my_window_seat | (no subject)

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away...
A movie was made.
This is not that movie.

I used to keep paper journals. Analog. Wrote everything down and kept it with me, along with whatever I was reading at the time, which was always something - never went anywhere without my journal and someone else's words - a printed escape hatch with two doors to jump into at a moment's notice.

The girl at the party in the corner with a book, the girl at the end of the bar with a book, the girl in the back of the car with a bunch of other people yelling and throwing things at each other and taking corners on the curb with a hint of smoke or at a camp site or at the beach or at a concert or waiting in line or -

Always with a book and a journal. My words and somebody else's because the real world isn't always the right place to be at the time you need it to be someplace else.

I thought about things. I read things. Then I wrote stuff down.
I still do that sometimes, though not nearly as often.

I was living in New Jersey one summer. There's a story there but yadda yadda etc. and I ended up living in a basement of a guy's house with a British girl I'd met working at a summer camp and instead of going to England and being a hostess at a kareoke club for foreign business men - and yes, that was actually what was planned but didn't happened, which is yet another story yadda yadda etc. -

Sylvia and I were living in Jerry's basement, a house which at that time was pretty much Party Central for the Jersey Dead Head Crowd. There were a lot of parties at that house. A lot of people coming and going at all hours, and even in all the melee and madness, the house was a reasonably decent place to live for a little while. Sylvia and I cleaned the place up in between parties and generally paid our way in that way. Housekeepers for the Dead Heads. That would make an interesting line on the resume...

Before one of the parties, I accidentally left my journal sitting upstairs on the coffee table. It must have gotten mixed up in the magazines and I didn't even realize it was gone until I had something I needed to scribble, and I found it, and - yeah, okay.

The next week in the afternoon, we're tidying up the house post-party with a few people and packing some stuff to go on another camping trip (same party just changing location), when Sylvia called to me from the other side of the house, "~D~ - 'ave you seen my - "

And the girl standing next to me turned and said, "That's you?"
And I said yeah, that was me.
And she told me that the week before she'd read my journal.

It was just a writing journal more than anything. Not a bunch of super personal stuff but mostly scraps of terrible poetry and story ideas and a few sketches and what not.

She mentioned some particular piece by name, and gave me a look I couldn't quite read and said, "I know exactly how you felt."

I think I've been looking for that same look and that same quality of meaning ever since.

And it's been so many years and so many lifetimes since that moment that I know that it was an isolated moment, and it won't ever happen again.

Now it's not so important to find that moment anymore. I've been with myself - really alone with myself, for so long, that I no longer have that as a goal - I don't need to have my own feelings mirrored exactly in another person. The moments where there's a shared connection of consciousness - all well and good, and I'll take that and that's a moment of its own and then the next moment happens -

But where are you if you're only looking for a reflection of yourself in someone else?

Common ground is good. Shared humor and/or pathos, yes that's healthy as far as it goes -

And then there's a need to be somewhere else for a little while.
Get out of your head.
Find another world to go into and explore it.
See things you wouldn't have if you traveled with another person carrying the same maps you've already been following.

I'm tired of being alone.

Not that I am entirely.
There are really special people in my landscape.

But everything and everyone seems to be at a slight remove; a little fuzzy around the edges, because I've made it a habit to stay in the background. Watch everyone else as they interact with each other, and wonder exactly how it is that they do what they do, without even thinking about it.

I've become so good at it that I don't know if I'll ever find my way back out of it again.
My skin is a canvas backdrop and every facial expression is a shade of pigment placed with care to blend with the scenery.

I never thought I'd end up alone, but then I never really - thought about being alone.
I didn't have to.
In between the times that I was alone, I was attached to this person or that who was *never* alone -
I always had a friend that I could act as a satellite to; a moon orbiting their social circle.

I guess I miss that.
Because it also afforded me those opportunities to sometimes find myself in company where I could be seen, and understood, and in connection with just one other person.
And in someone else's world, outside my own.

I miss that.

I have my own world, and it is full of many things -

But I miss that other world, too.
The one I so often needed to be immersed in and studying from a distance at the same time.
The one I skated just on the edge of, balanced between interaction and observation.

I miss the accidental collisions.

"I know exactly how you felt."

Sometimes I know how you feel.
And sometimes you get my drift, too.
And sometimes you take me out of where I am, and I can just -
be.

If it wasn't for those moments here and there, I think I'd be lost and I'd never come back.