head throbs.

Tomorrow I have to wake early, and think. Let thoughts arrange themselves—or fail to arrange themselves—and have that disorder take me somewhere, to some sort of truth, some half story. Clumps of projects are being called up, and I know with that I am suppose to deliver something of myself. Meeting an expectation would not be good enough. I must exceed it for my own self-approval. I said I needed to wake and think because I feel like with classes having begun and speaking one-on-one with professors again, I should have something to show from summer—a story that has shaped me—substance to share. But I just don’t know. Much has happened to me. Small moments of being that will thicken with time and larger happenings that will become lighter once distance lets the mind breathe. But as of now, everything feels like hours that have only fallen upon each other—days that have folded one upon another, leaving me with a pile of calendar days but no clarity of each event. Currently I have no strong grounding/opinion on why I have done what I have done. I feel more of nothing. And I wonder whether it means that they were superficial moments, moments void of meaning, meaning founded on non-meaning. Or maybe, feeling the meaning will come subtly, when time thickens and I have forgotten to think “what is”, “what was”, “what matters” its purpose, its importance. Whenever I go searching, I see nothing. What is meant to be is never forced into being or becoming.

• I have been placed in a graduate fiction course and an advanced poetry course. I do not know what to think of that either. I am in a writing course that theorizes the fragment. Ideas are surfacing—an extended fragment, a lucid streaming, dialogue half invented and half spoken, the undertone being the presence/absence dichotomy. I realized the motif was all I have been working on: light/darkness, in sight/out of sight, wakefulness/sleep, truth/dream, not real/unreal, self/other, breathing/breathless, artist/muse, forgiving/forgetting, I could go on and on. Had a bottle of Pearly Bay and Indian food tonight. Indian food is my favourite—makes me delirious—but I have not had it from a restaurant since Paris when they stole $1500 from me within my first 24 hours of being there. And yes, I guess I have been bitter this long. Both were delicious at the time, but as expected made me sick after. I tried to nourish this with mindless reality television and a one am shower. My head is still throbbing. Six hours until I begin thinking, thoughtfully.
  
  
• A professor called this weekend. He said I was impressive, but that I sounded ahead of myself. He said it was not personal, but he felt like he sensed an urgency in me, as if everything needed to be planned, goals decided, a future given some faint order. I did not know what to say and so I did not deny it. I said that there has only ever been one option and that is to start graduate school immediately, and because of that decision or rather, non-decision, there is an urgency, traces of a plan, much hope and pressure. He responded saying, how one must not forget that once graduate school is finished one begins at zero again.
  
  
• Anais Nin said psychoanalysis changed her life and opened up her fiction. I think the only way to let your mind rest, yet simultaneously acquire knowledge, is by reading Anais Nin's journals. If you want sensibility, I highly recommend her diaries. Trust me. If there are three things I have avoided that have been repeatedly recommended to me, they are: Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and therapy. My professor said, "Chelsea I want to read you, as I want to read Proust." The speed at which I wished to create only intensified from then. I have taken in the above in only small dosages because I feel they will provide clues and something close to an answer. And I do not know if I am ready for it. I almost want a moment of being absolutely careless before...before...just the opposite.