this is sort of an apology. it is not a very good one.

i was thinking. that i am, perhaps, an exhausting human being. she is always writing, always thinking, always singing, always reading.

and maybe i would be more... manageable, if i could just take a day, or an hour, or 10 minutes, and watching some effing television. play a video game. fold some towels. organize my itunes library. eat a granola bar. do some ridiculous facebook quiz about what color of season 1 power ranger i would be.

but all i do, all i do is write. and read old things i've written, and write about them. it's awful, reading things you wrote when you were someone else. i have been reading things from 2 and 3 and 4 years ago. (hint: timelines are significant), and i am alternatingly amazed and mortified by the things i wrote and thought and was then. and i want to change them, and delete them, and make the prior me (who is so far away, now, i think of her as "her") sound more intelligent, and less brainwashed, and less desperate, and more like she's got a teensy bit of self-respect. i hate the things i wrote then. they are relics from another world to me now. and they are ugly.

and still, i can't change them. they're ugly and they're awful and they're, frankly, embarrassing, and i don't think anyone who knows me now would recognize me in them, but they are sacred for what they are. they are what i used to be, and instead of drawing lines in the sand between that girl and me, i have to leave her words alone. people change when they have to, and in order to launch that process of change, they tell themselves they are new people. they are liars; i was a liar when i said it and i will be again. there is no such thing. new beginnings are a myth. we are all what we are, spurred on by where we came from whether we admit it or we don't. and it is a useful and a beautiful lie; it gives us courage to be what we want to be. 

as much as i want her to never have existed, she did and does as i do. and to expand, the way i'm desperate to, and to grow and become and exist as something i could call a tolerable self, i have to read the old things. all the time. i have to live in time collapsed, in kaleidoscope identities of she and i and all the intermediary transparencies that i could call a self. 

 i cannot deny her. she was as much a human being as i am now. and this, this now, is why i am so exhausting. i am absolutely, unequivocally determined to figure this out, to come to terms, to see with eyes open, to sleep better, to sing always, to remember without fear, to write pages and books until i've got something coherent and authentic that i could feel comfortable setting down in front of a television to watch american idol or some such nonsense.

so i guess this is an apology. sort of. the kind of apology where the person says they're not really sorry about what they're doing, but they feel bad because it's making all their friends miserable. like if your sister just started playing the violin and it sounds like a fight between two nails over who can make the biggest line on the chalkboard, and for the entire 3 hours she plays she apologizes: not for playing, but for the death she's inflicting on everyone else's eardrums. this is that kind of an apology.  so i'm sorry, to everyone who does not wish to, on a daily basis, discuss mysticism or trauma theory or gender or how time collapses in religious rituals or hegemonic masculinity or iran or pacifism or my old stories or violence or love or what art is. to all of those people, i am truly sorry. really, you should say something. i can put you on a do-not-call list, except for talking. or something. 

these days, we are nothing if not dynamic. and the nights we don't sleep (hardly) and the days we don't sing are just steps in a direction, inshallah the one i'd like to think i'm going in.

i am less, these days, a pile of secrets, and more of a whirling dervish of them. spinning and spinning til i can't see anymore, letting the circles take me and hoping that when i stop spinning i will see clearer than before. until then, we are what we are. and i hope it is, in its current state, tolerable.

writing, dancing, free people. i wrote that quite a long time ago. it is still, even still, true.

perhaps some things i write do not become idiotic with time.

then again, that's a long shot. well, we live and see.