Mimi is Rallying

Owing to a long span of artistic lethargy I haven’t been able to record anything since my departure from korea. Nothing by way of event happened, to be fair, but I have been feeling a lot. In effect, I was spent completely from the attempted breakup; my emotional capacities having been shot to the extreme, absolute sensitivity, I felt vulnerable to the slightest assault (or the intimation of assault) – including the inevitable state that follows this sort of ordeal: insecurity in his love. For over a week since returning to Berkeley (oh - depressing Berkeley!) I roiled in this impossible condition, which is unbanishable even as it is unsustainable . . I wept bitter, bitter tears at every opportunity; the breakup haunted me ceaselessly, relentlessly, and the results of trying to cope with such lancing retrospective scenes in this current emotively raw, infirm state, were grisly.

He seemed cold. Not by design certainly; in fact he was as persistent in his assertions and reprotestations of love as anyone could be, under those circumstances or elsewise (and oh, how frayed his own resilience must have been, too!), but at that point my recovery wasn’t up to him, or anything he could have done. Or said. It wasn’t even up to me, I don’t think. It all seemed so hopeless, so without solution – and I knew, in that turbulent, ravaged, poignantly tortured state, that peace would only be attainable in the form of God. Something beyond us. Nothing else could possibly allay the aching contraction of this soul, that sharp longing for love that was absolute, certain, unconditional, responsive, devoted to me.

Today, weeks and perhaps even a month later, after several occasions of strife between us (the times I felt infinitely pathetic, desperate, and pride-lacerated as I called him weeping, at odd times of the night, sleepless and restless, begging for love he could not procure; if he did, I did not and could not believe in its sincerity - how could I?) we’ve tasted the ascent to recovery. Our love is wholly restored. The problem now is, how do I reconstruct my artistic pith? It’s so ominously odd not to feel anything anymore. I’ve simply had no urge to write or draw or anything in weeks and weeks.

It’s time to write again. I must. I don’t know what it takes to get me passionate, but I must will myself to become so. I can’t live like this anymore, lethargic, soft-minded, counting down the hours until my boyfriend presents himself available, day after day after insufferable day. Reality is that we are apart spatially, and there is only so much we can do to satisfy one another’s emotional appetites in such circumstances; no, his emotional support is sufficient in providing me a stable, becalmed emotive footing on a daily basis; I need means of a more immediate sustenance, the soothing of the more vigorous, ambitious, fretful, and urgent demand that is my artistic inertia.

I don’t know when it crept up on me. Perhaps it is the influence of living so far in seclusion all the bloody time, which attributes to this unshakable state of unmotivatedness. The days of impassioned writing on a weekly, no, daily basis seem a lifetime away. Did I truly consider it my obsession? Did it truly come so naturally? If so, where is it now? Why is it so pathetically difficult to compose a single e-mail? I need to reassert myself back into that ambience. That frame of mind which enabled me to fabricate and dissect worlds, lifetimes, characters and villains. Let me purge myself of this lethargy, this anxiety, this insecurity, this prejudice against my own writing.

It’s a curse, this sodden ego. Even as I write this very entry does my conviction limp away, does my good intentioned agitation peter out to a milder, meeker cadence. What am I waiting for? Why can’t I inflame my own will to something recognizably lifelike? What have I become and why can’t I care more? My mind feels like a piece of stiffened tissue somebody once wiped their nose on. It feels dry and marshy at once, reeking neglect. I wish I could start a story. I wish I understood what this all meant. At the same time, there is something verging on deliberately evasive in the attitude I employ for my self-study. As if I know, very well, that I’m not in any condition to make sense of things yet. That something is still broken and rattling. I have no desire to read or record diary entries of this past winter respite, these past benumbed months. It taxes this worn organ here cruelly.