Through My Eyes: A Journal

By Liz Root

Contact Liz by emailing her at liz@vagrantcafe.com

Archives

9/7/2003
strange things:

last night i think it was, i had a dream about how i was driving around with some friends in the car. we were on the interstate i think. suddenly, i temporarily lost control of the car and was veering off the road, and that's when i realized my left front tired had come off of my car completely, so i somehow pulled my car off the road. end of dream.

tonight: (not a dream) i was pulling onto my street, and there was this car nearly blocking the entire road, and right next to the car was a group of perhaps three people, standing around one of those baby swings. you know, the ones you set up in the living room and stick the baby in so it will stop crying or something. except the baby swing was broken, and they were all just staring at it, pushing it back and forth. i seriously don't have a clue what that was all about. bizarre.


- liz r. - 12:00:08 AM

9/5/2003
soundtrack for this evening: The Innocence Mission - Befriended.

after work tonight, i went out with a couple of friends and it just felt like a letdown. no offense to the friends b/c it wasn't their fault by any means. i just get my hopes up sometimes thinking everything will be like old times. and maybe it was finally smashed into my head this evening that the old times are officially OVER. we're all so different now, which is good. but it's also somewhat depressing. these are the people i used to be able to laugh with, usually at absolutely nothing anyone else would find amusing. these are the people i used to be able to talk with at great length. one is married. one is getting married. one is dating like there's no tomorrow. and then there's me. me oh me oh my.

i just wish i related better to people in general. it seems something has happened in the last year that's just made me so bad at even general conversation with people. i wish i could pinpoint what that was. i find myself wanting to get to know people better, and it's so difficult to get beyond the beginning stages. the awkwardness. and it seems there's this new wall within myself i can't get past. what is this wall? i don't know...i really don't. anyone out there have a clue?

tonight is a sad night. no real way to explain it, except i find myself holding back tears. tears for what? it's a mystery. but sometimes these waves of sadness fling themselves at me, and i never see them coming. i wouldn't say i'm generally a sad person either. i usually a pretty good job of hiding my emotions. but lately i've been trying not to do that so much...trying to let myself feel a bit more. and i guess maybe there's some sadness in me. it really feels more like mourning. perhaps somewhere i lost something, and i'm mourning it. it's kind of crazy al the things that can go on within us without us knowing.

"I believe that all our utmost sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, that added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there anymore,--it is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens." - Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Letters to a Young Poet"

- liz r. - 10:45:07 PM

8/31/2003
"There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times." - Annie Dillard

i left before it was over, i bailed out. i was tired. oh, so tired. returning home, the intention was sleep, but i never slept. instead i medicated and i numbed myself, like i always do. always. today's overwhelming sensation was that of complete aloneness. i wish i had a nice metaphor to say this: actually...nevermind. no saying it after all. not today.
- liz r. - 4:57:24 PM