September 14, 2010

Sometimes I wonder if you think that it's me sending messages into the universe hoping to reach you. You, who are approximately 6,400,000 steps away from me. You, where the buildings are tall and the streets are noisy. You, with a life quite different than mine yet somehow similar.

No. I wouldn't. I couldn't go back now. I promised myself that I'd never do that again. It took me a long time to figure out that I was in love with you and even longer to figure out how that happened in the first place. I have concluded it was your words, which so easily rolled off your fingertips, turning me to Jell-O with simple keystrokes. I never even met you, yet I gave myself completely and freely.

I wasn't prepared. I often wonder if breaking my heart was easy or if it was difficult, like hitting yourself in the thumb with a hammer. I bet you didn't even think twice about it. You are the master of game playing and, to you, I was just the latest version.

You just

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But I am not your stalker.  I don't write you words of longingness and missingness and lovingness. I can't and I won't.  Not in a MILLION years. It hurts too damn much.  I only visit that other place to peek through the window of life, to see if I can catch a glimpse of your beauty (just one more time) as you meander by. 

But what I want to know is this . . .

. . . . . . is that you writing to me?

The last months have been mercilessly nothing. Since my laptop broke I've been blundering around stupidly, more or less waiting for the $60 a new hard drive would cost, and being frustrated by the asinine insignificance of $60 standing so resolutely in my way. Since fucking July.

My laptop contained all my writing drafts, photographs, drawings, animations and programs - it was infrequently backed up to an external hard drive, but the last backup was in January 2010 and I'm none too pleased at losing the subsequent six months of recorded data that exists in no other place on or off the Internet.

And then there were mp3s, movies, pictures and text files I'd downloaded over the years, which I'm less worried about but am still having a bit more difficult time without - lacking (or actively eschewing) any other real items of value, I had used my laptop as a newspaper, television, VCR, game console, telephone, radio, tape collection, library, social outlet, reference desk, and general point of contact with the outside of my house. Without which I'm reduced to a couple discontinuous hours at the local library every day. The inability to save things (except to a 2GB flash drive, thank Providence) and the constant presence of onlookers pretty much stopped my anime-watching in its tracks, as well as my even more disreputable online habits.

But, entertainment purposes aside, perhaps the greatest loss incurred by my laptop's death is linguistic. Being notoriously bad and slow with pencilled letters, I have throughout my life preferred to type rather than write - the latter, aside from being a simple inconvenience, is hard to keep track of and harder to duplicate for archival. And without the ability to shuffle my sentences at will until they look nice, my writing is (even more) disorganized and crappy. So for the last few months I've been pretty much completely unable to write anything of substance, mostly because I can't type whenever I feel like it and have to set aside time to go to the library, wait in line and get online in public - by which time, natch, the spirit has left me and I feel completely devoid of inspiration.

I am torn between whether I hold more disdain for my life or myself.