Maggie West

My Schedule For This Week

This is going to be the schedule for my website this week, unless I get distracted again. In all likelihood, I will. If it’s not my family (who have ALL figured out I have a website now), it’s my friends (mostly because of all the frickin’ parties and social gatherings – come on guys, three in one weekend is a bit much, don’t you think?), my dog, the postman (who I think may not have anyone else to talk to, but me. He is here every morning for at least twenty minutes), or the guys in the sheriff’s department (who, now, visit me as often as the mosquitoes – that’s a good thing, I guess), and I can’t forget the neighbors (the lawyer who owns the house next door is trying to sell it. I think he’s plotting to torch mine – if you saw it, you’d understand why).

Oh yeah, the schedule…

I will post two blogs on family members. They have been patiently waiting for the completion of some manic thoughts from “yours truly” and the “why” escapes me at the moment. Maybe they think I’m going to say something that will change their lives; perhaps they think I have figured out the answers to their many questions, or that I have some vital information. My readers will understand this next line more than my relatives ever could: “They don’t know me very well, do they.”

At the risk of sounding “Frankensteinish” – “It’s alive!”

I have created a monster.

Next, I hope to include two posts on relationship issues; they have been pouring into my email. I had 36 messages to answer this morning – I was only gone for a few days – and this number did not include any of my other mail. I had 64 total. How the hell do I keep up with that?

If I only posted the answers to every question currently in my “saved” folder, I would be blogging until I’m old and gray. Okay, I am old…okay, I am gray…never mind. I guess the time has come to start including more than one topic in each post. I do want to “mix it up,” after all – otherwise, it would be boring, wouldn’t it?

Then, I would like to give myself a break and write a little about my “swearblogger.” Well, I guess he’s not really mine – you can’t own a person, or can you (just kidding, honey)? It’s not as if my readers mind. I get more “hits” when he is mentioned than at any other time. Maybe it’s the suit?

And if you all give me enough time, I’ll include some chapters from the book. Now that’s a novel idea – no pun intended. Lately, I just haven’t taken the time to post them.

Hmmmmmm…

Something else must be weighing on my mind. What do you think that could be boys and girls?

While I’m doing all this, I also have a front porch that had all the posts knocked out and is currently being held up by 2x4’s, the bathroom looks like a grenade hit it (time to finish the walls in there), and “the love of my life” and I have a garden in North Carolina too. It needs attention (actually, so does the lawn and mulched areas).

If that’s not enough, I also have more readings scheduled this summer and oh, there is this little bartending company that needs some of my attention. I do work every now and then.

Damn…

I’m going to need a lot of naptime.

No worries. Keep your pants up and your skirts down, I’ll get to them all eventually.

A Shot In The Dark

Most artists’ payment for their craft is an “immortality” of sorts (for lack of a better word). The closest I thing I can relate it to is having children. You know that a piece of you will always exist, or your hope is that it might. Writer’s children are their “words”. They want to nurture them and send them out on their own; in hopes that they are able to achieve more than the thoughts and ideals that generated them. When this is accomplished you feel little else at that very moment. Is this a mistake: This feeling of elation that comes from your words finally being heard to the point of disregarding everything else? Then I have erred, and erred badly. With one sentence, just a few words really, I took away the rest of what gave me solace, contentment, euphoria. My heart tells me now that it should never have been cast in stone; but once put to type, put for all to see, it cannot be undone, it cannot be forgotten. And in some cases cannot be forgiven. Do I now cut off the hands that committed such an atrocity? Do I sever the head that so foolishly believed them to be mere words?

As a writer I dream of making an impact in some way through my words into someone’s, anyone’s life. This dream has come to me at a high price, however. I think for the most part, all writers want to be recognized in one way or the other by their readers. A conversation I had, not too long ago, involved this very topic. As we discussed the thought of many people being touched by what we wrote, I found my thoughts drifting to just being able to affect one person, nothing more. I mentioned it during the conversation, but maybe only in passing. My mistake may have been not relating the importance of this vision properly. I have been writing for about five or six years now, little else. I realize it not only has become a passion, but a way of life for me.

There are only two dreams I have held very close to my heart, most of my life. One was that my writing could find that singular door into someone else’s life, the other, is I would find a door into one specific person’s life for the rest of mine. Both of these dreams were so close I could taste them: I could feel them. All I had to do was reach out and they would be mine. It seems my reach was not long enough, strong enough, or maybe even not felt enough. One of them came to be, but only at the cost of the other. Rather than correctly expressing my need to share the excitement of the one, I drove the other away. Someone who I cared deeply about, someone I thought I would never have to face the ultimate penalty with – eternal silence. We just fit together, were interconnected somehow – there’s no other way to explain it! I miss reading his thoughts, I miss hearing his voice, I miss feeling his touch, but most of all I miss “the man” I had come to know in so many ways and the anticipation felt when I knew there were many tomorrows to know more.

How could we let this happen? How could I let this happen? People like him exist so rarely in life. Moments, like those we shared even farther and fewer in between. Like most of you have probably felt at one time or another: I ask myself, “Why did what I wanted and needed for so long, happen for such a short period of time?” I don’t have the answers. I wish I did. I do know that for one fleeting moment in time he made me realize that my heart could beat again, that my life was able to grasp at happiness once more. Maybe this was my intended message all along. He brought me out of the darkness for one single glimmer of light and then placed me back again. Allowing me to feel the optimism I needed to continue the hopes, the dreams, and the understanding that have always been there in the past, but were lacking in my present.

Maybe my journey is just beginning. Maybe my words will be heard for what they are by someone, somewhere. Allowing them the knowledge to recognize what I truly pine for. What I have truthfully sought after, all along, was just an exceptional individual to share them with. Someone who could see the real me not through what I write, but through who I am; who I wish to be.

Once again I find myself looking, searching for answers. Why were my dreams so close at hand, yet ripped away without any warning? How is it possible that you could feel such euphoria one minute and such utter misery another? As I peruse my files for an answer to my own situation I notice that this too is common. Many of you are struck out of the blue, without any warning; that’s what makes the sorrow so deep, so final. Is this a consolation to me in my hours of need, not really? But, I know I’m not alone…I know there are others. So can I make it through this? I know I can. Just as those have done before me: Just as those that follow me into the dark will.

I guess I’m still just learning, through some very hard lessons. All I do know, with some amount of certainty, is that writing is still a passion, still a way of life for me. Though many frequently misunderstand my words, I can only hope that others accept them for the purpose intended and nothing more.

I will continue my blogs because I believe it to be my fate of sorts. This is where I have decided to leave my life’s pursuits, this and nothing more. It is time to reflect on my own words, my own meanings attached to them, and those I affect with their existence. Know that I will return tomorrow and the next day and the next, to listen, to hear, to understand, and to write.

I thank all who have left such wonderful messages and words of encouragement in the last few days. You will never know how much they have meant to me. I leave you now with a portion of a poem that is very close to my heart and elicits my mind-set at this very moment. I believe now that certain lines were spoken to me as a foreshadowing of things to be, rather than the perception I took them for at the time. Here is the ending of this noted work:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

“The Hollow Men” ~T. S. Eliot (1925)