Ghosts

It's so quiet where my paretns live in Virginia. You can see the stars at night and you can hear the sound of nothing. It reminds me of living in Africa--the quiet, the dark, the big dipper, the bugs slamming into my bare arms and my face and the feeling that in the darkness there is a monster force waiting to gobble me up. My imagination can spin me into a tizzy anywhere in the world. I can be a movie star or the victim of a murder in a split second. In New York City, I am an ice skating champion gliding down the street on my way to Olympic Gold. In LA I am a football player clearing a path toward a touchdown. But here, in Virginia, the place I come to write and think and be with my family, I am in a horror movie--a beautiful, bloody horror movie, like Silence of the Lambs. I breathe shallowly, on the verge of tears, waiting for something or someone to eat me. I am Agent Starling and it will be me or Buffalo Bill.

I thought I was sick for a long time. All of these neurotic, adolescent musings ought to have been outgrown by a 29 year old. Now I realize that my dark thoughts are born of the same impulses that make me write; the same instinct that lets me create imagininary worlds in music and on paper. If I try to squash them, or turn the light on, or turn up the volume, or scold my overdeveloped ego, I lose my ability and will to create.

The only other time I feel as erotically insane as I do when I am creating something is when I'm in love. Then, my world and my life hang in the balance of every word he speaks and every touch he shares and every note he sings or writes or whispers. Perhaps that is why in these creative times, I feel sadly alone. I miss the old boys. I miss the way they'd touch me and love me...or whatever it was that we did that we called love. I want to call them. I need them to save me now. But if I call, then I surely won't write.

So, tonight I pour my heart into another page, another song, another world. That is the only way to escape those ghosts and to ensure that I am like Jodi Foster at the end of Silence of the Lambs...and not Buffalo Bill.

love, peace, and all that cal.

matt g