textural things

(self, 'les amants' by noemie goudal)


the lowest point is when life gets stagnant and routine is no longer an object of comfort but a means of an escape. i can't confidently say that i have fully reached this point, thank god, but nearing it in a dangerous proximity was enough to shake me into an unfathomable fear. what happens when things get stagnant? they rot. they suffocate. they die. a putrid layer of unmanageable refuse matures above everything that could have been - but you'd never come to discover, only daydream about its potentiality. it's almost disgusting how many things are left abandoned in this manner.  things, things, things.  even half the blog name admits to the ambiguity of this word. vague, but such a grand definition for what could be.

i sat in a conference room this afternoon opposite a man who brought with him a leather bound sketchbook.  he opened it with nonchalance and leafed through the pages until he found the first empty space that allowed him to scribble down notes from our conversation.  the notebook was nearly three-quarters filled, which would suggest that he made a lot of notes, but his pen barely touched the paper during the entirety of our conversation. all 36 minutes of it.  the absence of notes didn't concern me though; whether or not he found my answers insightful, intelligent, or creative became the least of my worries. for all i know he could have just tallied every time i broke eye contact or jotted down a grocery list.  sometime during those 36 minutes, an overwhelming fear of the familiar held my attention. when asked what i wanted to learn, i blurted out what i feared.  between the nerve-wracking circumstances in which we met to converse and my desire to clearly communicate my realization, the sentences i formed with the words i combined in a haphazard fashion sounded like pure bullshit.  it sounded like i stole some lines from a movie or i was trying too hard to impress him.  it was neither some trite movie line nor an attempt to impress anyone - just raw emotion coming from someone who desperately needed to grow.

"i don't even care about failing; i just don't want to be stuck anymore"
"ok"

i wonder if he saw my desperation as much as i felt it.