The remorse bores a hole and my dreams leak out. Here is a puddle of my ambitions on the floor; my anxious bladder and the end of the world. Fear has robbed me deaf, dumb and blind. I know nothing of life and being. From a young age, painfully cognizant of death, I have been burdened by the ambivalence that is a product of this context, the swallow in the mead hall, the would-be mother straddling the grave. Action becomes effort instead of purpose. Motivation is borne of boredom instead of inspiration. Meaning exists only moment to moment instead of in the beating heart. The body is absurd in its persistence. Thus, nearing fifty, a comet (a swallow) coming out of the darkness and hurling toward that which has the most gravity, I look back at the tracers that chase me through space. What do they illuminate? What have I left behind? And I regret things both done and undone, regret words, both said and unspoken. Perhaps there is no tragedy in this balance of success against loss. The melancholy I feel is only sentiment defended by the lingering expectations of parents, family, and friends, my church and by God. I cannot be a mirror of thy perfection. I am human, and I am flawed.
"This journal is not a mere literary diversion. The further I progress, reducing to order what my past life suggests, and the more I persist in the rigor of composition--of the chapters, of the sentences, of the book itself--the more do I feel myself hardening in my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power." --Jean Genet
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