Dragging on

Days stretch into weeks stretch into months, and the experience of distance and longing never dimish. The withered pre-spring blooms on my desk compete with the tete-a-tete, that ubiquitous symbol, their shining, delicate stalks gathered by a hand sorry to see them curl and die, but glad to preserve them. The temperature has yet to rise enough to encourage the real harbingers of spring, the furtive, green-brown shoots of the outside world, to push up out of the hard ground. I wish it would. Easter soon to be here, not quite a time of rebirth, not quite laden with blossom and scent, not quite ready. I wish it was.

I receive small glimmers of hope in the form of vacant, and stuffed-to-the-gut missives, but the longing lives on. More time to myself means more time for thought and for the books too long neglected, but instead I'm sitting here, the carefully metered beats dancing me inside myself, tiny muscle twitches no substitute for the ungainly movements that are so much a part of my world, though not now.

A web of veins maps the back of my hand, was that always there?

Back in Sweden again.

Thinking about gaps in continuity, about the life that happens in between having time to record it, about the forgetting, and the remembering, and whether there isn't something to be said for not recording, in that trains of thought lead back to the forgotten recesses and create pleasant surprises.

I will always remember the hot boys in the hot air, on their up-turned trolleys outside a supermarket: whiling away the afternoon with shouted commentaries and glances laden with casual interest. But I often forget the alarmingly gravelly voice of the homeless guy outside the bank. The voice that ripped through you as you stood within the over-air-conditioned vestibule, taking out too much money that could easily be his. And this thought leads me on to more memories; the air-conditioning: its metal smell, the chill briskness of interior vs. exterior space, the wall of heat upon exiting.

Maybe the excitement of remembering makes forgetting worthwhile.

dragged up from the deep

Just realised I set up this blog two years ago, while living in Sweden, and haven't touched it since.

I was glad, when I opened it up, that I had given the blog such an appropriate title, as it reflects my experience of my current surrounds just as much as it did my life back then. It gives me a pleasing sense of continuity.

So, I'm not really sure what to do with this space. I put interesting thoughts into my notebook, I write messages to people in which I get everyday experiences off my chest; stories and things mostly get processed and abandoned while still in my head. So. I suppose I'm just going to collect a few musings along similar lines as the rest of the kids for the times being, and see whether I can make anything worth reading out of them.

Perhaps tomorrow it'll be forgotten about again. Still, one ten-line entry in two years is not two bad, right?