Sufi Soul Selective

Where are the words tonight? Where is my Goddess? For the last few days I've not felt her whisper brush the lobes of my ear. I've not felt her warm hand cup my heart and entreat me to write her another piece. Today I feel lost, sitting in a dorm room in the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Today I feel lonely. Shoot's not really started yet, and I've been wandering around campus pretending that I'm getting in to the skin of my character. But in honesty, I've just been wandering around, lost and fearful. Another film to do. Another knot of worry and tension coiled around my spine. What if I don't deliver on this one? What if I'm not nearly as good as I hope I am, or I need to be? What if the fraud I am will finally be exposed on celluloid with everybody watching and sniggering and shaking their heads.

There is sun here, but no heat. There is wind here, but no cool breezes. Even the quiet of night sits uninterested and sullen. The campus if full of interesting people but they have better things to do than to talk to the strange, tall boy they see in their classes or sitting in their cafeteria. They stare, some of them smile warmly, some of them come up and shake my hand. Some of them tell me they liked my work. Some of them click pictures. But still I feel alone.

I'm staying in a large room, with a wide, soft bed. Too soft for comfort. I sleep deep and troubled, waking up like a man in prison. The lights are all white and bright and harsh beyond bearing. There's a moth in my room that may just be lonelier and more lost than I. Aimlessly he flutters from corner to corner searching for whatever moths search for from light. But these energy saving bulbs give them nothing either. One of them comes and sits on my desk as I write and stares at me with his antennae twitching, trying to tell me something. I smile at it and try to tell it that you can come sit on my arm, take some of the warmth from my body. But it's wary, and rightly so. In a lifespan of about three days, why should he trust me to do anything but squash it dead?

I have things to read but I'd rather read. I have two scripts other than the one I'm currently shooting but can't seem to find the desire to flip through them past the point I've already read. I seem to to have lost the ability to gauge whether they are worth the doing or not. Every little grammatical error, every piece of bad dialogue screams at me, and I shut them fearfully. I don't want to say no to them without reading them entirely, but maybe I'm just hoping they'll turn into something written by Aaron Sorkin by the end, so I push on. I've got an Indian Ocean song ("Ma Rewa") playing on repeat throughout the night. Raghu Ram's voice and it's soulful crescendo only serving to show me the yawning chasm that separates me from the true artist, the true seeker.

Dear Goddess, bless me tonight. Let me sleep and wake full of energy and hope. Let me remember the man you created me to be. I feel strangely exiled from the calm confidence I normally carry with me throughout my days. Maybe it's just this night and it's unfriendly silence. Maybe it's just nerves before I start acting again.

What a strange profession this is. I've been dying to get back to work. Now here I am, and I'm a mess. I'd smile but I'm too tired. I wish the phone would ring. But it's not going to. I should get back to my script, but I just stare at the spaces between words when I do.

I don't mean to transmit my gloom to whoever is reading this. I just felt like pouring what I felt out of me. There is no poetry in me tonight. There is no wit, and no charm, there's just me in an empty room in an empty dorm. I'd get out and take a walk, but that would only remind me how empty the campus is at night and quiet. I could wander until I found a cluster of students and try and join in, but the thought of doing that makes me feel weak. I shouldn't need to force companionship upon myself to feel better. So I write.

And then all of a sudden, I get a letter from a friend from back in the simpler days. And he tells me he just saw one of my movies, and he's proud of me. How do I tell him the soaring relief hearing that brings me? Because admitting that would be admitting how much I need to feel loved and affirmed.

And all of a sudden I'm laughing at how silly I can be at times. And everything's alright. The moths' flapping in happy circles around my head and the Kings of Leon's "Radioactive" is crashing against the unfriendly white light and driving all of it away from me. And I'm back to being ineffable, self-adoring me.

Thank you for listening to my latest rant.