Let it rain
01 August 2011 06:47 AM Categories: Writing prompts
My eyes are dry, though rain threatens daily. My muscles ache, like I’ve been running, though whether it is away from something or towards something or merely running in place, I don’t know. I ended yesterday thinking about desire, for escape or for fulfillment, the desire for companionship, for touch, the radiation out of us, the force field. I don’t want to want a thing, but I want, and the want grows in the fetid hidden dark.
For almost my entire life, I’ve wanted to escape. First it was from my home life, the kid’s imaginings of being a grownup, out from under the control and capricious decisions of adults. Then in my first marriage I focused on the crush, this person that represented something else … art, instability, dark emotion. There has always been something outside of my life to focus on, to stare at in my mind, a pretend safe/unsafe place where I would be challenged (emotionally? sexually? physically? I’m not sure.). A new career. A new place. A changed and charged conversation.
If my individual therapist were up to the task – lately we’ve just been having conversations. I see her put her notebook down and I know that the rest will be pleasant, but not about where I, um, need to go – I’d bring this up, because I think this is the tip of something large, something that I can chip away at or work on in some other context. Maybe when our needs aren’t met as children, they live on, they rise like some sort of mutant dough, ever-expanding, like something in a sick sit-com, and the room we build for them keeps getting bigger, too, it presses against the sides of our mind and things leak out and the way to deal with the pressure between needing in real life (the way we need and love those around us) to the fantasy needs that necessarily separate our bruised selves from the real needs …. Well, it all intermingles.
I fought the need to escape last night, felt the pressure in my chest, a version of the same tension I’ve been carrying around for days. I don’t know if I am up to the task, but I have to keep on going forward. I still can’t tell the line between real needs and fake ones and so I am here, I am here. I am trying.
It's hard to be good, to be clear, to know my own motivations.
From the prompt "If only ..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Pinkat, cropped slightly.
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