It is Important, Just to Be Writing, Pt. 2

I just got up to make eggs in the filthy kitchen, I took out the eggs from the refrigerator, the shredded cheese (Kathryn's), the French salted butter, the brown rolls. I cracked two eggs into a bowl and sprinkled in some cheese, but it fell in clumps, the shavings stuck together in gluey balls, and I plunged my fingers into the still-separate whites and yolks to break up the cheese. Doing this made me remember being in the red black darkroom in high school and sticking my hands into the trays of developer and stop bath and fixer instead of using tongs, they were always missing or broken, we always used our hands, we always stuck our hands into basins of chemicals and to the icy water of the spin-wash where our black and white photographs rode a merry-go-round until retrieved.

Whenever I fall back into this phase in my life, super-analytical, whenever I begin self-narrating my every movement to myself because I am alone and have no one to talk to and my thoughts start to speed up and free associate on their own, in my head I see amoebal splits and divisions and reproductions of thoughts under a microscope, and I worry about nothing and I attribute meaning to everything, I will inevitably say to someone, "I just don't know what's important." Just to keep writing is important, I've decided right now. It is okay just to be writing. It is okay to try to feel okay which is to be writing, right now.

Another thing I do when I fall back into this is what I did last night, which is to dye or cut my hair, which is on the one hand contrary to the search for meaning because that is also the search for the pure self, and my pure self has very light brown, almost dark-dark blonde, hair (almost no one knows that, could describe my natural hair color, because I never let it grow out, not because I am ashamed of it but because I am too neurotic and compulsive to let it get that far and yet when I see pictures of it, last making its photographic appearance in January 2006, I think I am looking at a younger triumphant version of the pure self), and on the other hand not at all contradictory because the search for meaning is also transformative, the future potential pure. Right now, the pink-red dye job I gave myself in August is fading out to a strawberry blonde that everyone has mistaken as my natural hair color and last night I added more sweeps of bright pink-red to my bangs and to the wisps next to my ears, which does not look particularly good but was also not to dye the whole thing, which was almost to hold on to the future potential pure self, the one who I will be when I leave here, I think. This is not how it works, I know. There is no such thing. It is okay to feel okay, right now.

I am listening to people move furniture in the apartment next door, behind the wall behind my headboard behind my head, we've never seen any of our floor neighbors face-to-face, they slip out when they hear our door close, the tops of their heads disappear down the stairs when we try to catch them leaving.