The only way I can describe my current state, ironically, not even in my own words, is the phrase “writer’s block.”
I guess it’s nice that I’m enough of a writer to be blocked, but I just went to tell you, the elusive, imagined audience whose certainty I can’t discern, everything.
I want to tell you about the transition from winter to spring, and the music I’ve been listening to, and the tv shows I’ve been watching, and spring break, and how dearly I missed my car, and how endlessly I love my friends, and how I have two spring ice shows left, and how I’ve become obsessed with matcha, and how everything is in shambles, but they are the most vibrant shambles of my whole life, and I am so desperately clinging to every terrible moment that has attacked me.
I could write a full essay with just the 100-word fragments that have been sitting in my docs, sticking out of me like arrows, completely uncohesive, but each with some potential.
I can’t translate my thoughts into sentences like I used to. I can’t express myself in columns without feeling a nagging sense of futility, a nagging feeling that I’m wasting my breath trying to get my point across.
I’m sick of thinking about my fragments. I’m sick of remembering the times it was easy, the times I knew I would miss, but not for the reasons I’m missing them. I couldn’t see this coming, I couldn’t predict my lack of depth that I feel draining me now.
I placed ever so much self-worth in the fact that I had words to speak. Paragraphs to write, ideas to think, and energy to carry me through.
Without meaningful things to say, what is my meaning?
I know this part of the year all too well; I begin to write like I’m running out of time because I am. The days of being a junior are dwindling, and I don’t have time to decide if I’m happy or sad, so I just write about each and every thing until I’m out of time to decide.
The smell of spring is intoxicating, and it’s diffusing itself in my lungs, spreading to the rest of me like a disease. Hitchhiking in my bloodstream, affecting every limb. The birds chirp, and my window is open, and I wonder if the birds think of the melodies playing from my room as a song, just like I regard their morning debriefs as a song.
Spring means it’s almost summer, and summer means another year of this class and these people are over, and I’ll have one left.
I can’t have one left.
I can’t let go of this. This exigence, this beginning, this wonderful thing that taught me how to turn passion into a hopeful future and led me faithfully out of the terror.
Yet, I am wasting it, this beautiful thing, with writer’s block and an inability to tell you everything I want to.
