stream of a late night consciousness

My favourite hiding spots are books. And you could argue with me about how the printed page would win over an ereader any day, but to be honest I don’t care all that much. I only need to read. I need to. That’s about it. There’s all these words running through my head, running, running, running and I need a way to slow them down.

I need a way to pretend I feel.

I can’t sleep, and there are books beside me. I would read, but the lights are off. And so I am doing the next best thing really, typing these words as they come so that they stop dancing and skipping through my head.  I still buy books, still walk into second hand bookstores and spend hours searching for interesting titles because I love being surrounded by books. My reader is just my personal, portable library. Because call it habitualization or whatever, but I don’t feel. Too many books have passed through my hands for me to whine about how it feels better. Of course it does. But I can’t carry three books with me whenever I go on a holiday. I can’t stand the nights lying in bed, knowing a scene, seeing it play out so well in my head but be unable to place it, to put it to rest because I am not at home. Or because someone borrowed it and never returned it. To have half finished scenes in my head that don’t leave until I pick up the book, flip to that scene and just absorb it all over again.

I have no qualms about reading of a machine. I read because it’s very much an extension of me. I would read of a character whose patience astounded me, who was reserved and quiet, but kind and I would think I want to be like her. I pick up personalities from my favourite characters. You could argue, that I pick my favourite characters by how much I related to them, by how similar they are to me, but no not really. That’s about partially true. They reflect me as much as I reflect them.

I wonder who I am sometimes if I pick emotions and ideas off of books. I wonder if I have ever been me. But then again, if we are but blank canvas, left hanging on some faded wall picking the dirt and dust and dead skin of the people who pass us, are we ever ourselves? We are but a product of the world. An influence upon influence building upon learnt conditionings. There you go psychology classes, I’ve learnt something today.

I’m writing these midnight rambles down so that I can let them breathe for a moment. And god, I sound like the lady in The Yellow Wallpaper.

I can pin point the moment I started feeling numb. Numb, numb, numb, what a word. The roll of the fat and ineloquent tongue. Lips slapping together. It feels exactly how it sounds. It feels like I have just be administered some annestatic at the dentist. But yes, back to the point. I know moment, the memory, and I acknowledge that the incident that triggered it was tragic. Boo. But I understand more now than I did then. I understand now why sometimes, we can be so weak and allow such condemning actions. I understand how sometimes we can forget to think of beyond ourselves, beyond how we feel at a specific moment. I get that. To an extent I understand and forgive. I think I have for years now. But the numbness remains. How strange. Or perhaps, it has always been there and I have been fooling myself that I actually feel any sort of anything.

I get sad. Of course I do. But it’s such a flimsy sadness. I do something good and it makes me feel good about myself, but there’s a hollowness to it. It’s like I’m skimming the surface of human emotions. I don’t understand how to move into deeper waters. I would welcome extreme sadness, if only as proof I feel. But even as I write this, these rambling thoughts that I think off when it’s dark and I’m alone, I barely feel a thing.

Reading lets me pretend I feel. Because for those brief moments, I am not myself. I‘m running from danger. I am watching the sun rise from high above my favourite tree. I ride on dragons and face foes and outsmart villains. I am the villain. I am beyond this temporal body. I think that is why I even plot stories, plan them to the intricacies, but never really introduce the pen to the paper and sit down to write. Because I love planning and building worlds and characters. I like trying to figure them out. But I have no motivation to give them flesh through words because they already exist for me, to an extent.

I am pathetic. But I don’t lie to myself about loneliness. I don’t fool myself into believing that I am not alone. We are all individual beings trying to carve our way in this world, digging our trenches and building our walls, and as much as we think we share with the solider across our wall, we don’t. There may be similarities, things you both love but he is not you and would never really know who he really is. You know who he is then, in that situation, but the world you see is not his world. Nor does he see yours. So since we wander in our own versions of our world, brushing only occasionally with others when they overlap like a Venn diagram, aren’t we alone?

I don’t know why I read romance novels. I think I like making myself believe that romance and love and all that abiding, deep, feeling exists. That they are not just words.

--written on the 21st of September, while I should have been sleeping.