Quiet Moods

What sort of mood, he asks, when I reveal the reason for my quietude. And the question is, once again the answer. I feel quiet. I am not fully sad, nor am I particularly happy. My only real desires in this moment are silence and perhaps a trip to the grocery store.

What is this fascination with the grocery store I have? For me, it means safety...that I can go and buy what I need and often what I want to eat, unlike so many other times in my life. I do not buy new clothes or shoes or spa treatments the way other women do. I buy fresh vegetables and fancy, organic dessert. Yes, that is me.

He understands me. I tell him so. He agrees, asks me to enjoy it. And I fall in love with him for that. He does not ask me why today I am quiet. He does not pelt me with penetrating, alien questions but accepts me. I do not demand that he does this for always...just enough for me to let me feel my roots grow.

It occurs to me slowly that part of my discomfort is a lack in what some call personal definition. I have no trouble defining others: hippie, jock, nerd, health nut, political junkie. The terms of course range from hardly narrow to barely general but they exist. As I felt the pain of rejection today in my hideous undergraduate class (hideous because I am not a nerd, not really) from two girls who do not know one tenth enough about me to reject me to begin with, I saw it again. I'm not intelligent enough to be a nerd, I am not thin enough to be fashionable, I am not educated enough to be a leader. I am not enough of any one thing to be any one thing, and while I would normally consider this a gift, tonight I choose to see it as the reason I have never felt as though I fit in. I have fought and bled to not be any one thing, and yet here I am cursing it.

The deeper the cut, the greater then chance of infection. See, regular bacteria can be killed with proper antiseptic treatment but the oxygen-hating ones...the ones that only the deep cuts can be infected with are the hardest to kill. I remain so open to such criticism of my own being, having nothing to compare it to at all but my own shallow standards. It is really no wonder that I feel quiet.

And in the end, I have no idea what I meant to write about. I suppose it will not kill me not to be any one thing. Perhaps it is even the best thing for me. I can be whatever I'd like for as long as I can before I realize people can tell I am not that thing which I am pretending to be. I no longer worry so much about my contradictions, rather than trying to find out, I try to accept who I am and I have a feeling this is better than most people get. After all, my life is nearly half over and it would seem rather injustice to have to figure out who I am at this point. I'm developed, I'm adult, I've already learned enough about mortality to know I should have at least one child.

I think of the masses and know why they pay so dearly for imitations of happiness: food, television, movies, clothes, electronic human connection. For as old as time, people have and people will for the rest of time usually only be able to afford, be it monetarily or emotionally, imitations of the real thing. Read a book instead of going, order it instead of cooking it, run on a treadmill because you sit in an office all day.

I fall prey to the same disorder. Yet, I know that they are imitations. Tonight, perhaps for the first time in my hideously short yet perpetually long life, I feel disconnect and revel in it. The Buddha was right. The difference between him and I is that he actively pursued such disconnect; I am content and even surprised that I've experienced it even now. I cannot even be now a failure in Buddhist philosophy. I can't even be a failure. How grotesque and beautiful a statement, an accurate reflection of human nature, so unable to conform mostly because it should not.

We are the most beautiful of His creations by far. To not stop to wonder at it is criminal and intoxicating and wrong.

This blog, like many things, is the product of some dry cider and a close reading of the Sun magazine. It's so like me, at times, it scares me. When it arrives, under any circumstance I devour it and sing its praises the way a morning bird chirps. It is me, a strange mixture of cultures, poetry, prose, sadness, regret, joy and insightful, worldly analysis. It's an interview with me in not so many words. It's action and yet inaction. I love it as pure as a person can love an inanimate, biodegradable thing. Why love something so familiar as myself, you ask? It's obvious. Myself, she gets lost in the day-to-day. I become nothing more than a cavalier set of reactions to the world, as opposed to action. Reading the Sun is a lot like meeting myself after a long journey or waking from a deep sleep. It's a reminder that I, like all of us, is more than our life, more than our descriptors and even more than our memories. We are more, as humans, than ten times the sum of our parts.

We are beautiful.