2003-04-02 - 12:18 a.m.: wellwater

i was sitting on the toilet the other day (hush now... this is my diary)... and i started noticing patterns in the green and white flecked tiles covering the bathroom floor. patterns besides the square-by-square. patterns like stern faces and cornered swirls and spiders with hexagonal bodies and jagged legs. this has been happening more and more often. i'll watch the fluttering progression of motion as wind moves through the limbs and leaves of a tree. i notice the patterns of insects converging on a half-eaten blow-pop on the sidewalk. the layout of paperclips in a cup. wrinkles on knuckes. whorls of smoke. headlights through blinds and shadows blinking in corners. dead leaves from my unwatered plant somersaulting to the ground.

why is it that i can find a pattern in everything but me? why is it that i can say of him or her or they or it, "how typical"...but remain completely blind to the redundancy of my own behavior? i feel i've changed since *before*... but i couldn't tell you how. i couldn't tell you which habits i've dropped... which i've picked up... whether i've changed direction at all or have merely reinterpreted myself to feel more progressive.

i am able to say what i *don't* want in my life... in my person.... but some nagging feeling tells me that what i claim to not want to be is what i've been all along. that everything i'm rejecting now is what i've unknowingly embraced before. this scares me. i feel like i *have* given myself away. only not consciously. not meaning to. without the intention of "grabbing it all back"... but blindly. carelessly. it's not a matter of not giving up the wheel. it's a matter of taking it back. wrapping my own fingers around it. 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock.

could i [let go] again without thinking?

i'd like to say no. i'd like to believe no. i don't want to be chained to habits... but if i'm going to be dragging them around with me, i at least want to know it. no it. no...

...w.

i am more in touch with my ideals than i am with my reality. this is not the way to navigate a life. i am looking at the stars and dreaming of where i want to go instead of using them to calculate my current position. i'm drifting. i'm lost.

but i sleep well.

usually.

not really.

well...

yes. a well.

we throw ourselves in and expect to hear, at some point, a splash.

i guess i'm still falling, because everything's quiet.

shhhhh--

*waiting with ears wide open*

--?

...

inward...outward