i got back yesterday from a short trip west - a 3 hr drive back, then back to the domesticities: groceries, preparing today's lunch; then supper, a little dessert, strong cups of tea.
a game developer posts about how he just needs another decade, just one more decade, and his game will start to get good. oof, i feel this. one more decade, bro. just one more.
the days pass, the months, the years. i get marginally better at guitar. i get less bad at fiddle, & i occasionally pick up my flute. i write and like some of my poems better, some worse, than what came before. there's a good book of poems in there, but i can't seem to shape it. i touch up some of the music i wrote earlier. i think about going for a run.
i don't, of course. i'm done running for the year: the weather's turning, frost blanketing the still-green grass in the morning. i can see my breath as i take my dogs for a walk. they get back inside, run to the couch, curl up together.
in my down time, i berate myself for fucking around on the internet, for hitting google news for the tenth time, for scrolling social media, for writing entries like this. i am no longer young, and these letters in the dark many days feel more obligation than freeing. i write to hold off the feeling that the open horizon of my youth has shrunk and will never get wider, that the people i called friends and lovers have gone. have likely forgotten me.
the last few years a slow parade of the dead, watching the loss of old friends from every point of my life i never expected to outlive. but here i am. going to work, coming home, trying to make headway on a series of projects loved by nobody, it seems, but me. my stage fright preventing any meaningful solo musical performances; my manuscript passed, passed, and passed again. the earlier meaningful comments to keep sending it out feeling dull and hollow when the subsequent submissions received only a form rejection. my distance running times, with a few exceptions, getting slower and slower by the year. time spares no one.
a sadness settles in: a fear that my creative life is moving ever-slower toward something i can never actually touch. but what can i do? i have to work. & i have to do the work. a small packet of hours in the evening to divide among too many interests, the knowledge that if i drop one, i'll regret it forever. so i practice a bit. on flute, after a few weeks of this, i start to approach where i was at the end of high school. when i played in a small recital at my teacher's house at the western edge of town, and where, as i waited for the bus, a car slow rolled me, someone leaning out, yelling, are you a boy or a girl?
a hell of a question for a saturday afternoon in june. the truth is, i've never had a firm grasp of who i am, or else all this would be easier. surely that's the truth, isn't it? i'm a man who plays the flute and classical guitar, who writes poetry and runs because he likes the fire in his lungs. because it grants the space to think, if not to figure out.
maybe next year. maybe next year i'll get it together. maybe next year i'll finally love myself. if not, maybe the year after that. just one more decade, bro, just one more.