I’ve come to a place where everything is a little bit terrifying, a little infected by nihilism and unease, a little bit impossible. Dark, unknown, all the synonyms.
I feel I should re-read nausea.
I don’t know if any decision I make is the right one, nor am I able to convince myself that any decision I make matters at all.
This is desperately melancholic of me: but are my desires allowed to come to fruition?
I’ve been feeling like they aren’t—allowed, and that they won’t—come to fruition. And perhaps I should just get over it, move on, keep chugging like a good little robot, my mothers curse passed on, keep on keeping on, it works if you work it, etc.
But of course I won’t get over it. I’m a poet. I’m my mothers daughter.
[As I write this, I have just left a reading by the poet John Gallaher. He got his phd here, at this exact school I am enduring now. He returns, not as a student but as a success story, someone to look up too.
I loved his reading, truly, but more on that another day. ]
I got to thinking about other poets who have lived, not forever, but on, because people continue to love them, to fill their days with their words. Whitman, Shakespeare, Frost, etc.
And Emily Dickinson, whom my poetry professor, and I, have been obsessed with lately. (He printed poems—mine and hers—on a piece of paper next to each other, passed them out to the class. Our names, written in his slanted script, lined up on the page—both start with E.)
She just keeps poking her strange diction into my life; I can’t say it upsets me.
In the midst of my more delusional musings, I have taken her recurring image to be a sign, a positive omen. This long dead poet is reaching out to me, specifically, a kindred spirit in need of guidance.
[I have a list of women with whom I believe I share bits of soul. Elena Tonra, Nandi Rose, among others. Perhaps I will add my odd & dear Emily. ]
I have decided, as of right now, to give in and entertain my delusion. Moving foreword I will accept her messages as prophesy.
A few years ago I purchased the Modern Library Classics edition of The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Tonight, I opened it, pleading for counsel.
XXXIII: “How happy is the little stone / That rambles in the road alone / And does n’t care about careers / And exigencies never fears; / Whose coat of brown / A passing universe put on; / And independent as the sun, / Associates or glows alone, / Fulfilling absolute decree / In casual simplicity.”
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