very few, except the ones that read me

my life narrows and widens. many tethers severed. probably more than i can actually handle, more than i can protect myself from (dangle). yup. there are definitely parts of me that dangle flipping about, dismoared. yet, the widening is an odd beast. it creates unmoared tethers on my end that i cannot feel, attach to or stroke, but they are surely there. little cyber contacts pulse with texts that indicate it is so. i do understand a part of the widening — i write, i post, i click, snap. i translate my scrawl, my lived experience, thumbing it out in each post, each status update. i am less transparent becoming more visible, more solid, through the transparency of my moments strung together, analyzed, poetized, sensualized, written, as i own with words what belongs to me with the layers of my livedness.

but, but, i bump into real space, littered and peopled, with each leaving of my microforest. well, i certainly hope so [dangle]. i might be prone to talk, i am, to make up for the lack of spoken words. the count has been dropping exponentially in the depeopled woods. the talk becomes more awkward spilling from my lips than from my thumbs despite the typos and faulty autocorrects. my internal leanings spoken and truncated into undecipherable verbal fragments. typical now, the initial voiced frag stutters and stalls there as other interrupts, “oh, i read that on your ___” so mouth shuts…nothing preprocessed to spill out for building of real connections in real space. on occasions what then comes is so stupid, truthful, kathy spadish, a tad random and something other than it “should” be that, snap, i remember why i live in the depeopled woods. not so much that i am a hermit, i am not. an introvert sure but my peopled historical world has always been narrowly filled with unspoken comforts of just being. it didn’t require of me too many words with a handful of others. i could just be there. i could hang without a dangle. words mess with that state. so often kathy randomized spades fall from my mouth. generally spades are uncomfortable small truths. we, me included, like the safety of our illusions. spades no matter how tiny do not help the illusions we like to grasp and clutch to ourselves.

i don’t fully understand the how writing became pivotal. it began in grad school in spite of the fact that I was there for the visual, the graphical, not the text based. a goal at the time was to not bore art historians with regurgitated party lines, to not bore myself with dry academic verbiage, to not pretend to “look” smart. well and i was terrified of the dry academic form because language (not logic) in terms of craft has always been difficult and documentation games confounding [i finally learned to preface all texts i amalgamated in regards to the historic as assemblages and noted all books, texts and such that i absorbed in any fashion in the appendix. any truly original idea, i owned as my…own, but indicated the rest as an assemblage of other]. i’ve no fully functional mental device or system to store or move from symbol to audibly pronounceable word and back again. steel trap, nope; steel sieve, yes. oh, did i mention i hybridize words at will? it works for me. it worked far better when the second Bush was president and i could say, “if he does, i can too!” another goal in picking up the scratching pen was to free up my writing until i found my way into my final thesis. plus the scratch, scratch, of pen to page also prevented me from cutting and pasting text not my own…it forced and still does all I read through my own steel sieve. yet, only in retrospect have i begun to understand that writing has been grounding me in my own life. it gives me a way out of myself, a way into myself. i’ve had people fall in love with me or a parts of me, befriend me, like me, simply from my words slewn on a posted page. they, the words, let other enter and know me. they are like sign posts as to who and where i am. i made my professors in the privacy of their own grading caves smile with my initial attempts, even laugh out loud as they handled my texts. i’ve made others cry. some choose to let go of bitterness harbored. some just text me to concur that they ponder a lot on this or that same topic. some simply express a gladness to find themselves unalone in their experiences. some follow. some glance. some mull over. some write off or submit (ha. a comment that is). why i can wear myself naked in a post or thumbed out update, i do not know. i used to believe i was very transparent, authentic, connected in real space. i am to a degree but access both into and out of myself in a knowable fashion is widening through text (shrinking verbally). so i am widening as i have narrowed. others tether to me, while i still, even now, find myself licking the severed.

widening and narrowing, and still i haven’t honestly figured out the nine foot vaginas and such.