You get quiet.  You are almost always alone.  You stop going out to the city. Stop telling long, entertaining stories to make people laugh.  You move into yourself and out of the world.  You suddenly realize the language you used to speak is not the language you write now.  You suddenly realize what condensation gathers on the window on days when suddenly the temperature drops.  You cook beans in a pot made of clay, let them come to a boil and then watch them.  You do small things.  You write like never before because suddenly you have nothing else and it is obvious that there is nothing else.  You stop reading the Internet.  You disconnect from the Internet.  Your friends are worried about you.   You do nothing to allay their fears.  You stop returning phone calls in a regular, orderly fashion.  You harbor dreams of greatness and wonder how it would be achieved.  You masturbate at night and continue to enjoy the moment after orgasm more than the orgasm itself.  You write because your grandmother dies and suddenly that entire generation is gone.  You try to imagine fictional worlds and constantly end up regressing to your own.  You wonder about how your language has regressed in the last few years.  Your isolation is supposed to be productive.  You produce.  You write many words whose quality you doubt to the extreme.  You labor over words and syntax.  You strain to eek something shiny and bright out of old, old words.  Sometimes you are happy in your quietness and talk to yourself.  This is not being quiet, you scold yourself. Alone, staring out the window you see the trees, the forest, the mountain in the distance.  You have suddenly arrived to the place you have always wanted to be. The chance is yours.  

(This is a reprint from the Catalogue of Feeling.)

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