Incoherent

So I lived a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the wrong place. The words coming out meaningless, garbled...I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language. (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces)

It's paper season. Specifically, I am currently working on a history paper about the Kirov murder. One thing I have learned: if someone has written a 700+ page book about the subject of your paper and you are someone who already tends to run over the word count, then you should probably pick a different subject. Just the research part of this paper killed me. Plus I am not comfortable writing history papers. English papers I know what I'm doing. I'm a whiz at MLA citation by now. History papers I always just feel like I am out of my depth. It doesn't help that inevitably when this time of the year rolls around my ability to form coherent sentences goes out the window. The thoughts are there in my head. In fact, in my head I am downright brilliant. Things break down when I try to communicate what is in my head. I feel like I'm speaking a foreign language, as if the words are just slightly out of my grasp. I'm forgetting things before I can write them down. The other day I was typing and wasn't looking at the screen and then when I looked up all there was was incoherent garble. It seemed like such a perfect embodiment of the way I have been feeling while trying to write. I immediately thought of this quote from Fugitive Pieces. So perfect. At least if I can't express things there are brilliant authors who can do it for me.