thought

It All Comes Down To…

Nothing.

Sometimes, it all comes down to absolute nothingness. There is no reason to actions, no reason for behavior, no reason for thoughts. Sometimes, it all comes down to nothing, at all, whatsoever.

Despair sets in as the weeks go by. Despair coupled with longing and yearning for something else, something different, something old and familiar rather than new.

Not all the time. No, some moments are full of their own fierce emotion, their own wonderful, eventful, meaningful something. Those are the moments for which all is worthy, all is important, all is enduring and good. Those are the moments when things make sense, passions burning brightly, thoughts whirling in an endless stream of new ideas, new names and faces, new imagined scenery.

But sometimes, when the limbs are suffused with a weariness beyond measure, when the thoughts are sluggish and illogical, when the very tips of the fingers don’t wish to respond to a thing in the world… then, it all comes down to nothing, and the vast void that fills the future is frightening.

Everything Can Change

Everything can change, between one moment and the next. Anything can cause the change, as long as it triggers something within your mind. It can be a snatch of song, floating from a car window that reminds you of an event from the past. It can be the way a leaf falls from a tree, looking just like a similar one that you saw a week before. It can be just a few words of a conversation that two people walking by your are having.

Everything can change, between one moment and the next. The sky, that looked so blue and wonderful can turn into a scorching, painful color. The breeze, that felt so pleasant and cool and sweet, can now make your hands feel like ice. Your very insides, which felt so balanced and serene, can turn into a flurry of angry bees, buzzing and stinging and making your muscles clench.

Everything can change, between one moment and the next. It’s impossible to shut out those day-to-day coincidences that meet our eyes and ears and remind us of things. So, we accept the fact that everything can change. We accept the fact that our emotions are irrational, strange things. We accept, and we live with it.

Everything can change between one moment and the next. Sometimes, things change for the worse. But when things change for the better, in the space of a breath, it feels like a gift.

A Thought On Writing

Although I’m writing about essay-writing in this particular instance, I’m pretty sure that this happens in creative writing as well.

There is a point, while writing something, when your brain simply goes numb. You catch yourself staring at the computer screen or at the notebook in front of you, and for a moment you’re almost sure that no thoughts have gone through your head for the past two minutes. Of course, if you think about it, you realize that you’ve been thinking the whole time, but not about anything profound or interesting – definitely not about what you’ve been writing. Rather, you’ve been thinking about your next meal, or the dress your friend just bought, or the trees with their pretty autumn leaves outside.

It’s a strange sensation – almost like your mind is betraying you, for once it gets to this point, it’s often really hard to get your mind to function properly once more. You may need, at this point, to get up and stretch and do something completely different. If you try to stare at the page for much longer, you’ll fall into despair and won’t manage, under any circumstances, to write something you’re pleased with. It’s a tricky situation, and one which I’ve been reaching over and over again in the past couple weeks.

The real problem is when you don’t let yourself take that break from whatever you’re writing. It’s a problem I repeat too much. I need to learn to listen to my brain, and when it tells me to stop and get up and do something else, I should do it, instead of sit and force myself to write for another half hour or hour or two or three. Having said that, I am, of course, going back to my extremely poorly written essay, even though my brain is going fuzzy. Alas, I must ignore my own conclusions for tonight.

Mute Anna

Anna wept silently. Where once she screamed, now she was calm, tears dripping down her cheeks without a sound. She had gone away for a time, or, at the least, had slept like a morbid version of a Sleeping Beauty. However an equally morbid prince must have come to her without her knowing it – he must have worked some sort of sourcery to awaken her from her restless, though long, sleep. She couldn’t remember a prince, but he must have been there. If she could have chosen freely for herself, she would sleep in the tower forever more, sparing the world her presence.

But Anna was awake again, and she couldn’t fall back asleep. In fact, the castle where she’d slept seemed to have disappeared without a trace, leaving a few dusty old stones lying around in a field of brown grass. She would stare at the forlorn heap and couldn’t even contemplate building the castle up again. It was too difficult. It was so much easier to simply sit on the grass and weep.

The silence irked Anna, though. She was used to being free, unfettered, unreserved, but something had changed – she knew not what – and she couldn’t make a sound anymore. She was so silent that she would throw stones around for the simple pleasure of hearing a noise and making sure that she hadn’t gone deaf. She hadn’t, though, she’d simply become mute. Each day that passed, however, brought her throat a slight ease and she felt that before long she may be able to make a squeak again – and then, ah, then! Then she would be able to resume her screams, the thing she relished in most. Anna couldn’t help it – she was a violent, ugly beast. But so beautiful as well, so beautiful that it would take an age to describe her beauty and charm.

After the Last Page is Read

There is a unique feeling that one gets when finishing a novel. When one closes the back cover of a book, it isn’t quite over yet. If you’d look carefully, you’d see a fine trickle of fairy dust flowing from that last page and right into the reader’s mind – it is the story, refusing to lose its hold on a reader so quickly and to be put back on a shelf as if it doesn’t matter. The story would much rather walk around with the reader for a while, influencing his or her thoughts and ideas.

Stories are living things, full of their own characterizations, personality quirks, stylistic choices and charm. They can cause a reader to think seriously about an issue, to laugh hours later at a funny incident, to remember fondly a particular passage or simply to contemplate the way the story ended and what that means. Stories can play with their readers minds, causing them to jump at sounds in the night if they’re scary, or to sigh over a couple kissing if they’re romantic.

And so, even when a reader puts a just-finished book back on the shelf and leaves it, the story sticks around, replaying images and words in the mind’s eye. It is one of the greatest wonders of words, that they’re able, within a few hundred pages – and what are pages? Such flimsy things – to preoccupy the reader’s thoughts and affect them. Words are powerful, and stories focus their power.

Mind-Space

Oftentimes it feels as if that space between one’s ears, that space that isn’t very large and shouldn’t be able to hold so much information – that space sometimes feels overfull. Thoughts crowd it, vying for position as the foremost amongst them. Feelings, which ultimately are all just caused by strange surges of electricity or chemicals, feelings also seem to crowd their own chambers; they don’t often make sense, and they tend to mix with the thoughts more often than not, causing a terrible tangle.

If only one could card out one’s thoughts and emotions like so much dirt out of wool. If only there were a way to silence the hundreds of half-formed ideas and concepts that jump around, just for a moment, just for a temporary relief. The silence and the privacy of that place in the mind seems somehow to be overwhelming and crowded, and one can’t help but wonder how, and if, anyone else deals with this.

Who knows? Perhaps you’re the only one with a crowded, tangled, snarled and unorganized mind. Perhaps everyone else’s minds work differently, perhaps they’re organized in tidy drawers and the thoughts can be pulled out neatly, one by one, and examined at the thinker’s leisure. Then again, maybe not. Maybe humanity, that sole race that seems to have such an extent of consciousness, is made up of billions of confused and messy-minded individuals, and each wonders if their mind is unique or if it is like this for everyone.

Unruly Thoughts

There is a problem I seem to have – while I often know exactly what I want to write about, there are also times when I sit and stare at my computer screen for full minutes at a time, and I ponder. The thoughts run through my head, half finished sentences chasing each other around and around. I abandon one idea and move onto the next, I ditch that one and jump to yet another one. It can be a wonderful feeling, and can sometimes lead to something that I catch hold of and mull over, and that something can eventually blossom into a whole piece.

Then again, there are those evenings where the thoughts never cease to chase each other around, like wild children in a game – each is intent upon making itself heard. But then, as children will do, the ideas abandon their convincing and pleading because something more interesting is going on, or because they’re bored, or perhaps even curious of what the next idea is going to be.

How do writers, real writers that is, deal with this? Once you have a beginning of a story, how do you decide what to do with it? How can a writer, even one with a clear picture of how everything will play out, not be tempted by the dozen odd ideas that can pop into their heads at any moment? I suppose there is some way to focus yourself, but then, perhaps writing at one o’clock in the morning isn’t the time to discover it.

Everpresent

Sometimes I find it amazing that humans have managed to exist as a conscious race at all. Think about it for a moment – we’re each stuck with our own mind and our own emotions all the time. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there isn’t any escape. When we live with other people, we have to “endure” them all the time as well, but we’re only dealing with the outward projection of this person’s thoughts and emotions. Even living with children, who speak out about what they need and want rather more than adults, isn’t the same as how we live with ourselves.

If I sound rather gloomy or negative here, I apologize, for that is not my intention at all. Of course we all have painful moments where we have a difficult time with ourselves and we feel the need to escape from something that we can never escape from. But that’s not what I’m alluding to in this post – I’m mostly thinking about the mundane, everyday thoughts that we deal with. Our minds are always buzzing with thought and emotion, always trying to figure things out, always thinking things we’d rather not think about. We have control over ourselves, but only to a point. How many times have we tried to get rid of a tune or song that’s stuck in our head? We only succeed when we’re truly distracted by something else, outside of us.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it’s incredible so many of us are still sane, stuck with ourselves as are.

Rosy Thoughts

“Plink-plink-plink”
The metal chimes of the pretty mobile touched each other lightly in the almost nonexistent breeze. Rosy stared sullenly at them with her ice-blue eyes. The sound always bothered her immensely. Why have wind chimes when there was never any wind? The air was always as still as a boulder in the summer, and Rosy hated it.
As if the tiny breath of wind had heard her thoughts, it ceased to make even the merest attempt at cooling the stifling room, and the plink-plink of the chimes stopped. Rosy shifted her position a little bit so her neck wouldn’t hurt as much, and settled down again, closing her eyes. She let out a long, slow breath.
If anyone were to look at her at that moment, they would see a beautiful, sleeping girl, her shortish hair spread around her face like a chocolate-colored halo, lips slightly open and face perfectly calm. Little would they know the turmoil of thoughts and internal conversations that went through the mind of this silent angel.
Rosy felt as if her mind was filled with a whole crowd of people.
The part of her that was a little bit wicked was saying “Keep pretending to be sick, what do you care? All that matters is that Mama and Papa keep paying attention to you.”
Then the sensible part of her would interrupt with “But you can’t go on like this forever, and once you do get up, you’ll have to deal with them.”
The self-pitying part would meekly put in “It makes me sad to think of that though… Can’t you just stay in bed and have them keep feeling sorry for their poor daughter? You are their poor daughter after all, and you are very sad and tired now.”
Wicked would interrupt with an eager “Yes, exactly, that’s exactly right!” but not long after that, Self-Loathing would rear its aggressive head and yell “You disgusting, wicked, ungrateful little fiend, how can you be doing such a thing? You make me sick, you know that? What you’re doing is just so wrong and pathetic that-”
Sensible would then try to sooth everyone with soft words, “Come now, that’s a bit harsh, but yes, you must stop this, Rosy, because it’s not going to help in the end and you know it, dear.”
Wicked-self-pitying-sensible-self-loathing Rosy snapped her eyes open once more. It was no use. No matter what she did, no matter how hard she tried to sleep and look properly sickly, she couldn’t shut out the stupid voices in her head, nagging her about what she was doing or not doing all day long. All Rosy wanted was her parents to stop fighting. They had stopped, for the past couple of days, and she knew it was because they were worried about her complete and utter collapse that led to her staying in bed all the time since. Rosy also knew that the moment she seemed to be feeling better her parents would resume their bickering and their harsh conversations, filled with grim words like “lawyers” and “bank account” and “custody” – words Rosy was thoroughly sick of.
So now instead of hearing her parents fighting, Rosy had to endure the bickering inside her head and try to deal with it. She often dreamed, when she got tired of fighting with herself, of a day in the future when she would feel fine and dandy about everything, a day when things would feel normal, no matter where her parents were. She knew  a day like that, a day where all this was behind her, was somewhere in the future. Rosy waited impatiently for that day. She wanted the present to be all over and done with.
Whenever she lapsed into that dream for too long though, her voices would pick up their arguments and she would sigh, adjust her position, and live in the now in her mind. Occasionally the wind-chimes would clink against each other, puncturing her thoughts, and giving her something fresh to be angry with, but the air always stopped moving soon, and the dead air of the summer would grip Rosy’s heart in a vice-like grip, and her thoughts would continue in their turmoil.

I have no clue where this came from. I started writing it months ago, completed it tonight. I don’t even know if I should call it a short story or not. It’s just… something.