I want to stand in a forest and scream.
But, I mean, don't be alarmed.
In “a mood.”
Having “a moment”.
It’s been “a day”.
Sayings like a tick used far too often, a mindless practice of complaints and suffering that is the (mostly) universal human existence. Generic and meaningless as being in a mood isn’t even proper grammar, lacking total specificity regarding what said mood you are supposedly inhabiting in the first place. “Which mood?” the squeaky hopeful angel asks. “You know the one.”
I want to stand in a forest and scream. Isn’t that clearer?
Why a forest? Is “forest” pretentious somehow? Should I go to the woods instead? No, woods are creepier, more menacing. Dark. Sure, they’re theoretically the same, but female intuition knows they’re not. The woods are danger and the forest is enchanting, one flees the Wolf and the other climbs a ladder of silky Rapunzel hair. A forest can be magical. Lush, safe. The place where a tree falls and no one hears so it never really happened. My angst beckons.
Well over a year has passed since my last “overtalk” and that is shameful but also real. It is okay and also not okay. Because I am okay and not okay and a blur of infinite emotions that can’t seem to be stilled enough to sit with confidence and type. A steady paycheck saw a void of creation, pursuing few passions, mumbling convincings that this existence is enough. (It’s not.)
The line between laisse faire and lazy shattered eons ago.
My absence can’t be excused. It can’t even be explained. I have nothing to say for myself other than a wave of my hand and dismissal as “uninspired”. A cheap, self appeasing phrase I coined as my own sad-sack mantra amidst a mental health journey of 2021. Anything more than nothing is enough. And quite enough that is, Kelly.
I’m mad about a lot of things. Failings of humanity and loneliness persistence, I rail my fists in the air with an angry “FUCK OFF” as my best Logan Roy cosplay. I’m anxious and veer depressed before I grasp my cheeks with a pinch and a snap and a call to look around, remind yourself what you have. Tell yourself you are good. You are not allowed to be depressed. You, are “strong”. I want to be left alone but I also want to be loved dearly, endlessly, eternally.
Even this very essay is a relic of time passed, a burst of creativity dampened in a blur, a collection of trinkets shoved in a cardboard box full of splotches and stains and water rot from the drip in the basement begging you to come back, screaming "don't neglect me! I mattered to you once!" because in fact the words you read before were already there, sad and dusty. Waiting. Thumping like Jumanji.
Is it fraud? To tell you I want to stand in a forest and scream today when I thought it before? When I wrote it before? Or can it morph and blossom into a conscious thought that transcends time and just is. And again I find it is true.
I think of Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray which yes I did get tickets for before even having a flight booked because nothing else mattered besides ensuring my seat on closing night eve. I think of her running around a dark desolate stage as 26 different people, an imperceptible millisecond to catch a breath or collect a gulp of saliva or wipe the drip of sweat that dangles threateningly. There's an essence and a magic that transcends time and space and exists in the atoms in the air, in the flecks of dust illuminated by the orbiting spotlight. Her seamlessness of embodying all of them when they're really all just one. They're all her. A star, playing pretend.
I think of the climax that jolts me alert from my jetlagged lull. She's racing through screens of trees, frantic to escape her (his) death at her (his) own hands as remember they're all her hands anyway bounding through the forest hearing echoes, cries, and screams. Lost in a wood, so vast, so much bigger and grander and holier, the sounds are her own. She runs from the danger and the danger is her. She stands, she falls. She screams in the forest. And she's able to see, when before she could not.
I want to stand in a forest and scream. Quiet the noise of the cast of 26 inhabiting the same soul. Competing for the throne and the thought and the final word.
In the forest it's just me, and a sound that no one else can hear.