:: anne in the attic ::

Create Your Own Countdown

:: Monday, June 27, 2005 ::

There is a constant longing to experience that has been growing. Its most recognizable feature is a sense that others' realities are somehow "better" than mine-- or maybe, worthier is more accurate. I look around and see myself growing smaller in my world, less significant. I wonder if that's how it is as we age and come into the reality that our dreams will probably not happen, that nothing we can touch is as strong as the things we imagine. And the music videos we run in our heads alongside the lives we live seem further away and less from us, less applicable than we wish they were. Just to get a little grounding.

When I began this writing here, some two years ago, I thought of it as a place in my life where I could be honest with people and myself. I've always tried to be honest in a non-petty way, in a bigger sense, if you will. That's not to say that I do not incorporate that into my living; but on some level, this journal has relieved me of the responsibility to admit every little thing that I need to express to those around me. Here, it is specific, but can remain general enough not to stand in anyone's way. And now, I have not written much lately, though that's not because I have nothing to say, but more because it doesn't really seem to matter what I say, or if I say anything at all.

And if I am to continue in all honesty, I must admit that I have somewhat receded from society, and must remain so until I have rebuilt what I've managed to tear down in this last part of my life: my will and my sense of self. Without those things, a person cannot interact, cannot truly be. When you're lost inside, sometimes the outer motions of discipline and structure are all you have left. So I guess I am seeing what's to be done about that, and it seems I've got a lot of hard work to do now.

:: Anne 3:30 PM [smartass remarks] ::
...

The wide expanse of space diffused with amber light; the large, heavy wooden walls of high wainscoting and painted Japanese friezes; a linear functionality at once warm with color and cool in the mind, empty and yet full of echoes against hard surfaces: these are the trappings of a certain architecture that has threaded itself into my way of living. It came upon me that I am drawn to the Craftsman style for reasons of comfort and familiarity, having grown up in various pockets in California where these homes abound. Even more, though-- a curiosity about my past has woven the familiar thing of it into a kind of query.

I look at photos now and remember things I'd forgotten were familiar. In the sleeping porches of the famous Gamble House do I know those same sensations of lying contently in the temperate night air of Berkeley, Mendocino, Escondido, San Jose, Pasadena. During the hot days of California, the bright sun streamed through hand-hewn and stained-glass windows into the homes of my mother's friends, our extended family. How many times I remember the scenes that occurred after bedtime, as I would almost always sneak a look. After hours on a summer night, it was often still dusk, and I remember poolside strings of colored paper lanterns, bottles of wine, stereo speakers faced outdoors onto patios or into gardens, and a contentedness that this was what was to be, that this is how things were supposed to be at their best.

I lack the words to pin down this particular feeling of nostalgia. But I remember the first gatherings in my parents' first home in Redding before Kirk died. They weren't quite as free or relaxed, but they were the precursors to the ones I would grow into and eventually be allowed to experience. When I began writing this, I wanted to make a connection between those feelings and my current musings on the Craftsman style-- I had wanted to relate a small epiphany that revealed something about the obsession I seem to have with what I have often called "mortuary homes," as their features are similar to what I know and I was looking for that to teach me something about everything I've been missing about my past. But now it seems banal.

Still, I look to those Craftsman interiors for a kind of forlorn emptiness. But the thing that occurs to me now is that the character of that emptiness is not completely given by the likeness to funeral homes; rather, it is that now, in the current day, I am missing the gatherings in those surroundings. I have never been able to replicate such scenes as I remember my mother partaking of during my childhood. I have missed the temperate open air and contented leisure of those long summer nights, the spot-lit festivites and sophisticated company of evenings spent without the pressure of days. A part of me suspects much of that is captured in the places, and I yearn for California.

But I know that's wrong. Because though I can place myself in those settings as a child, I know that they were created mostly from the heart-- the hearts of the people there at the time, along with my mother. And sadly, though I dream of creating that kind of community among friends, of living with so much love in my life that I can hardly stand it, I honestly don't know that I have the heart.

:: Anne 9:02 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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