She lay her head on the pillow, the weight of the thoughts streaming through her mind pressing down upon its inviting reprieve.

We read this passage today from Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. I don't think I blogged about that book, but for the record: I love it. It makes me want to cry, it's so beautiful. It's like looking at Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, it's that poetically beautiful. I read it, and I felt as if Hurston was speaking to my soul.

Anywho.

There was a part where Janie "starched and ironed her face" then sent it to her late husband's funeral while her mind went "frolicking through the fields of spring" or something along those lines.
There's a veil in my mind. A very delicate veil that I work very hard to leave alone. It creates a division, a division between aspects of my life I'm trying to marry in some type of union that won't be damaging to either side. Whenever I think I'm succeeding, I give into the temptation and lift the veil up, ever so slightly for just a bit of a reminiscence, and get a glimpse of what's on the other side. Or sometimes I do it entirely by accident or out of sheer forgetfulness, and suddenly I find myself on the wrong side, the painful side, the side I'm trying to forget and ignore because a union seems almost impossible. Why do I succumb, why can't I just remember to leave the veil alone?

But how can I ignore it? I can't just replace a huge part of my life with something else. Rather the lack has created this vacuous hole in my life and I'm frantically trying to salvage any remnant of its existence. The two sides of that inadequate veil don't seem to get along, and I'm frequently trying to play the compromiser, the peace maker, the advocate.

People mention things, very casually and innocently, and I internalize it; I take their comments--which are always harmless and blameless--and dwell on them, letting them sit and fester in my brain. There's a passage in the Bible where it says "And Mary took these things and pondered them in her heart." Sometimes I feel consumed by my thoughts, wherein they no longer inhabit only my mind but my being, that it becomes my state of consciousness. And then I have to pull out of it, turn distinctly away from the thin veil of my mind, and focus on my present, my now, my today, for it does naught but harm to dwell on yesterday, that what was, the past.

I want to distance myself from it, but I can't. I feel like my life is in limbo, an Inceptionesque state of consciousness in which my life is frozen in a world not entirely composed of elements of reality or what I wish were reality. Then when I start to succeed, getting farther and farther away from that veil, I question my actions. Do I really want to be the one rowing the boat? Or do I want to drift in a lazy fashion, letting the tide of my thoughts, thereby influencing my actions, flow in any direction they please?

For now, I shall have to do as Janie and "starch and iron my face," leaving my true thoughts and feelings dwell within. I can't come out of this shell. I'm not stable enough, I'm not confident enough. There's too many unknowns, and I've never been able to venture out into the ambiguous. To put it simply, I'm frightened.

My constant companion is my Thoughts, a place I know I'm safe and secure, a friend I know is reliant and accepting, a safety vault for my innermost yearnings and ponderings. And since, right now, that's what I need more than anything, she'll have to suffice.