forkforkforkforkfork

the sad truth is this: I have not written in almost two months. Whoa. I have written nothing, absolutely nothing. I haven't been able to complete a goodbye email, a scrap of poetry, or even a grocery list in many moons.

I've been listening.

Have you ever said a word over and over again until it was nonsense? Try it. Fork. Fork. Fork. Forkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkfork. It's hardly gibberish, it's worse because it's the same meaningless nonsense Mork and Mindy blabber, even to the insane and alien. Suddenly, a real thought is forced by relentless echo into redundant silliness. I've been listening to my thoughts become blather.

They had significance, once upon a dream. But in my silence they have circled and swum inside my head and through their dizzy dancing have been reduced to a hazy din as appealing and distracting as ceaseless buzzing of a tired fluorescent lightbulb. Not good for productivity or a glowing complexion.

I've done to my poor thoughts what constant fifth-grader repetition does to the word fork. By refusing the object it's purpose I've reduced it from a useful utensil to onomatopoeic balderdash. Suddenly, all I'm left with is a sound, an echo, a song, a game of no skill at all. Over the past couple of months I've gotten good at this game. TV, sleep, easy books, the same songs over and over again, and always that nauseating buzz of what I know melting away into what I knew.

I have been without a certain depth of conscience and consideration that makes me a person I could delight in being. Keeping confined to my own section of the Universe as I know it, I have reached out for very little, taken very few chances and never once allowed my own reason to get a word in edgewise. Being back home in the naked Northeastern Colorado landscape hasn't solved all my problems, but out that window under a sparkling layer of disappearing snow, is a cracking parched land that has finally, when I made myself look, reminded me of how untrue I've been to the girl i strove so desperately to hew from that exhausted soil.

All this time, I've been mistaking the alarm of my disloyalty for a petty migraine. A call to the truth about myself has been lurking in the drone I've learned to tune out, waiting for it's moment to remind me of the voice and depth I owe to my life. So that sucks. Wasted time makes me angry.

Fork.