Atlas Minor • writing

Kindling

There’s that principle that we burn up all available time to complete a task—and this gets scary when measured in years.

To erase the “I” and stand outside of time, writing like a ghost.

The body remembers slowly and forgets very quickly.

Lately my dreams have been all garble and grime without symbolism or plot.

It doesn’t matter if the nail is in the exact right place, so long as it’s holding together two pieces of wood.

There’s a strange dynamic to this nightly journal, this sensation of writing against time. Or more precisely: writing for myself in the future.

Lately I’ve been torn between the possibilities of fiction versus my compulsion to record each day’s events in this nightly journal.

For years I would reach for my telephone the moment I woke up, groping for it with a junkie sense of need.

And I’m reminded that I think better without the screen tugging at my thoughts like a magnet.

Sometimes my mind lands on a jittery thought: screens have become our reality and the physical world simply exists to serve their needs.

This morning I was pacing our flat, searching for something I could not find. She told me it was probably “otherwhere.”

Tonight I came across Tolstoy’s three questions, and they feel especially pressing in these overloaded and disorienting days.

My interest in triangulating art, faith, and the day’s events feels increasingly toothless, maybe even oblivious.

Each morning I wake to the imaginary babble of fully-formed news reports and television clips while skating across sleep.

I’m beginning to understand why so many novels and television shows are set in the past.