on overfeeling, overloving, overwanting
i miss the way i used to write. i miss the flustered, unpolished unconcerned flutter of it, heart-burping, heart-vomiting, the vile wet unglued matter all pouring out without agonizing, without the cutting board, the post-production stage. i miss the teenage bedroom writing with my cadence, my sentences, so imperfect, so uncut, so overzealous and heaving with want beyond anything i could ever hope to articulate. i miss overwriting and just pushing it forward, clicking it into the world. i miss writing because my throat never caught up with my fingers, my headswirl, my neediness, it was not a purging but a plunging, a flush of myself. i didn’t care about going down smoothly. i didn’t care about being concise, being only the barest, whittled self-construer i could be. i didn’t care about the ugliness of my overfeeling, my overwording, overeverything always. i didn’t want to wait for a literary magazine, for a space i couldn’t self-produce, couldn’t bleed into. and maybe i was a narcissist here. maybe i wanted a diary and not a craft. maybe i couldn’t distinguish the two then. maybe i should know better, should say diaries are what we call womxn writing about themselves, about their lives, and journals are what we call men doing the same. maybe writing a space for myself without waiting to be permitted into one is not radical but self-absorbed, maybe it means i am not a real writer, i am not a writer who…
