Your mother, she was immortal because he loved her.

The air is blunt when I need sharp and
it rolls around in my mouth too thick and
it fills up my throat and I can’t swallow and
my lungs don’t believe me when I say
yes this is air we can breathe it
we can

but this isn’t air; it is heat and
water and worry and
we can’t breathe it.
we can’t

and the heat isn’t heat
(really, it’s not.
you have to be here to know)
and how funny that a country so hot
can do nothing to keep you warm

Polaroids were born because we were tired of waiting. Polaroids died because, even though we still needed the instant satisfaction, we had grown afraid of permanence, or posterity, or something.

I had a dream the other night that there was a book that was too long for me to ever read. It would’ve taken several lifetimes. It was only a few inches thick, but with this sort of book you shouldn’t let yourself be fooled by physical size. A few inches to your eyes would require generations of breath from your lungs. I didn’t even pick the book up; I was too intimidated. I chose the smaller one next to it on the shelf.

Upon waking I realized that every book ever written is just a chapter from the same story, this one infinite book of finite details.

You,
you think you’ve got
that silver tongue
but I see only
aluminum.

I hate being reminded that I am merely a unique collage of everyone else’s faces. And that they have my face too, somewhere.

We are all alone. We are all connected.

There was too much sugar here, so I took what I could of the grain.

these are our old things
are our tired things
our enfeebled things
broken things
our things
empty things
we fit into the cracked things
warmth in the cold things
comfort in the hard things
don’t let go of things
we will shyly share things
old things
our tired things
share our broken things
my things your things
these are our new things

I’m so tired of the sad days that come like clockwork.  Can’t get out of bed for hours because my chest is empty with a cold chain attached to the edge that keeps me in. Tired of being able to point to a calendar and say, if I will feel sad, if I will feel depressed, it will be on this day.

It’s been years now and knowing it’s fake doesn’t make it feel less real.

(I wrote this in my green journal the second time I read Yann Martel’s Self. I’m now reading it for the fourth time and still feel mostly the same way, only with a little more complexity. My view of love has grown, though.)

My relationship with Self the book is as profound as my relationship with Self the thing. It is a struggle. Love and hate exist bountifully together, the existence of the one making the other all the more intense. This is how I loved, and often still do; in a struggle of love and hate, the negative only providing the positive with a bolder outline.

Self is a vulgar, fabricated book. It is a lie. And yet, it is a book of truth. It is as if someone (Yann Martel, I suppose) decided to throw colours of metamorphosis, sex, language, philosophy, humanity, love, and identity on a canvas to see what he’d get (2010 Sharla note: Martel is a literary Jackson Pollock). The result is an ugly mess, but one that begins to grab you as soon as you start to see how the colours exist together and alone, and before you know it, it has become a part of you.

And so, Self is very much a part of me. It angers me, but I continue to love it. There are so many paragraphs of beauty, of authenticity, that the ugly bits and the thought that THIS COULD NOT HAPPEN are suddenly less important.

Self is an exploration of just that.

I have a love of the simple, of the genuine. Something about the strange, vulgar honesty of this book feeds that.

And I do not want to share. I am happy to talk about this book, but to recommend it to someone would go too far. I would become embarrassed that someone else is reading it, keeping me in mind the whole time, thinking, “THIS is what has moved her? THIS with its explicit (though not erotic) sex, its breaking of the possible, its etc etc etc.”

In fact, I do not need to share it. It has moved me and that is enough.

(I wouldn’t say it is my favourite book; it just never fails to have an impact on me.)