The need to update

I.
I feel sometimes as if the need to update an online journal is a primal urge displaced — a marking of territory, a way of signaling presence or continued well being to the tribe.

The urge to update grows wings and circles the world. The urge to connect eats brain tissue, goes mad with foreign thoughts, opens borders to strange flags and music.

I watch the urge to update my journal slip past my buttons and wrestle itself into a place of primacy, next to my skin. I think if I let it, it will burrow in like some parasite until it is just there, an organ, a need like breathing…

II.
The urge to update was born the night the first spark from a human hearth lit a grassland on fire and torn across the savanna like thunder, the flames like a mob, individual red feathers as thick as spilled salt on a table — you never get them all, they end up everywhere, underfoot…the blogs are like that.

The blogs of my friends are like that.

The blogs of people I’ve never met are like that too, but cooler; they don’t burn me as much, although I think that’s about my fireproofing, and not about their heat.

III.
Sometimes a blogger steps away from the key board, and that world disappears.

IV.
I lost my urge to update to the sexy blog, the angry blog, the smart blog that ran rings around me logically, the cute blog with the dimple, the blog with the knife, the gun, the unformulated rejection letter, the hand
the size
of pain.

V.
This is the update of the moment before I turn to ash. What will that smell like, the burning of this pixilated storybook?

VI.
I am certain heaven has no room for the urge to update…