("Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time..." And I have come stuck.)
This isn't living. This is standing still, watching time progress slowly before your eyes; watching clock hands ticking on, their only ability to move forward while you stand still. In many ways it is more like moving backward. The speed at which everyone advances, and there you stand—might as well be regressing, devolving back into childhood—if you can fall back far at all, if you aren't already there. That's me, me stuck in childhood, stuck in constant regression. Not moving forward, at times moving backward, reversing anything I might have worked hard for, if you can call anything I've done hard work. All the while everyone I've known, my colleagues and counterparts, my friends and my foes, they move onward, day after day, advance their lives and become people. I am not a person, and I am not living. None of this is life.
I know the mistakes that I have made, this is my ultimate curse. I could make lists and diagrams and long explanations of my flaws and my failures, and none of it would mean a thing. It would be self-deprecating all the same, but it would render useless, having learned no lessons in the process. This is the way of things when it comes to me, I fear, that I could name my problem, name myself, and never fix it, and thus in the end succumb to nothingness. This is my fear, that I will succumb to nothingness. I will literally watch myself devolve to nothing, knowing all the while what mistakes caused this particular regression, completely cognizant to it all and having no power to stop it—no strength.
What is it that holds me down? My fear, or my weakness? Or my inability to care much what happens, and yet to devote my energy solely to worry of what will? I can name myself, call myself out, but cannot answer the call and fight the battle against what I allow to happen. Why? Am I so paralyzed by fear, or am I lazy even when it comes to myself, or am I so deep in some sick depression of the past five years that I can't so much as move? What is this, my enemy, that stops me from living, that allows me to stand still in this life and watch helplessly? What is this that renders me useless? What is this that leaves me dead in the water?
The answer of course is myself, and that I am not helpless or useless against it, I am simply not standing to fight. I am simply not standing to fight because I am scared, and tired, and lonely. Because I am so deep in my own head, so deep in my own mind that I can't come to my senses. And I can see this, I can know it as it happens. Yet, I still stand and watch it, like the clock moves forward, unable to move back.
Something has to happen. Something has to give, to break, to crumble and force forward action and movement and time. Something has to end so something can begin, and I am unsure still of what it will take. I have lost everything, have curled into the fetal position and have hidden away in my own filth and mess of a life. And still I do nothing to stop it, to change it, to reverse it in anyway. Still I do nothing to prevent the end which I so fear, which has be so paralyzed that I allow it to happen right before my eyes. What will it take to break the cycle, to free myself from my own curse? If not this, what? If not now, when?
There is nothing for me but to move forward, this is how it has always been; I do not possess in me the ability to stand still, to wait for the sun to rise or a passerby to offer direction. I wander instead, I choose the hard way and try to make sense of the street signs, of the instincts I have toward North. And when I have wandered, no clear path found, my feet aching and my heart loosing hope; when I have kept it up, blindly searching, refusing to stop—for what is there in stopping when all you have left is keep moving? When I have no way of knowing what lies around the next corner or how soon I will find my way home, I cry, and I cry, and I stop moving, finally, until I cannot stand still any longer. And then I move again, for there is nothing to do but keep moving forward. Things still fall apart, even when you're walking, but especially when you stop. Something, though, something keeps you standing, and something makes you start walking again.
I am standing still, I am not living; I am crying, uncontrollably heaving, sobbing at anything and weeping at everything. Something is going to come, and I will grow impatient with standing, and I will start moving again.
I know this: I have grown tired of fear and angry with laziness. Impatience is nothing if it is not the love-child of exhaustion and wrath.

02/24/2009

Author's Note: The whole point of everything is to move toward something.

Posted on 02/24/2009
Copyright © 2010 Rachel C Johnson