you have nothing to say but you feel like saying something.
you say something like this?
i feel like writing but i don't feel like writing to anyone in particular.
i spend a lot of time feeling time pass, lately.
feeling the reality of having moved across the ocean to a new country, missing my home, missing my family, missing the things i thought i hated about my life in the US.
don't get me wrong, i like it here, though i do wonder if i will ever be happy, wherever i am.
i move from place to place, have all kinds of bizarre experiences, some better than others, and that is my life.
i don't form any permanent roots, i move every few months, i don't have any real sense of memory a lot of the time - it sounds weird - it's like i don't really remember much aside from the immediate past.
i live in whichever moment i happen to be in and the rest of everything feels like a story i read somewhere. i know it happened, i remember it in a way, and i remember very specific details - conversations, exact words - but the emotion and the feeling of those moments is gone almost as soon as they happen, leaving me with facts. lists of facts and details and information. when i'm in the middle of those moments i feel them very deeply. then they are flattened out and placed in rows in my brain. sorted into memory files. sometimes i write about them and feel them when i sing about them.
but i don't feel any more emotion than i would feel reading a book written by someone else. actually, i feel much more emotion for other people's lives than i do for myself.
it might be because my own expectations are much lower and i know that many people still expect certain things. or maybe i just think they do, and that sense of expectation and hope that i perceive in other people makes me cry. or maybe i remember a time when i had the sense of wonder and expectation and hope which i seem to think still exists in other people, and that memory makes me cry.
or maybe it's the realization of the loss of those things that makes me cry. or maybe it's that i still do have those expectations and hope, and they haven't disappeared, but there is also now a realization of truth and the way the world works, and this is a crushing realization.
i don't know.
it's a strange place to be full of hope and expectation (because i guess i actually am) and at the same time so full of an awareness which makes those hopes feel futile.
it is a conflicted place to be in one's head.
it is also no fun at all to feel the passing of time on such an acute level.
when you hear my new songs you will hear that obsession. the passing of time. i'm sure it all comes from fear of death. another fun thing to think about.
and these things just make me miss my family and my home.
because i think to myself, time is passing so quickly - i blinked and 3 months have gone by - and what am i doing? sitting here in my apartment in london. when i could be spending time with my family. and for what?
i guess once i'm in the studio again, i will feel better about it. once i'm on the road again, once i'm playing shows again. because at the moment, the trade off feels off balance. there is no upside at the moment. only a sense of loss and a longing for everything i have given up in order to be here.
i want to go home. but i won't, because that's not what i do. i push through that sadness and carry on.
and i hope, at the end of it all, whatever that means, whenever that time comes, i will say that it's all been worth it. i won't know til then. i have to survive on a hunch. and an obsession. not being able to make any other choice. there is no choice. so here i am. waiting to see what happens next. hoping it leads to something good.
xo