Day 354

Time is pressing. In so many different ways. Only 11 days of this year left. An artificial measure, yes. But still one which is real and has its effects on me – as a person, as an entity, as a writer, as a worker. As a living being counting. A few weeks ago – I might have mentioned it, but I don’t read these blogs back – my acupuncturist said she had never net anyone who can say exactly what they might be doing on a given day at a given time. But for me, it seems normal, to do things at almost preordained times, when minutes are my currency. Perhaps it comes with the territory of wisdom, the wisdom thatthe quote refers to that says that “a wise man thinks of his own death at least fivce times a day.” I may have misquoted. My memory may be faulty. But I don’t think I’ve made it up. One of these days I’ll find the original quote.

I look with a degree of envy at those who seem t have more time than me. I can’t look into their eyes. I am typing this blindly with a Taylor Swift track on repeat in the background in this minute space I inhabit right now. I want to spread out again, litter my stuff and myself on increasingly expansive spaces, let my words crawl blindly across all the surfaces and cling to whatever organic matter they can find to vcarry on growing. Sometimes I wish the words would write themselves, but then I see these automatic content creators being advertised on the various platforms I use, and throw my phone at the wall in outrage, because that’s not real writing, not the organic mould and growth that accompanies the words as they spill out of our bodies onto whatever we’re using as pages. The act of creation is almost more important than what we create – be it as parents, as writers, as artists, as sentient beings.

There’s a poem in my head, that started with the phrase yesterday about the feeling I have about being split into increasingly small pieces. I added a line to it in my head today, and wrote it into my journal that really I need to fill before the end of the year lest I regret the cost of the blank pages left just before midnight on 31st December. Is this some form of autism, my obsession with sequences (and today I regret taking a press-up rest day because I feel flaccid and loose instead of tight, board-like, strong, straight, flexing), my obsession with using up every last drop of energy, time, paper, ink, mutterings tramsitted into concrete black letters on here, on my fluttering pages, in the noise they make, in the noise the words make in my head. This is automatic writing almost, because my fingers are trying to keep up with what’s coming out of them. Just spewing words. Just doing without thinking. There’s the essence of Aggie. Is that instinct, or is it something much more sentient than that. The cats lie on the bed and sleepily watch me hacking away at the keyboard, the letters flaking off almost as soon as I’ve bought them and stuck them on to replace the original letters which wear off all too quickly.

That will do. My brain is possibly warm enough now to traverse the empty spaces between this note and the chapters of Aggie waiting to be written. I should have been a solitary journalist in the newsroom at midnight, the solitary writer retching for air on some lonely planet with St Exupery’s Little Prince. There are so many different lies and lives. Which of those are we living?