meaningful meaninglessness

"I have some dreams
they were clouds in my coffee" - c.s.

i recently finished "100 years of solitude," which felt like exactly that. despite all the beauty of the narrative, the book quite overwhelmed me. maybe that's partly because i've been re-living my own discord with solitude - or as it would come from my own lips "my fear of being alone." so the book was timely. or more likely, the book brought this age old torment of mine to the surface for examination. i've come to realize that i've spent so many years running in to the company of others without considering what i was running from.

marquez's characters in this book - all descendants of eachother, with incest making the circle ever thicker - wove their stories, fates and failures in to and over eachother times and time again, like patterns on a looping quilt. inevitably they'd wind up back in their childhood home, stuck in dreams of the past and haunted by the same behaviors as the legacy of ghosts that brushed by them in the hallways... often alone, even in eachother's company, and as often exhibiting the same self-destructive patterns of their elders.

so imagine me, fearful of my aloneness even in the company of beloved friends, reading about these cycles of isolation page after page, character after mirroring character.

i had to put the book down sometimes for weeks at a time cuz the edge of my own brain became sharpened by these pages, and felt self-destructive. or maybe that WAS the very fuel for my own journey, cutting the roots of patterned thoughts apart with my disgust for the hampster-wheel of the characters' lives.

i feel much better now... maybe muddy up to my chin, but through it. even the last 100 pages were a brisk walk, held back by nothing. or less.

it's remarkable to me how creations can mean so much at different moments. some day, i should like to re-read "o.h.y.o.s." to absorb more of the beauty, when i can take the tragedy alittle less personally.