It's Sunday night and all is quiet. My stereo plays the music of Edward Shearmur softly in the background. The room is lit by candles for ambiance, their dim flickering light supported by the warm wintery glow of the street light that shines through my lounge window from over the road. The street below is motionless.
This is one of those moments that would perhaps be more rewarding if I simply put down my laptop and just relaxed. It's a melancholy moment, but such for no reason that I can grasp. My eyes search the room and settle on the branches of the leafless tree outside.
I suddenly feel quite alone, in every way. Maybe I should abandon this 'meanwhile'. If I have something to say then it isn't manifesting itself through my fingertips and I can't imagine that trying to force the issue will help.
So many words to choose from, yet not one is able to lead to another. There is no rhythm, no flow. The life in this text is lifeless. It will simply fade out when I finish typing. What good is that? There isn't any point in writing when the task is a task in itself.
I'll come back later, maybe then I'll have been able to grab and hold a thought long enough to make some sense of it?
--
Okay, so it's later now. My usual therapy of a long hot soak in the tub seems to have done the trick. It's loosened up my muscles enabling my fingers to dance over this keyboard with a little less concern about what a bad dancer I must seem to be to all those who might be watching from places I can't see.
I wanted this 'meanwhile' to reveal something, if not to you, to me. A friend of mine said to me in an email that I reveal more of what I feel in my writing than I would normally do so in conversation. It never occurred to me that this might indeed be the case. After that email, I suppose I felt under pressure to come up with something revealing, while at the same time not too revealing.
I felt like I needed to monitor my words more carefully. Could my black and white ramblings reveal so many shades of grey? These are my words, and I know who I am. But I might have no idea who you are. And I wonder just how you picture me in your mind.
I always say that I am not a champion of communication. I'm a private person. As much as I try to be open about feelings and such with people that matter, I find it incredibly hard because it's the people you hold in high esteem that you least want to hear negative words from.
Given a chance, I would probably just end up talking garbage with my most trusted and loyal friends. Relationships become espionage over time. Controlling the flow of information can become an obsession. Those who know too much have the power to become a threat, and threats need to be eliminated. It's a self-destructive circle that ultimately ensures control but at the highest of prices.
I can control honesty, but I don't want to. I want words to flow out of me naturally. But I'm struck by the fact that what I write has the power to be more revealing than anything I might say. I can't reshape the truth into anything other than untruth. So I have to make a choice. Keep writing and see where this all goes, or stop now and risk nothing.
This blank page is not a threat, and if I can't talk to you, who can I talk to?