I did not write today. How
could I? The happy stories have all been written and the vagaries of life,
increasingly, have a sameness to them. There are no mountains or seas left to
escape to. Strangers no longer smile in jest; they just walk past, their drooping
shoulders burdened, their barren eyes hoping to finally sleep a night.
The newspaper guy duly deposits
more noise at my doorstep while I stay under my quilt inside, too afraid of
what it might carry, too sick from a permanent throbbing sense of foreboding.
But it has all been written about. So I did not write today.
There is fatigue from the empty
discourses of a higher purpose, from those shallow expeditions to the
sanctified soul. Nothing yields. Causes sprout like weed, causes sprout from
weed. They are celebrated in angry songs, loud exhibition and commemorated,
before the sober purge begins. The governments crumble under questions and
dissent. Dissent tires of itself and questions age into history. There are no answers
I can write about.
I did not write today. But
everyone else seems to have written. About the crushing lies of their lovers
and a longing that is senile from having waited a bit too long. About the white
noise of their loneliness that makes them sleep on the bathroom floor of their
marble palaces. They have created literature out of everything. From the
squalor of the man who scavenges by the sewer to the oddity of rat poison by
the artist’s bed.
Who do I write about, they’re
all claimed. The dying soldiers, the drunk poets, the sad gentry, the loveless
seekers, they’re all taken. I did not write today because literature is born
from art. And art out of passion. My passion is spent.
I did not write today. I don’t
know when I will.
