Ennui Session #8

Sometimes, mornings are like a
nosebleed.

 

Some mornings, you feel you
don’t wanna write this novel anymore. Some mornings you feel you’d rather write
a 50-page treatise on the rings of Saturn. Or the mating rituals of Cuban
earthworms.

 

Friends tell you you’re now living
the “good” life. Now you’re calling the shots. Now there’s no specter of a boss
casting shadows behind you. Now, you have those two sharp teeth and you’re
sinking them into the soft neck of Life As You Want It.

 

And you wonder: Why does it feel
like a frigging nosebleed?

 

To find true happiness, says a
character in Chuck Palahniuk’ novel Invisible
Monsters, you have to be like this animal, cut open with all its vital
organs quivering and glistening (imagine intestines, liver, pancreas),
everything dripping and pulsating. The only way to true happiness is to risk
being completely cut open. And somehow, somebody will come to sew you back up.

 

Like a dutiful kid, I usually
keep that in mind. Don’t pretend. Say it straight even if you write it with blood from where your
fingernails had been.

 

But a nosebleed is a nosebleed
is a nosebleed. And usually, no one comes, and you take a needle and thread and
sew yourself up. And some mornings, I wake up staring at the ceiling trying to
filter, weed out, draw a flimsy line between what was dream and what was
memory. Which was nightmare and which was real life. Some mornings, I ask
myself if there is any difference.

 

Happiness is cutting yourself
open. Completely. But the more I do that, the more my innards rot from sepsis
of the fourth order. What little I understand only condemns me to play the
patron saint of all the losers in this planet. My empty wallet and empty heart
force me to speak for all mediocrity, for all inarticulable smallness, for all
those who can’t speak for their own disappointments.

 

Some mornings, I walk out that
door and tell the world Pummel me. Crush me. Send a missile because I’m standing
on Ground Zero. Like that rich Chinese lover in Marguerite Duras’s novel, I
tell the silent world To destroy me completely. It’s easy; I’m so much weaker
than you can possibly imagine.

 

When I first came here, I
intended to take the universe. Now, I’m giving it all back. It’s about time.
It’s beginning to end.

 

It’s all yours.

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