i’m finding that most attempts to write in the past 3 months have started with some variation of “i haven’t written much lately.” i don’t know why i feel like i need to say it. who am i proving myself to other than myself? it’s a true statement; it only gets truer the longer i hold off. it hasn’t been much of a conscious choice any more than a lack of time, lack of care, inability to form concrete thought…something like that. the truth is that i don’t really know what i’ve been thinking. i don’t know if my thoughts have been about anything or anyone. i can feel them settling back down at home base, though, in that murky goop of self-deprecation, the stage in between heartbreak and the next heartbreak. i’ve still got a girlfriend who i love very much, but it’s different with her. i know she won’t break me, and i know she loves me the way i love her, so i don’t have to spend all my time thinking about it. i have space again to think about how little i love myself, so that’s what i’ve been doing. and i’ve been doing it so long now that i don’t need to write to conceptualize it anymore, i can just let it happen.

to summarize, not much is going on. even if i had been writing these past few months, i don’t think my words would’ve interested anyone. i haven’t completely stopped; i’m taking an english course on creative nonfiction, so i’ve been forcing myself to formulate structured, cohesive things with themes and meaning and purpose and all that. i haven’t been doing very well on them, though. i guess my ideas are less writeable than i think they are. i guess i have so much to say that i’m not really saying anything at all, or that all this time i haven’t been a writer or known how to be a writer, i’ve just been putting words together in the shape of the thoughts in my mind and calling it “writing” when it’s not. i’ve been hoping the words translate properly. i should’ve known they don’t. you taught me that.

march is always a strange time of year. for some, it’s the in-between season, the melting snow, weird rain, coldwarm and warmcold and the final stretch of misery. for me, it’s dance competition season, where my heart lives in my throat and my body lives in agony and every minute is spent holding my breath until i finally walk off the last stage of the last performance of the last day of the season. that day is coming up in a few, thankfully. if you asked me why i still do it, i still wouldn’t have an answer for you, not after the 16-year-long identity crisis i’ve lived about whether or not dancing brings me the joy i say it does. i’m not in the mood to get into it right now. i could say a lot.

i did a solo again this year. i don’t like solos very much. the first time i did it two weeks ago, i came offstage and cried so hard the tears dissolved the glue on my fake eyelashes, and it took 10 minutes to scrub the mascara from my under-eyes. i placed 3rd out of 22 and one of the judges gave me a special award, announcing that she’d never forget a performance like that and never will, that i’d gone on the stage and bared my soul for 2-and-a-half minutes in a way nobody else did that session. i couldn’t understand how she could think that, how i managed to stand out after doing not much at all, but it made me feel a little bit better until the next week, when i performed the way i’d wanted to and enjoyed myself doing it but didn’t place at all. it took me a while to stop crying after that one. i crouched outside in a particularly bitter wind, punished my hand with a knife while everybody else sat inside and continued to watch the competition go on. the door to the venue was locked when i tried to re-enter and i laughed at the irony of it all, thinking even the building knows how much i don’t belong in a place like this. i have my last shot at it this saturday. i’m not looking forward to it.

i did astonishingly well on my midterms. you’d be impressed; i actually think i managed to do better than you on one of them. i know it’s not a competition, but you’ve gotta give me credit for achieving something like that. you only ever do schoolwork, i do everything but. and it was like, “hey, maybe i’m not entirely fucking useless.” i dunno. i’m still going, despite how desperately i wish i wasn’t.

i think that’s it. i came home today and wanted to write for the first time in months. the weather was drastic and beautiful today, and i hadn’t expected it to be when i woke up this morning, and i think it changed something in me. i stepped outside and almost slipped down the porch steps, realizing i’d planted my foot directly on a flimsy sheet of ice. ice? it hasn’t even been that cold, i’d thought. but i felt it as soon as i walked out from under the overhang, the freezing rain as it kissed my face, as fine as a weightless mist. i went to my first class and walked out again and the branches were suddenly dipped in it, slick and glossy with rain kisses. it’s something you only see in the middle of winter, in the middle of nowhere. seeing it on campus confused me, but elated me, too. i left in the evening to run errands but the winter rain had stopped completely, gone almost as quickly as it had come, replaced by a humid warmth and a subtle sunset, few clouds, chirping, and an openness to the air i hadn’t felt since the fall. when i left the grocery store, the world was dark but not completely, pumped full of haze and a deafening fog. my phone was dead, and i would’ve probably tried to put music on if it hadn’t been. i’m glad i didn’t. i took the world in for the first time in a long time tonight. took a million pictures with my favourite camera, of fog and street lamps, and street lamps through the fog, rays shimmering through the thickness in the air, dancing around inside each drop of mist like each one was a tiny snow globe hanging from the sky. i took pictures of tall buildings, low houses, tree branches, headlights, endless stretches of suburbs and side streets, faceless silhouettes in the night. the weird weather reminded me what it’s like to be me in the world. to live without consequence or fear of living wrong. i’m glad this day happened. i feel like i can think again.