Wordless

I'm trying to get back into the habit of writing here.  I stopped awhile back, and I'm not sure exactly why.  All the places and types of things I used to like to write just shut down.  It's like the flow of words I have always relied on just dried up.

I suspect I know why.  Before the semi-cataclysmic events of last Wednesday, I had reached a place of such worry and such stress that I basically shut down every system that wasn't essential.  Does a person do that?  Is that possible?  It feels possible.  Nothing was resolved Wednesday.  In fact, a great many things might get very much worse now.  However, two of the biggest issues in my life came to a moment of crisis, and at least now I'm not running from them.  Sometimes I think I was using up all my energy and effort with the running.  Maybe there's a mercy in the dropping of some of the old juggling balls after all....

There's also the fact that during the most fruitful period of this blog, I was writing with the idea that someone out there was reading it, someone specific.  I won't go into all that, but it's not the same now, and I've found it hard to come back here when I know that one-sided conversation is at an end.  That's just stupid of me.  It never should have been about a single person other than myself.  Knowing that it was stupid has also prevented me from coming back.  Will I fall into those same old patterns?

I miss the writing, though.  At certain times in Turkey, I saw something, and a fragment of a poem or an essay would start to form, and then it's like a hand swept away a cloud of incense, leaving me with the frustrating feeling of having glimpsed the finished work while being totally unable to capture it.  I found something  in a random notebook I  had tried to write about the Hagia Sofia, and I was astonished by how really terrible an effort it was.

I took out my book of poems the other day, the ones I have typed up and mostly in a final form, and it seemed as though another person had written them.  Maybe there's truth to that.  We do grow and change constantly, or at least we're supposed to.  It's not supposed to be a bad thing.  I just can't stand the thought that this new person, this current incarnation of me, is wordless.