I wish there were some way for me to convey how frequently I come here to write, and how infrequently any of those opening paragraphs are actually completed. Sometimes it's just because I'm distracted, and other times it's because I feel compelled to write, but nothing happens. It's like a dry heave. My writing, it's like a dry heave. This is how I get things like "On Finding the General Vicinity," and "In Wake of a Cat" -- poems about absence and my inability to communicate what's been bothering me. The idea of absence has become an obsession, the idea of idleness, images of lights left on in empty houses or in rooms where no one is sleeping. The idea of not knowing yourself or your appearance. The way a breath feels when it enters your body, heavy, slow, and foreign.

Sometimes I wish for terrible weather so that I could stay home and read, with no power and thunder in the distance. We've been having such beautiful weather lately.

I feel like for all the images I create of myself in front of mirrors or alone in my bed, I never quite make it onto the page. I don't feel like I fully exist in any medium, just pieces of me that poke through in photographs I take or poems I write, or the way that I converse with people I don't know. It's like I can't fit inside any one thing long enough to figure out what it is I'm trying to say -- long enough to really discover myself. Sometimes my body is just a medium.

And I keep thinking about the difference between a void and a cavity -- a lack of something, versus something that is incomplete, that waits to be filled. All of these ideas are caught inside me, like the songs I listen to (I'm still on "Muzzle of Bees"). Sometimes I can't turn them off. Sometimes I wonder if suffer is even the right word. As I told Carolyn, maybe I'm just being overly dramatic about feeling disconnected.

Maybe it's something that time heals.