I am in the middle of the oldest thing in the world: moving away to a faraway place because you met someone and love them. This place is the desert and I cannot describe it like I would the mountain west of the United States (my old home) because that is a place of passion or despair, and to describe that contradiction is to capture the strength of feeling the mountains had over me, even the nebulous feelings like disgust or religious fear. The desert will not come into me and possess me but it does have the capacity to and seems instead to prefer temporary neutrality. I imagine once I have a child here it will finally sink into me and I can describe fully the feeling of living here.
The things I am supposed to be good at are difficult for me and the things that I am properly good at are vague and useless. I am caught in the thin, unnatural line between. I feel I am betraying the forward movement of my life with any negative emotion but writing about it is perhaps the only compromise.
The compromise, specifically: I will begin writing poetry again. (And writing deliberately, hence the short-term goal of thirty consecutive days following prompts). This is the white flag I raise within myself. Poetry is my favorite medium because it does not drain me out like fiction writing often used to and it does not feel like a narcissistic spiral of ego and self-rationalizations like diary writing does. Throwing myself out to the many faceless wolves of the internet is instead comforting because it is a complete erasure of the self. And there is nothing more comforting than reading back a poem and finding I “put into words” the things I could not define inside myself.
Art as a cult of negative emotions or as a shrine to the aesthetic of the age and sometimes incidentally and wonderfully as a shrine to the aesthetic of the eternal is my favorite type of art, and that is what I generally attempt. The “last pavilion” has moved from being a literal place on my college campus to a figurative thing wrapped inside me, a small solace against a strange land.
the last pavilion 