When I first decided to move to Bhutan for at least a year, I made a deal with myself, that I would finally focus on my writing more. I knew there wasn’t going to be much street art, like what I had been documenting extensively for over a decade. And I knew I was going to be teaching writing, and I knew in general, life was going to move slower here. “Meditate and write,” I told myself.

And so I feel like I’m here, but not here. Present, but slipping. The past two weeks have been a strange kind of limbo—somewhere between dream and articulation, between the pull to write and the weight of existing outside of it. Words spill out, but they don’t quite land. Thoughts stretch, dissolve, reappear in fragments. Is it the altitude? But, how can it be? I’ve been good with it since last Fall.

I feel myself disappearing into the abyss of it—the writing, the feeling, the attempt to pin something down that refuses to be named. A breath caught mid-chest, not quite reaching its end. The edges of reality blur like ink bleeding into water. Some moments, I’m electrified, the words coming too fast to catch. Others, I’m staring at the page, knowing there’s something there but unable to pull it through.

Is it inspiration or exhaustion? Dreaming or unraveling? I can’t tell. But I keep writing. Keep sinking into the haze, hoping that somewhere in the mess of words and breath and blurred edges, something true will take shape.

Adding to this precarious state has to be the fact that I’m reading the new Haruki Murakami and his books are just one long dream, aren’t they?

23march2025