busying the non-escape

#writingtherapy

Is there a feeling-name for that constant urge to run away from your own self? Every few minutes it’s like I want to just, drop everything and escape. I feel like I am constantly distracting myself so I don’t end up at a station or an airport or just on a million buses. I feel ungrounded, I feel a strong pull from the spaceclouds, I feel that pull when I stop distracting myself like it’s reaching and beckoning and I’m worried that if I stop, I will be zoomed away – though maybe more worried that I’m actually not worried about the zooming-out-ness, because it’s so appealing, so… so, whatever the word is when it’s like magnets and when it makes more sense than whatever this jumbled nonsensical figuring-out stepping stones life is that I must engage in instead. It feels like I am trying to hold water, it feels like I’m trying to swim through candyfloss, an unsugared tongue unwoken, overspoken, it feels like I need to abandon my own inner oceans, it feels like if I just walked and kept walking I could wander out of the gamesphere into the grey, the reassuring grey, and I could hold the grey, then Be the grey, and then nothing else – and then nothing – just the ghost-essence of dead stars waiting to be glimmered. and so I write and type and sing and pace and repeat the soup round and round and round like an alphabet-circus of shouty number-shapes which refuse to stay in any one place – but even the sugarclowns are bored, their abacus-bead faces round and polished as they roll down forgotten hillsides which we no longer choose to climb. Productivity is a jellyland mountain through which my sense of purpose trembles. so again, I write and type and sing and pace and repeat the soup, throw the soup and splatter, like shattering liquid platecrumbs hurtling through a zero-gravity ceiling. and once again, I stand up, sit down, change the order of the pillow-pile, flip the duvet over, touch the wall, clap, stretch, tap, gather imaginary butterflies from the corners of runaway shapes… and force myself to stay.