so restless

I haven't been blogging for a while, aside from the usual photo posts, which I'm beginning to suspect are cover-ups for not producing any piece of proper writing. It's not like I don't want to, or that I don't have the time. It's just that sometimes the thought of opening up this Blogger window and seeing this huge block of space waiting to be filled up with my words is positively scary. Tonight, however, I don't want to be stopped by the fear of trying to write, and then failing to produce anything decent. I try not to think of the large gaps of time that punctuate my writing process, when my fingers would slow down, and gradually words disconnect from mind, and it's another painful session of being so close to grasping the right words, but at the same time not close enough. Tonight, I want to, no, I really need to write.

It's silly I know, to be afraid to write. But I sometimes annoy myself when I write. Even now, as I am typing this, I feel like what I'm trying to say and what I actually am saying run parallel. I've been writing about writing, and have been sounding painfully pretentiously poetic in the first paragraph. But I digress. There's something more pressing at the moment than going back and correcting my pretentiousness to sound less pretentious (which is actually also pretentious? and what's wrong with being pretentious anyway?) What I actually want to say is this:

I feel so restless.

It's been that way since I came back from school three hours ago. My entire being feels heavy, and I can form no clear thought addressing this feeling not unlike a mixture of helplessness/ pessimism/ frustration like there's a swarm of bees in my head. I sit in front of my laptop, tabs flitting between Tumblr and FaceBook and the Atlantic, a book next to my phone open on WhatsApp, but I am doing nothing. I am accomplishing nothing, and that thought annoys me. Sitting here isn't too bad, but I feel annoyed at myself as the digital clock at the bottom right of my screen glides across the hours so smoothly I don't notice it.

I should be studying but I can't with this state of mind and I am annoyed at that. My head is saturated with flitting thoughts and fragmented ideas of what-ifs and the occasional party-pooper university application worries thrown into the mixture to add masochistic interest. In the end I am thinking of so many things that all of them surmount to nothing. And if I haven't made myself clear on my stand on that, I am very annoyed at all this lost time.

I recognize this feeling of restlessness. It's boredom and frustration, and it's the feeling that has characterized my life so far with stories of impulsive pursuits. It's been toned down over the years, but tonight it seems to have made a comeback, and a strong one at that. It's something I probably can't shake off until I have gone offline and gotten out of this place and done anything. There's a problem though, it's nearly 10PM which means if I got out of here right now and anything happens to me it's going to be my fault.

All I want to do is shoot and shoot and shoot, not the gun variety, although that doesn't sound half-bad right now, but the camera variety that ropes your mind firmly to the present. I'm thinking something messy and clean and terrifically artistic, thoughts that relieve this restlessness just by being there: a prospect to look forward to.

So what I can do is let the fireworks go off in my mind, and try very hard to grab a fragment of the firework that I can work into an idea. And hopefully when I grab one it'll take me across the sky with it, ending in a pathetic streak of an averagely manifested idea that can never seem to rival the original display. In the meantime I can only pace the ground, restless.