![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I sit in my apartment, at the now-unplugged kotatsu. Bach cello concertos, my companion for the past two evenings, fill the air with a timeless beauty not at all at odds with the hodgepodge of papers and eclecticism that is my apartment. I am the only rhyme and reason that exists in this place; logical, since it is mine for however long I stay here and continue paying for it.
I was in Kyoto-proper this evening, arranging my dinner for tomorrow. I am at the age where things only happen for your birthday if you do them yourself; as much as one might wish to remain quiet about the event and be pleasantly but predictably surprised by the thoughtfulness of one's friends, it is much wiser to make one's own arrangements and avoid the potential disappointment that could result from one's friends not actually doing anything. Because they have a plethora of distractions each, after all.
I can on occasion be wise, though the childish pride that still lives within me rails against it. But it's just that stubborn pride that causes us to hurt ourselves, and then rage at a sourceless Other.
If I am ever hurt, I cannot entirely free myself of blame. Of course it's wrong for someone to hurt me, but if they have managed it then I have left myself open to that hurt. I like to think of it as a warrior's mentality: to gaurd yourself.
Having nowhere in particular that I needed to be, I paused on the Sanjo Bridge. Below, on the bank of the Kamo River, fire spun and twirled in swift arcs around the twisting bodies of the dancers, serpents and orbiting comets of orange flame. Drummers pounded out a rhythm that was music all by itself, the familiar boom-tekka-tek an external heartbeat. I took off my shoes and perched on a stone piling to watch-- the dancers, the flames, the drummers, their various friends, the audience, the passers-by. Such a convocation of people, many of them young. Guitar-toting hopefuls waiting for discovery, businessmen sipping at beer cans, tourists staring in wonder, families on their way to or from restaurants. A thousand stories, walking to and fro, as the dancers whirled and leapt, tossing their flaming staffs into the air and catching them again, as artfully self-concious as they could be while handling fire. Well aware of their own allure and reveling in it.
I am a writer, which means that I move in a world of stories. My own life is not a story, it is a thousand stories, none of them mine. I assigned names and identities to the characters who passed me by, memorized faces and roles, and wondered vaguely what they saw when they looked at me. Nothing that invited intimacy of any sort, of course; sometimes I wonder if what I am comes through to the point that other people can sense it, and it keeps them away. Or is the unloveliness of my face sufficent to discourage any attention whatsoever? I have walked unmolested in the dark hours, in the questionable sections of various jagged cities. Lopsided face, a body at least four hundred years out of fashion, skin alternately mottled and spotted, any gold or red in my hair losing out to muddy brown, disproportionate limbs, short and stubbed fingers . . . a thousand beginnings that never came to fruition . . . every piece of me a broken promise . . . and the focal point of my being: a writer's eyes, shifting blue-green-grey, calm yet inconstant. Remote. Always watching, and somehow forbidding both desired and undesired attention. Set apart forever, whether I will it or no.
I can't win if I fight against myself. I can't remake my being, even if I should wish to. I can't move from story-maker to story, cannot become the main character when I am not myself a character at all. I am meant to tell stories, not to be them.
This is not my life, this is a search for stories. I am not a person, I am a thing which exists to find stories, and to tell them.
I was in Kyoto-proper this evening, arranging my dinner for tomorrow. I am at the age where things only happen for your birthday if you do them yourself; as much as one might wish to remain quiet about the event and be pleasantly but predictably surprised by the thoughtfulness of one's friends, it is much wiser to make one's own arrangements and avoid the potential disappointment that could result from one's friends not actually doing anything. Because they have a plethora of distractions each, after all.
I can on occasion be wise, though the childish pride that still lives within me rails against it. But it's just that stubborn pride that causes us to hurt ourselves, and then rage at a sourceless Other.
If I am ever hurt, I cannot entirely free myself of blame. Of course it's wrong for someone to hurt me, but if they have managed it then I have left myself open to that hurt. I like to think of it as a warrior's mentality: to gaurd yourself.
Having nowhere in particular that I needed to be, I paused on the Sanjo Bridge. Below, on the bank of the Kamo River, fire spun and twirled in swift arcs around the twisting bodies of the dancers, serpents and orbiting comets of orange flame. Drummers pounded out a rhythm that was music all by itself, the familiar boom-tekka-tek an external heartbeat. I took off my shoes and perched on a stone piling to watch-- the dancers, the flames, the drummers, their various friends, the audience, the passers-by. Such a convocation of people, many of them young. Guitar-toting hopefuls waiting for discovery, businessmen sipping at beer cans, tourists staring in wonder, families on their way to or from restaurants. A thousand stories, walking to and fro, as the dancers whirled and leapt, tossing their flaming staffs into the air and catching them again, as artfully self-concious as they could be while handling fire. Well aware of their own allure and reveling in it.
I am a writer, which means that I move in a world of stories. My own life is not a story, it is a thousand stories, none of them mine. I assigned names and identities to the characters who passed me by, memorized faces and roles, and wondered vaguely what they saw when they looked at me. Nothing that invited intimacy of any sort, of course; sometimes I wonder if what I am comes through to the point that other people can sense it, and it keeps them away. Or is the unloveliness of my face sufficent to discourage any attention whatsoever? I have walked unmolested in the dark hours, in the questionable sections of various jagged cities. Lopsided face, a body at least four hundred years out of fashion, skin alternately mottled and spotted, any gold or red in my hair losing out to muddy brown, disproportionate limbs, short and stubbed fingers . . . a thousand beginnings that never came to fruition . . . every piece of me a broken promise . . . and the focal point of my being: a writer's eyes, shifting blue-green-grey, calm yet inconstant. Remote. Always watching, and somehow forbidding both desired and undesired attention. Set apart forever, whether I will it or no.
I can't win if I fight against myself. I can't remake my being, even if I should wish to. I can't move from story-maker to story, cannot become the main character when I am not myself a character at all. I am meant to tell stories, not to be them.
This is not my life, this is a search for stories. I am not a person, I am a thing which exists to find stories, and to tell them.
