I miss writing.

I don't do it any more. I've tried a couple of poems, and they've been complete messes. I can't even do a limerick, or a haiku. It comes out with the right number of syllables but no soul, no feeling behind the work. Like a computer wrote it.

I had a novel that I was working on outlining, and I haven't written a word on it since January. I have five story starts on my Mobilon that I haven't worked on in months. I continue to accumulate references, but it just feels rote, now. Stale. flat. Dull.

Exactly as if I'd never had the ability to live as another person. Exactly as if I'd never been able to compress the essence of a moment in less than a hundred words.

I do journal entries, and that's the extent of my writing. I'm thinking about pulling down most of my Web site, because it feels dead to me. The work of another person entirely. I reread my stuff and it sounds wrong. Like something I never wrote at all. Who was I when I wrote this?

That's a question that I can't answer.

Things are beginning to fade, now. I'm starting to forget the way I used to be, the hopes and dreams I used to have. It's a dangerous thing, because I haven't yet come up with anything to replace the old dreams. Nothing seems important enough to use my limited emotional energy to work toward. I seem to have gotten stuck in this awful daily treadmill with no room on it for anything bigger than myself. I feel simultaneously self-absorbed and like I'm disappearing, like maybe I've disappeared already and I'm just going through the motions.

I read through a poetry collection the other day. And for the first time in my life, I didn't read a poem that made me think good idea, but I could do it better than they could. It was just kind of there.

For the first time in my life, poetry has become just words.

It's like losing the ability to see colors. Like losing the ability to taste salt. Like losing the feeling on your upper lip. Nothing fatal, nothing even that important, just something that leaches the world of some of its flavor, an enjoyment, a pastime that no longer pleases.

I am trying not to believe that this is what being human is about. About losing the only thing that kept you going for most of your life. Words have been my friend, have comforted me, have been the reason I could stand to even glance at the world. And now, when I need them, they are gone as if they never were. Words were my last line of defense, the thing that nothing could ever take away.

Except maybe the acceptance of myself as human. Except maybe trying to hold myself in a shape that isn't natural to me.

Except maybe trying to be content with what I have and not looking beyond the circle of my arms.

The strange thing is that otherwise, everything else seems to be going all right. Chris and I are pretty much the same, getting together once or twice a week after not seeing each other for a few weeks. I'm starting to wake back up after spending last week in a zombiefied state. I've finally accepted that my cat is gone, and am getting used to the shape of a household without him in it.

And spring is finally truly here, and it's warmed up and everything is this really intense green.

I'm not certian I'm going to get a lot of comfort out of this summer. But I can try, I guess. If I get enough alone time outdoors, maybe I'll start to feel better about not being able to write. Maybe I'll even think of some new goals while I'm out there.

Or maybe learning about contentment will be just enough.

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