the Russians say, I've got to spleen. I should go for a run.

Ugh,

K

Oh Hush, You Know Nobody's Really Reading These Anyway, Plus We're All Going To Die In The End

Dear K,

Oh hush. Also if anyone deserves to be read it's you. You're one of the great secret writers of our generation. Do you know that? I mean beyond your inevitable claims that you're terrible. We both know you're very good at making things and writing things and feeling things. You wouldn't like to do these things if you didn't find some sort of pride in them, and you wouldn't have some sort of pride if you weren't sure you were good. I think you're good enough to know how much better you could be and that is a thing that will cripple you.

That's one of the demons I tried to pickle with whiskey.

I've spent all week in bed with a fever. Well I went to work yesterday and today, but those eight hours and my commute were the only time I've spent outside of bed. Okay, I've also taken a lot of showers and baths. But you get the picture. I haven't had any sort of appetite for about five days. As I write this it's a Wednesday night.  I came down with my fever on a Saturday afternoon. Its been a great reminder of mortality and how actually flimsy our lives our.

More importantly I haven't written very much in the last five days and that upsets me. My standards are pretty low. When I say I wrote a lot I mean a page or two. Usually I satisfy myself with a paragraph or three. I'm training myself to sit still at the keyboard again. It's a good thing to train yourself to do. I think I'd like to spend the rest of my life training myself to sit still and type. Someday I imagine I'll be very productive.

What's it all for though? You know? What's the point? We die in the end. This planet will blow up, and nobody will even remember that our sun was our sun. Some days this fact makes things lighter, and some days this fact makes things heavier.

Lost in a fever dream and Nihilism Lite,

K

requiem for an illusion

Dear K-

Seven years. Seven fucking years. Broken. The illusion gone. I hope you're happy.

I sat and stared outside for hours. I watched the light fade. My reflection slowly became bolder and more visible in the window as evening set in and the backdrop shifted to black, but I still looked like a ghost. And some days, that's exactly how I feel. After the initial flurry of new adventures, new thoughts, new occupations, everything settles back to grey. Everything ends the same way: with me, staring out a window drinking tea in the dark, wondering if this is what I imagined being adult would be like after all. Living alone isn't all that bad sometimes.

I've started wearing rings to hide my broken knuckles. I thought maybe the glitter would distract from the blood. I am not sure if it is working. All I know is every time I wash my hands it hurts when the water rushes over the wounds. That's the price I pay, I suppose.

This is disconnected. This is a mess. I feel like my sense of balance has been destroyed. They know who you are now, so they know who I am. It's no longer for the desk drawer if they can trace it back. Perhaps it is time for me to disappear for a while. That's what usually occurs whenever things get a little too present.

Until then,
-k

I GOT A FIRE LIT IN ME

Dear K,

I've never been able to do small goals. I think that's why I've never been able to finish the things I start. I know I should be just going on one mile runs, but I want to run across the Sahara. When I ride my bicycle I hear a sports announcer in my ear, saying my last name like it's a prayer. "Is K*****n going to do it? Is he going to ride his bicycle faster and longer than any other human being alive?" I live for those stupid dreams. I ride my bicycle with the belief, or delusion, that in that moment, when I lose myself, when I lose this stupid world around me where I'm just a guy who works in a bank and sits in a cubicle and has no interaction with history and will die and be forgotten so quickly, it might as well be tomorrow, but when I ride my bicycle and hear that voice, hear that little voice saying "K*****n, K*****n, K*****n, K*****n, K*****N! K*****N! K*****N!" I my tires leave the ground, my body leaves the ground, my soul leaves this body, I am lifted and transported. I become something just for a moment. I touch that other universe, the one right next to ours where that is the reality. Where I am the man who is riding a bicycle faster than anyone has ever ridden a bicycle before I become my dreams, for one single shining moment when I am on the verge of collapsing from being out of breath. When I RUN, god damn! When I push that limit inside myself I open up a door to a land where nothing can't be done. The same thing happens when I write. Hell yes I want to be taught in High Schools. You bet your ass I want a Nobel Prize for literature.

That's ego talking though. You know what I really want? I want to be satisfied with something I write, and thank GOD that will never happen. I will write the rest of my life and I don't ever want to be satisfied. I want to keep getting better. I want to write through twenty different styles. I want to write so much that people look back and say: "this was K*****n? It's so different from his later stuff? I'm a fan of his early work, he was rougher around the edges. Have you read his recent stuff? He's really let himself go."

I've been covering these ambitions up my whole life and I think it is about damn time that I stopped. I have a fire lit inside of me and I mean to feed it one page of writing at a time until it is a towering inferno. I mean to sacrifice time and energy and thought and love to it. I mean to make myself into something. I mean to do great works in this world with nothing but some fingers and some buttons and some paper and some ink. I want to capture lightning and heat and breath in words. I know it can be done, and I want to do it.

In the meantime, I'm gonna finish this marathon. I'm going straight from running around the block to trying to run 26.2 miles. Right up to the Queen's Balcony. Right up to Buckingham Palace. I've got my sights set on the big things, but don't worry. I'm not giving up. I'm gonna put the blood and sweat in until I get there.

Yours,

K

the struggle of memory against forgetting

Dear K-

I am sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me. The insomnia is back and I have been trying to fight it, as best I can, through tiny measures. One measure is to hide my phone away at night. I make it lie quiet and dormant, not to make a peep until it is time for me to arise. Sometimes it helps to disconnect yourself. Sometimes it feels good to unplug yourself from the stress of responsibility. My phone has been making me anxious. The introverted insomniac of my youth is making a special guest appearance in this month's episode of my life. Every time my cell phone flashes I worry it is someone I don’t want to talk to or someone I don’t have the energy to converse with. It makes me feel guilty.

Keep working on the novel. Don’t lose hope. Stop trying to assign an unknown future to it. Are you writing it for a specific endgame? Is it going to be the work that wins you a Nobel Prize? Is it going to be the creation that makes you the world’s next literary darling, and they’ll add you to all the high school curriculums so millions of sulky teenagers can flip through your pages with indifference? These goals are too lofty for this moment. When I run, I don’t look off into the distance towards the eventual finish line. It’s too far away…sometimes I can’t even see it. The thought of that distance makes me miserable and exhausted. Instead, I focus a few feet ahead of me. A quickly evolving target. Easily attainable. It also lets me run in the present moment, prepare for the steps ahead of me and avoid any potential pitfalls or trip-ups. You need to do the same with your novel. Don’t get weary trying to strain to see the finish line. It may still be quite a ways away. Concentrate a few paces ahead, and work towards that. Repeat, repeat, repeat. You’ll get to the end, eventually. And then we can celebrate as the New York Times puts you on some list.

I bought myself a new blazer yesterday. I also punched a sparring bag until my knuckles broke open and bled. Sometimes the simple things in life can bring a dose of unexpected pleasure.

Enjoy the breeze,

-k

I'm A Little Piece of Everything

Dear K,

Sometimes I get sad. Sometimes I get down. Sometimes I wonder what this whole life is worth. I wonder whether I should just sit down and not move. It's been a long time since I wanted to die, and I'm pretty sure I'm done with that. I'm pretty sure I want to live and live and live and live. I'm sure that I want my heart to keep beating, even when it will be old and struggling to beat I want it to try for one more beat. I want to die in my bed in a hospital at the age of 136 struggling to breathe and forcing my heart to beat one more time. I like living. But I will die. So will you and the birds in the trees and the whales in the ocean and the grass on the prairie and the dogs in their kennels and the presidents and kings and all the shining faces on television. Statues will crumble. Everything will become ruins and dust and then even the ruins and dust will die. The sun itself will die. Then someday on some distant frozen shore of time the universe will give up its last beat.

Lately the thing that makes me at peace with all this is my secret knowledge that I am part of all these things and they are all part of me. There is no separation between you and I and the bird in the sky or God's wild eye staring down at us or the pig wallowing in its filthy sty. We're the same we're the same we're the same. Time and space are meaningless, you're a little speck in the body of the universe.

I guess, I also don't know how much peace I find there. Sometimes I force that feeling. Sometimes I force a connection with the universe. Sometimes I don't feel like I'm a part of everything and that I'm just a little useless cheap thing that's going to get trampled underfoot. Just something smaller and less useful than a million billion trillion other things just like it. Something that doesn't have anything important to say or do.

Then I go outside and I take a walk and I feel the wind on my skin.

Did you know that I've always believed that God is in the wind. Ever since I was a little kid. I've never been alone if I've been in the wind. I remember once I was walking from our farm house to go check on the neighbors horses in a blizzard. They lived a half mile down the road and it was a crazy cold January and this was a blizzard that kept us snowed in for most of a week. ON the third day my Step-mom and sister decided that they were going to go and check on the horses. I think they were both stir crazy from being stuck inside because of the snow. We couldn't go anywhere in our car because it was so cold. I went with them because I was tired of being inside.

We walked to the neighbors barn in white out conditions. It wasn't snowing anymore, but in Iowa we have WIND. There's nothing to stop it sweeping over the fields. The white out was from the wind picking up snow from all the fields and blowing it around. Making it pile up in huge drifts that covered the road. The wind could just about pick you up. Scoop you up in it's big cold God hands. I remember walking around in it with my arms tucked inside the torso of my coat, sleeves pulled in too, for extra warmth. Hat and scarf around my head, and laughing with delight at how cold and strong the wind was. I remembered thinking that I could lay back into it and be carried off by it, and that the cold would never touch me, but I would feel the giant soft hands of God.

Whenever I am cold and lonely. Whenever I am hot and miserable. I go for a walk and I wait for God to reach out and touch me. Any little bit will do. Any movement of the air over my skin and I am convinced again in a benevolent God that loves me and has a plan for me and that I am doing ok and going to be alright. I think this might be why I like bicycles so much. Because you can pump your feet and feel God rush over you, and it doesn't feel fake, it feels like God.

I walked home from a coffee shop tonight in defeat. My novel is defeating me. I'm being defeated every night I write. It's all garbage and it's all fear and cowardice coming from my fingers through the keyboard. I'm trying to extend the story I Guess. I think I'm trying to make this thing bigger than it is. I'm really afraid of letting it go. I don't know if that is it, or if its just fear, irrational fear getting in the way, stepping on the hose. You know? Fear comes in and steps on the idea hose.

Writing this blog with you is nice. I feel like I can come here and say anything that's inside of me and you won't judge me, and I know that what's inside of me isn't that bad. I'm not important enough to hide anything truly terrible inside of me. I'm just a little guy. I'm just a little guy trying to write. I'm just a little piece of a bigger thing. I'm just a little guy in the wind. I'm just a little piece of everything.

Yours,

K

my only swerving

Dear K-

Why can’t I be more like a lake? I used to be a lake. It was a long time ago. Sometimes I can hardly remember. They told me I had two weeks to live, but I made liars out of people who only had the best intentions. I kept breathing, and for years after that I was a lake. It was refreshing. It was remarkable. The world was vast, and there was so much more to it than my small, narrow window had previously admitted me to see. I needed to be shown what lay beyond my reach. I needed to be shown what I would care the most about when I didn’t think I was going to live anymore.

That’s not something I would recommend most 19-year-olds to experience, but it certainly puts a perspective on things.

But I lost that. Somewhere along the way I’ve gotten all cluttered. Did you know in Slovenia there are disappearing lakes? Lake Cerknica is the largest of them. It appears and disappears with the seasons. Sometimes, I feel like that lake.

Today I almost cried, just listening to a song. I’ve listened to it too many times. Songs sometimes become like smells to me. You know how sometimes smells can evoke a certain visceral reaction, a memory? It’s like Proust’s madeleine. When I hear a song that I have heard again and again, I start to associate memories to it. This song in question doesn’t even necessarily evoke a firm memory. It is more of a state of mind. It makes me think of sitting in an airport, waiting for a flight. That eager anticipation of going someplace different, an escape, mingled with the anxiety of change of routine and thought of possible complications. I’ve found that I actually love sitting in airports. Some of my best moments of creative productivity have been while slouched down in an uncomfortable airport bench seat, next to complete strangers, my feet propped up on my suitcase in front of me. There’s something extremely satisfying about being in transition. It’s the only time my restlessness is relieved.

I am glad that we are friends. I don’t think anyone else could bear to hear how miserable and lost I am the majority of the time. I’m supposed to be the stable one. I’m supposed to know what I’m doing.

So they say.

-k