I'll tell you how the sun rose...

...a ribbon at a time- or, how shall I describe the sun?

Really though, describe anything, explain anything, and see how long it takes before you've gotten away from it- when you're not describing the sun anymore but the way it appears from earth, and suddenly you realize there's no way to really explain the sun without telling about the sky, and the ground and darkness and other planets that are really only names to you. The sun is kind of an excessively poetic example, but I noticed the problem of explanation today trying to tell a friend from school about a friend from home and running into all sorts of walls. It should be said right now: I really am stuck on this whole past/present thing. This may seem like it's a different topic so far, but it's not. I guess the question really is, when are you truly separate from what has affected you and what you affect? Whatever I tried to say about this girl to make some sense of who she was invariably led back to a description of her house, her mom, then my mom and my house, and eventually the whole web of everything around us. It wasn't so much that I couldn't describe her without telling about these things, I couldn't explain her. And that's what I wanted to do- I wanted him to get it, to get why the things I was telling him mattered. As it began to get broken down, it became clear that what I thought was integral to the explanation of what makes something important was really just a sort of portal into something bigger and more invisible and more crucial.

This happens all the time, in explanations of everything. Someone asks you a question of how or why something is, and the simple affirmative fact you think you are answering with becomes a prompt for another question. It's a wonderful defense mechanism for protecting the information and honesty you're maybe even too scared to let yourself know that you have somewhere. I don't know how many asked questions it would take for me to even figure out what I'm doing here home. I don't know when it was that things went wrong, how they did if they even did. Every possible beginning just turns into a sign pointing to someone or something else, until suddenly I'm back at the point of being born when I'm sure things must have been okay. Or maybe that was it. My mom had a c-section because I was sideways, maybe there's something to being pulled up like a fish out of belly water, seeing light and hands for the first time through the film of your own walls. I don't really believe that though. It's terribly gloomy. And if it were true then hundreds of thousands of kids would be leaving their blindly functional normal lives each year to kick habits that are, they say, against normal human nature to even start. I don't know. The blame game is silly, I never even meant for this to get into that. But I suppose that's how rambling just sorta goes.

I wonder if he feels like he understands her- the boy from school, the girl from home- I can't imagine that he does after our short conversation. Of course it doesn't really matter. In that same way though, do any of us understand anyone, if we're given only the present to have known them? I think if you divorce yourself completely from the past you become unknowable, knowable only in a flimsy shade that is perpetually some degrees off, like printing understanding through a filter spread with vaseline. I've always found the ideas of inaccessibility and secrets and veils really tantalizing, I remember the day in my mom's car when I figured out the thrill of telling lies. But when you get past the glitter of all that, I'm not sure there's much to it. It wasn't until last year that I realized I hadn't been telling the truth about nearly anything really important for ages- and even then I didn't really start telling it. This is why, on Wednesday, I shall start seeing the person hired to make me do it. Of course I don't want to talk about anything important, and invariably every answer will just become another question. It's ironic that I left my glasses at school, like I'm subconsciously trying to blur things just as they threaten to get terribly, monstrously clear.