10 Fragments

1.
Most of the time I feel that I communicate better as a writer than as a person. In writing I can express myself with less anguish and violence, especially on myself; there's also a room for redemption which I have abandoned in life, being too impatient about whether people will be there to listen or be listened to next time. Writing also makes people conform to durability; what I have never achieved through friendship.

2.
I have not mastered solitude and apparently never will. There's an incessant craving for talking, which is the obvious result - paradoxically - of spending so much time - if not most - alone. It all has to do with the risk taken by those in permanent isolation, of forgetting what being part of the world (any world) feels like. Being alone and feeling alone are not the same, the latter can happen even with people and is so far the worst.

3.
I am in constant conversation with people I intensely love - not just letters, but all forms of writing, whispers, dreams, nightmares, daydreaming - and yet the moment the real conversations break off, I drown in a pool of death, being so absolutely sure that they will never come back. If they do - which isn't so common - I become insanely excited, but I hide it, since I don't want to be offered compassion in lieu of love.

4.
I am learning to respond with grace to writing I profoundly dislike - except if it is for poor aesthetic qualities -  maybe not because I am growing into adult virtues, but more like because my sense of solitude is so extreme that I will go into conversation with anything that opens its borders to me, even if only temporarily and if there is a feeling of empathy, which is something so vastly different from agreement.

5.
The fact that I'm so merciless with myself and not with other people is what might give people the idea that I'm merciless on them too. I would like to be a lot more forgiving, but sadly that's something I can only achieve in writing. In personal life I tend to break down at the slightest breach or lack of attention from the other party, and being too afraid to show any emotions, I freeze into silence.

6.
Too often I assume people will be easily scared about me, therefore I work intensely on proving it to them only in order to prove myself right and very often succeed. There's nothing necessarily evil or cruel about this; it's but this mistaken assumption I cling to forcefully that I should feel guilty for desiring any human warmth and nearness.

7.
I'm not used to receiving kindness from anyone, therefore I always find it highly suspect and need to subject it to merciless testing. With this age-old brilliant method, I have succeeded in eroding even the most faithful, patient and devoted friendships. I, of course, am not interested in political friendships, or friendships as commodities. If the world cannot be changed - even for a second - through them, it's not worth the time.


8. 
At some point - a long time ago - I toyed with the idea of the safisfaction that I would derive from having my work read by other people. The idea has self-destroyed itself. It's not that there's no pleasure at all, what would be a mere Philistine and snob lie, but more like that the ideal readers - truly loved friends, people with insights, other writers - cannot bother most of the time, assuming that I am a "good writer", even if I'm not.

9.
Nothing in this world can scare me, no wars, no massacres, and certainly not death, for the idea of writing implies per definition the idea that you toy with your death often; but there is the one thing that can unnerve me infinitely and without repair: The idea that anyone could love someone as simultaneously extroverted and introverted as myself. Not being loved makes me sleepless, but being loved makes me absurdly unkind.

10.
The one reason why I personally dislike most of my writing is because I don't think it's honest enough. I manage to dovetail myself and stop at a point before I am about to get lost in it, which is the only thing I ideally want. The problem is that when art gets "lost", it becomes its own blindspot, and is no longer available to consciousness; it becomes elitist, withdrawn and abstract. Not something anyone could sensorily love.