I live!

 

 

I started a project, and as a consequence started a new blog.

 

I disappeared completely off the radar, didn’t I? What’s new? Well, I got married. To the same person I started dating just about the time I left OD. I also attempted suicide.  As I think is rather obvious, I didn’t succeed.  So that’s a plus.  I’m going to be moving to Toronto Canada in March, so that’s good.  I am going to attempt to write here as well as my other blog to be as fair as possible.

 

http://reisender314.blogspot.com/

 

Below is the "most important" post so far.  The one I want the most people to read at any rate…

 

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     I am a small child who speaks a baby’s gibberish at a Japanese tea ceremony.  I don’t understand what is going on, but I desperately want to be a part of it and am unable to communicate my confusion.  I attempt to mimic their elaborate motions but lack the dexterity to accurately imitate.  Even as I grow confident in my limbs there is this great sense of distrust in their motions.  “Am I doing this right, it doesn’t look the same, why aren’t they letting me join?”

     Eventually it dawns on me, “but it is just tea!”  I don’t understand why they don’t just pour the tea and drink it.  Why the formalities?  Why are there so many grand movements for such a simple action, and why can’t I perform them?  Don’t they know there is so much time wasted in such action?  I then wonder if perhaps the ceremony makes the tea taste different.  Maybe the aroma is wafted peculiarly by the kimonos’ zephyr, or the decantation of the tea, just so, brings out only the most subtle of flavors.  Perhaps it is the anticipation of the tea that is what makes it so great.

     As time passes my mimicry is near perfect, but only a shadow of their fluid bodies.  I am stiff, I am rigid, I am mechanical, and yet they make it look so easy.  I pour so much work into the ceremony as both parties.  There is something in my actions, perhaps still doubt and mistrust of limb—always afraid of an arm going astray at just the wrong moment—and there is no joy in it.  I wonder if there is supposed to be joy, if I am supposed to be getting anything out of serving the tea, even as I am served myself the tea is no more than I would expect of any.

     Again, I find myself always the child, unable to voice my dissatisfaction with the results of the ceremony.  Everyone else seems to enjoy it, or at least tolerate its existence.  Otherwise, why would it exist?  I want to ask why I find such difficulty in these actions, these actions I was raised to observe—and do—every day.  I am confounded at every turn, unable to grasp these intangible subtleties that surround me.  I get lost in the details, desperately wishing to know how they perform as perfectly as they do.

     The sun sets.  Another day, exhausted, defeated.  I cry and thrash out but only get the frustrated looks of those who don’t understand my condition and seek only to placate me.  I know when I wake more tea ceremonies await me, another day where these worlds collide, where I perform the actions, knowing when, and how, but not understanding why, always searching for an answer when the best I will ever hear is “We do as we must.”

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–RK