I'm a storyteller but I'm the worst kind

My muse has escaped me.

It struck me today- midday- because today was Talk About Poetry Finding You day, and there was Neruda with his infinitesimal pinpricks and Giovanni with her no-limits poetic explosion, and there I was: empty-minded.

I wrote because I told myself I had to, because I am trying to be more disciplined with my writing, and mostly because I always promise my poetry class that I will write every time they write. It's a fancy trick, that class. Last fall, I couldn't stop writing. Stanzas were thundering off the margins of my notebook. Theme, purpose, creativity itself deserted me: often, I was more a student than a teacher. I sat in the thick of creation.

But now. Muse? Whipped right out of me. I don't know when/how/why she left me. Maybe she's hiding. Maybe I've accidentally smothered her. Maybe I'm not suppose to know.

(Honestly: I think my muse collapsed into my Obscure Object, which undoubtedly caused some creative complications, and I'm not exactly willing to speak further on that at this moment.)

But a word (or many) about writing + me. I don't know when it began; it has simply always been there. It started full-force circa the age of 12 with highly improbably-set "novels" that I never finished. Then entered the journals, all but one of which are still hiding out in my closet, that captured an unbelievable amount of daily- though never mundane- details. [I forget the simplest things, but my memory is tightly wound and I never forget the things I want to remember.] Somewhere in the last two years of high school, I discovered blogging. My first blog (still alive, at times completely embarrassing, but ultimately totally entertaining- maybe just for me) carries on the tradition of the paper journals: detail after detail after detail. Some coding exists in place of real names, and I confess that I can't decipher all of it. When LiveJournal became "all the rage," I got one. Then a second. Then a third. Over the last eight years, I've opened at least 6 LiveJournals; today just three remain; one is infrequently updated.

Something happened in my transition from blogging to LJ-ing. I lost a part of my writer's voice in the shuffle. It took a couple of years for me to realize this, but I never did anything about it until two summers ago. I then returned to my original blog and brought a modified voice to it: that of someone who had learned the fine art of ambiguity.

But again, something was off. I needed that sensationalized clean slate, so I started fresh with a new blogspot (hello, clean slate). After a significant transfer of posts, the writing started to come back to me. The ambiguity hit a new all-time high, and the coding began again. I took this blog underground last winter or spring, but have since gone "live" once more. I'm still not sure how I feel about that, but I was tired of being undercover. I was tired of letting loose only to pull everything back in.

You can trace all of this ambiguity and vagueness to my Obscure Object- which, admittedly, has taken on a few different forms over the last 10 years. But this is another story for another (blog)post.

Maybe I don't need my Obscure Object-corrupted muse. I generally don't believe that I have one, and truthfully, I'm currently using it as an excuse for my lack of word-flow. Or maybe this is just a concrete representation of how much has changed in my life from this point one, two, even three years ago ----> to how my life exists today. Maybe I need to make more mix cds because I tell the best stories with other people's music and words. Maybe none of this makes sense.

Years ago, at what I now realize was an incredibly important and life-shaping proverbial fork-in-the-road, I wrote this: "...because everything here has been so 'almost.'"

It's true: almost.

this will go unsent.

I won't burden you with specifics, but here's the truth: I'm fucking crazy about you.

I'm not going to belabor my point with citing how long I've felt this way (longer than I'd like to admit) or how it came to be (slow, then with the speed of an undammed waterfall) or what I'd like you to say in response (ok, alright, me too, or not but it doesn't change a thing, it changes everything- for the better, for what we could be).

Years, actually.

Initially, that animal attraction swiped me, cut me. I saw you and I thought: Wow. I'd tell you this, but your reactions to things are so unpredictable, and I can barely say "hi" without stuttering and/or turning a fierce shade of the blush family when I see you, so maybe you'll read this and understand, but I bet not. The reading part. I think you'd understand. You would if you wanted to.