do your waters run deep, my darlin

where they don't run wide?

I used to feel lonely amongst the root systems, but now I see that even (some) root systems feel lonely amongst the (other) root systems.

...And what good are isolating mental matrices when this is what's happening in the world?
(How am I supposed to concentrate on school, or on my internal wheels when The Global makes me feel so sad/small?)
why am I here? why am I here? what am I doing?

words Microscoft Word tells me aren't words.

1. liminal
2. situationally
3. intersex
4. intranationally (strangely; it accepts "internationally" as a word--go figure).
5. intersectionality
6. transnationalist
7. transnationalism

There's a word in Spanish I've always loved: ensimismamiento
the definition is: concentrándose en los propios pensamientos.
(and a loose English translation would be: a noun for the action of two beings' uniting themselves in each other's thoughts, which become the same thought).

My parents call it "minds touching."
And there's a pretty sweet Stephen Dunn poem about it, too.
Ensimismarse is the verb, and ensimismado is the participle--but get this: ensimismado, the participle, is also used as a noun to mean the person whose mind touches yours. (Ensimismada would be the female equivalent).

That word doesn't exist in English. I'm not so sure the person exists outside of language, either. Maybe for moments, but not for a lifetime.

Love isn't thinking the same way; it's caring enough to commit to trying to understand.

Transnationalism, on the other hand, is very real.
And so is liminality. Oh, liminality. I can feel it.

flashes of melancholy (and the Middle Ages).

John Keats wanted his grave to read: here lies one whose name was writ in water.

[They didn't honor it].

Learned the etymology of melancholy the other day. Turns, out--

In the Middle Ages, bodies were thought to be made of humors, right? Well, when certain humors were in abundance--or sparse--one was said to have relational illness.
Melancholy was one of those humors.
Melancholia was the humoral illness.

One with 'excess' melancholy was clinically deemed: high-strung, but remarkably creative; simultaneously insane and genius.

It's a love/hate relationship--The Poet's and Melancholy's--like something un-catchable that catches you. What is prescriptive mental normalcy, anyways? Is intellectual genius inevitably so isolating that one who has it cannot help but feel crazy? disconnected? I think that is sad. I'm no intellectual genius (and I vow to not be as broody as John Keats), but sometimes I feel crazy, too. Yeah, sometimes I feel crazy, too.

When I was a super-little tyke (like, too young to remember--so super-little), the Dr. gave me some 'test,' and told my mother I had an acute form of Attention Defecate Disorder. He tried to put me on Ritalin, and maybe that's good and well for some people, but personally, I think it was kind of fucked up that he suggested it. Luckily for me, my mom thought so too, wrote the thing off as "one man's opinion" and kept me undrugged-- never even mentioning the incident to me until about a year ago. And maybe I'll go through life losing things more often than most people, and maybe my mind'll be full of flashes, and my stories will go through all these anecdotal turns before they make their points, but what's wrong with that? I'm Joyful and my relationships run deep, and I do well professionally/academically/ etc. etc. Why fix what's not broken in the head?

I, for one, am glad Keats was Melancholy. (And for the record; he was too)

flashes of melancholy (and the Middle Ages) by Leslie Albanese is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Inspired by Dr. Brandy Fraley--lecture on John Keats and his Circle.