That The Love Would Return

I apologise.
I am not dead, not in that sense anyway, but, and probably melodramatically, I am just a little bit dead. In my younger days, I used to write with a fury that now I am truly envious of. Every night, without fail, unless I was terribly drunk, I would be writing. I remember a friend, very creative themself, complimenting my output. It seemed like nothing, very easy, and to forgo sleep just so that I could get another five-hundred words down was no decision at all. Life was quite different back then. Even the hangover would not last past noon, so that by clocking-off I had the energy and desire to do the whole thing all over again.
The problem as I see it is that I have written about my boring, meaningless life for the past two decades and there is no longer anything that excites me. If it was a spouse we might consider a separation. Amicable, yes, but a separation. We would have lived in the hope that our love might return but it would not, of course, it never does. We did not owe the other anything. We bore no ill-will. It was the order of things.
If one goes on holiday to a foreign land, they bend down to pore over every roadside flower, to gawp at decrepit architecture or beam like a moron in a bakery or over coffee by the piazza, blunt senses sharpened by the new and unfamiliar! There is little to stir me anymore. All of life came to me in sentences, paragraphs, pages; not so much anymore.
‘And, quite honestly, there is nothing happening in my life worth talking about,’ said I to my counsellor during what turned out to be my penultimate session. That was sixteen months ago.
This is just to say that what literary energy — or inspiration, opportunity — I can muster is being directed elsewhere, into a project that — I believe — is more worthy of my time and something I should hope to complete, or at least advance considerably, before I turn forty in August. Not to mix metaphors but I have only so much creative currency.
No one reads this nonsense anyway. As I fled various blogs to avoid people I knew ‘in real life’, so I lost my audience. As I have recently — the last two years or more — written less and less, so that depleted audience has disappeared further. This statement itself seems unnecessary, but here it lies and now you have interrupted it! I will probably return here [insert website address here, a Virginia Woolf reference]. In fact, I will definitely return here. I could never abandon it entirely, because writing is what helps me process the wonder and fears of life, its infatuations and disturbances, the brief stretches of existence that stand out from the dull.
If it is your thing, I am on the social medias here: https://bsky.app/profile/theeveningparty.com
If you visited here regularly, I do not know you but I am grateful so I thank you from the bottom of this sluggish body that carries me around. It might not seem like much to you, but it was always the greatest of pleasures to write and have someone else enjoy it.

The Evening Party—

Nude Sketches