Lately, I feel that I don't have the patience....or ability to write something. Not exactly the ability itself, but rather I really don't know what to say. I've had this roiling feeling inside me, a confluence of so many emotions that I'm beside myself with an inability to comprehend it, nevermind explain in words what it is I am thinking or feeling.
Somehow I'm here now though. Because writing always was my companion to express even when I was not able to understand. What I write may or may not make sense, but I will write for the sake of attempting to let out what seems to be brimming over.
I feel like a sad faced emoticon. One that just stands for a whole plethora of emotions and one that, in being a picture, doesn't need to be defined in words, because I don't know if that is sadness, or something else. I cannot explain what it is that I feel because I really don't know where it stems from. But that's how I feel. I have that pressure within that feels like it must burst out, perhaps in the form of tears. But I don't want to cry. I don't want to cry for a reason I do not know.
I visited an old memory today. An old dream. It's hard to explain how vulnerable a feeling it is, trying to share an old dream that perhaps you've never let go of, because it belonged to you in the past, and that past you is still who you are now, or what has made you who you are now. It's difficult to explain the sentiment of how important that dream was at one time to anyone else who is outside of it. To have it viewed and critiqued, or worse, not understood. But lately, I've had these old memories clogging up the drain of my mind.
I do not know if there is a distinction between these memories and dreams. I do not know if it's just the one or the other that's pulling me this way and that. It's a feeling of simple loss. Bereavement. To know that you have already buried and held funeral rites for that handful of dreams that have never made it to life. But that is after all the case with dreams more often than not, so why should I be so bothered now at the realization?
Yesterday I encountered a thought from something I was watching: "to have a soul means suffering". I wonder if it is this suffering that makes us feel vindicated in our existence. Why Devdas prolonged his pain, why every person who ever loved without reciprocation felt their love was ever more deep and longer lasting than those who have found love returned and have then forgotten or cast away the romanticism of that love, simply because they have gained it and are not suffering in longing.
But I am not one suffering in longing, or rather not in that context. I am missing something that has never tangibly existed. It is akin to pulling together two loci far apart on the string of time....and witnessing the dissonance. That's what I feel, dissonance. An alienation of myself from myself. A whole shoebox filled with scraps of memories stored on the top shelf of an old closet.
It is easy to disassociate oneself by leaving it all behind. But perhaps it becomes harder when you come face to face with another vessel bearing these memories afresh. What happens when you go back to the question of 'do you remember when...?' and it all comes flooding back without warning.
What is it that comes flooding back, though? In snatches they come to me. Memory of strongest attachments falling apart. Memory of happy dreams of a future yet to be filled in. Memory of a conviction that we were young therefore the good was yet to come. A haunting recollection superimposed with images of today - recognizing patterns that should teach us survival.
I do not know what it is that is aching within. Both foreboding and lament. But that is for tomorrow and yesterday. Why should these ghosts clash and upset me today?
