Let us not count the many many months I’ve been absent from my blog but dancing around it like it’s a burning pyre. Going wild around it, turning and gyrating, convulsing, moving in and out, a mixture of fear and worship. Sitting sometimes, sometimes standing. Sometimes trying to catch the flying embers escaping up into the air like rampant bugs, trying their damnedest to avoid capture. Sometimes I would look at this pyre and wonder if I had somehow spat it out and it was my guts I was skirting around. I grew accustomed to sitting by it, watching it, waiting for it to burn out, willing it almost. Disappear then, out up into the sky, or down, deep into the ground. Go on, I’m watching, I am preparing to see it convulse, and fade.

Clearly there has been a lot of contemplation going on around this so-called pyre. Too much contemplation. Contemplation is a plague! (I’ll touch on the actual plague another time). Yes, contemplation is a disease-ridden plague, I tell you! A little dalliance with thoughts and expansion of mind: brilliant, go for it. But, year/s long, conversations with the sprite that is your inner, rip-off, “life-coach”: bad. I have fallen into its little web and it has nibbled at me bit by bit, until the web is hole-less and I am entirely made of holes.

But I have pushed through this, dear reader and am learning to gag that savage automaton in my brain, sing la-la-la and carry on regardless.

Is there anything more tedious than a writer complaining about their inability to write? Like a thin person complaining to a fat person about being fat. If you’re thin, be thin. Continue on being thin! (And please let us wobbly-thighed alone. Talk only to thin people about being (non-)fat. You can all smooth your thighs together and look despairingly at your mean rice cakes like they’re naughty kittens). And thus, if you’re a writer…? On.

And thus here I am: writing. Writing about not being able to write, but writing, goddamnit. Perhaps it’s a way in. A release valve. Pressure lowered and passing through into the air as stagnant, fierce gas, shooting out in attack. Gas that immediately gets dissolved into the atmosphere as if it was never there, but for a moment, is a sharp, complete thing, an emissary released from the erratic reign of one’s brain, dispatched with a bag of letters (you’re thinking correspondence. You’re wrong. Singular words jumbled in a Scrabble bag that you shake and turn over and hope good ones spill out into your hands, not just ‘AAAINAA’). An emissary which gasped and was done for at the first breath of fresh, free air. The outside! What a new and interesting thing! Let’s -!

And gone. And thus, the first words of mine. Words so eager to get out, all scrambled now from months of being cooped up as prisoners. Sometimes they went on day release, got shit-faced and then returned, dutifully, for extended time inside. She rules with an iron fist, does she, up in my brain. Ever so hard, she is, sitting up there on her throne made of irregular patterns. Let’s called it ‘mercurial’, shall we? Yes, mercurial, like…like the Throne of Swords in Game of Thrones, but instead the swords are arrows and they dart, dart in every opposing direction, offering options, so many options, and finally the Queen – let us call her Queen – gets so tired of options that she cannot choose among them, can no longer differentiate, and so sits amid the possibilities and never leaves.

A bit gung-ho on the metaphor? Bear with me, I’m still finding my feet.