Attempts at a new fiction

I have never been able to sit still for very long.  After a while I begin to suffer shortness of breath and my body tingles and feels as though somehow it might be also existing simultaneously in some other indeterminate place.  Even my brief encounters with joy are coterminous with a certain wanderlust.  I have always, ever since childhood, felt acutely lost (though I know perfectly well that I am not) and lonely, which I've never really been either, in the literal sense of the word.  For example, in the midst of intense conversation, or even sometimes in the act of making love, I have the gnawing awareness that I am separate, that from somewhere outside me I am being limned by an invisible, yet everpresent, hand.  It is impossible for me to not think of myself in this way, constantly being redrawn, reworked, the shading done so that I am always partially, at least, steeped in darkness, the shadows, as it were, creeping always a little over me.  And yet, I wouldn't call myself an unhappy person.  On the contrary, I've experienced an abundance, I would say, and that being touched with melancholy only intensifies the good.

But even now, writing these lines, I feel an overwhelming sense that I must move about, that the act of writing itself is somehow to be avoided, and that the issuance of this behavior is contained even in the enzymes of my body.  And this is the beginning of my madness.

Presenting a tidy appearance to the world, much less writing, is daily an heroic activity.  Both have small windows of opportunity before the elan of alcohol and crippling self-doubt move in like barbarian hordes.  I am, in fact, a connoisseur of this space between clarity and conscious (and moral) manumission. I have the lurking sense that I'll never be able to write another word, smile again at my beloved, taste a wine I have desired.  This is both what drives me forward and cripples me.  I am wrecked against my own will.  And then there comes release, and wildness, and then the process starts all over again the next day.

A poem written by a moth that I read often.

She came around the corner 

to see body-sized mounds of rags and debris.

They could have been the warm torsos and arms

of the dead, wrapped in plastic and cloth, 

that she wasn't supposed to see

at the age of eleven or twelve.

Or twenty-five.

But they weren't.

No, they were not.

They were everything and nothing.

Like the brown paper bag

that caresses the curb under unseen stars.

Or the weeping un-heartbeat

of the car's turning signal.

Its melodic sobs asynchronous

with any other's.

Signal, it is. 

To listen.

The drive home is silent but for the city.

A moth's wing and a wet nose greet her at the door.