desire lines

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It's May now, which means I'm technically free from Inkhaven. I'm done; I said goodbye to Lighthaven and all the wonderful residents and the write-write-write rhythm enforced by the midnight deadline steamroller. It was a good goodbye, too. I sang. I danced. I bared my heart into the wee hours of the morning. I even wrote a huge retrospective about being done, which was so many words that I figured I wouldn't have any more left in me.

Yet here I am, itching to write. The words march around in my brain like ants, crawling down the back of my neck. I suppose I cannot blame them — they are simply following the desire line forged over a full, focused month, eschewing the long and winding road I used to make them take. They know that there's a better way out now.

It's curious. I almost don't recognize myself typing away at the computer, even though I'm just replaying what I did yesterday and the day before that. It's probably the phantom steamroller looming over my shoulder, the artificial, anxious urge to post 500 words by midnight. The steamroller was real when I was at Inkhaven — it was the whole point, after all — but now it's gone, and its shadow clashes with the color of daily life.

I see other afterimages, too. I keep checking the firehose as if there will be new posts to read, only to find the posts from yesterday frozen in time. I keep looking for messages from fellow residents and I get them, except that they're airport photos and let's keep in touch and oh, I'm expecting a familiar face to show up just behind the doorway. There's no one there, of course; my mind is just following another well-trodden desire line. It doesn't know any better.

But desire lines only exist by ongoing use; without it, they fade away into the vegetation. I can feel it happening already. Yesterday, I let the phantom steamroller run me over, just to see what it felt like — there was chill and a small shiver, but then, nothing — and I watched it plod off into the distance without me. When I inevitably find the firehose dry, I return to my RSS reader, full of blogs I've been reading for years. They're familiar, but I notice that I can't match a face to most of them. In my craving for familiar faces, I reach out to older friends, the ones who have had their own lives for the month of April.

As the desire lines fade away, I have to face the reality of returning to reality. Worries grab at me. If I don't have the steamroller and the friends and the beautiful campus, will I forget to write? Will I forget how much I love to write? Was the wonder I experienced at Inkhaven some kind of dream, confined to the halls of Lighthaven?

I have to trust that the worries are vacuous. You cannot do something like Inkhaven without it leaving a mark on your soul.

The desire lines may fade, but they'll never truly disappear.