Saturday, May 26, 2012

Reality Check

Small triumphs, that's all we really live for, isn't it?

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Goodbye

And I felt like I lost something today. If I close my eyes and listen closely, I hear the whisper of an echo, of something that used to be so close, but will never be so close again. My body draws in breath like the ocean pulling itself in before a tidal wave; but before it comes crashing down on the shore, my breath comes out as a sigh, and I know I'm slightly further away than I was before.

I'm begged to bid goodbye, but I cannot force myself to wave. I weep. I laugh. I weep more. My soul feels like it shrivels in defense, but the truth is that it's enlivened, enhanced by all that it gleaned from a long spell of glee, punctuated by disappointment, though entirely stitched together by love. I mustn't worry, I know; this pain is only temporary. But I cannot help but find that it's a more permanent parting this time.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Between Sleep and Awake

Have you ever thought about sleep? Not the act of sleeping itself, when you're so far gone that not even the apocalypse can wake you, but the moment of falling asleep. Does it scare you that you can't remember it? It terrifies me.

Every night it's the same old thing, a cold bed waiting to be warmed by you, two blankets and a sheet, a fluffed up pillow, and the darkness which settles over you as securely as if it were molded to fit your body. Perhaps for a little while you lay there in the dark, conjuring images of a life you're sure to never live, but slowly, without the slightest acknowledgment in your mind of it, you start to fall asleep. Where, between consciously making up fantasies in your head and dreaming, does your mind stop letting you be aware of the world? One moment you're in a city far away, the next you're as unconscious as the dead.

To willingly be unaware of our surroundings, that is what sleep is. To really not know the beginning sleep and the end of waking, that is the most terrifying feeling of all. That place between sleep and awake, it's the place that will haunt you when you're lying in your bed, thinking about the way you'll soon be in oblivion, without quite knowing how you got there.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Museless

It's a dangerous thing when your muse lets you go. Thoughts slowly grind to a stop, inspiration flutters out the window, without so much as bidding you farewell. Suddenly you're banging your head against the wall because there's a vital part of yourself gone, lost to some place you could not even hope to touch. Emptiness fills your chest to the point of nothing being able to fill it again, nothing but that which is lost. You can't make it come back. All you can do is sit and hope it decides to show up again, bags in hand, with a big smile across its face.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Ice

Memories are built on ice. They slip and slide and puddle, the longer you neglect to revisit them, and soon the details have gone, chaffed away by time; all that's left is a vague idea, an insistence upon filling an otherwise blank space in the timeline of your life. And once it's gone, it's gone, you cannot build it back up again. Memories have no right to leech into the present, no way of building a semblance to something that's happened unless you let them.

But versions of events differ; colours are not always the same, and textures come back as different feelings under fingertips. It's all in the details, and you cannot re-carve them into the present with the precision they had in a past now gone. We are not magnificent, we are not our memories, we are not to reconstruct what already existed, but to forge ahead new paths. What other way is there to measure the depth of ourselves?

Monday, May 14, 2012

The Wrong Kind of Unafraid

I do not fear the things I should. The things that scare me are quiet, a heaviness in the back of my throat with tendrils that curl around my tongue and stop me speaking, and creep down into my chest and squeeze my heart until it's hard to breathe. They could kill me; not a physical death, but an emotional one, wiping away hope.

I cannot be a wild thing, for I cannot love without abandon. I could stand on train tracks and watch the train speed towards me, but what use is that if I cannot give my love as easily as I could give my life? You see, this is why I need you. I need someone to teach me how to be unafraid.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Soul Tar

Once, I sat in the darkness, contemplating the corners of my soul, reaching tentative fingers and dipping them into the black tar found there, cementing the walls of me together. I find now that the tar had been cleaned off my fingers, and the feel of it has fled from my mind, to hide in some other distance place. But the tar, neglected in its loneliness, twisted itself into tendrils, and climbing up the walls of my body, attached itself to the bottom of my skin, pushing ever upwards to grasp the taste of air. Now my fingers itch, and they grapple with the pen, struggling across the surface of a sheet of paper, turning a blankness into a representation of the tar's whisperings. And when it is done, it whispers further, and the words get written down across the bottom of the illustration, a tribute to the cynical; an expression of the tar.