People say girls mature quicker like it’s some kind of finish line. Sometimes I hear it as Girls disappear quicker. Maybe there’s some truth to it. ‘Playing it safe’, the careful steps, the tiny permissions we give ourselves, but really, it’s not caution at all, it’s that we’re not allowed to give up as late as men do, that their impatience settles into our bones.
Men are allowed to wander until their hair greys, the only ones who seem to have a problem with it is themselves, sometimes. Women must settle first so that the wanders may find their way. Why should one bit of madness be taken as right and another stifled and made to wait. Is it even true?
C’est con. I’m not sure if I wanna be doing any of what I’m doing. I’m not sure how much of it comes from me. That’s normal, what you believe and what you think are two different things.
I am free, ostensibly, extravagantly free; so much so that everything seems to go on all around me, and I wouldn’t have to move an inch; I could watch all the little things that hold shape fall away and flicker out. Nothing more to say, nothing to clear up. Suddenly strange to be myself, I’m something closer to a classique du Lycée, annotated, revised – something completely effable. ‘Art is strictly not ineffable’ – Garden variety French know-it-alls, dripping with misplaced wealth. This is, mostly, for those unfortunate enough to have spent some time with this particularly insufferable breed of Gaul: the innerly delicate – too beyond their own intelligence to utter much of any interest, or string together a clear thought that isn’t ready-made, tried-and-true. It’d be too easy to call it a power thing, it’s more of an affectation – a terrible, rabid need to exist with absolute certainty, to know absolutely that they, and only they, are sly enough to really understand – never to look, hear or even feel, but to understand – il faut tout simplement faire le triage.
Nothing is really ineffable to men except love and women. Perhaps because they subsist on pure conviction, on sure-things at that lower frequency of being, called Reason, which is really a pre-condition to blindness; a discipline of attention that trains the eye away from whatever cannot be mastered. Whatever cannot be possessed – declared unintelligible, sentimentalized, dismissed. It’s past the point of being worked. What I believe decides long before I can think of it.
