October 25, 2011

• A spindrift life

  Sometimes I feel like I’m slowly disappearing.  I don’t know.  You talk to enough people eventually you feel like they’re not talking back at anyone.  Why do people like hanging out with someone who isn’t anyone.  I like assertive friends.  Assertive is the wrong word though.  It’s honesty.  I often feel like apologizing to people after I’ve spoken, like being me is actually a job I’ve been assigned that even I didn’t want.  I don’t want to be honest so I string out into a cobweb barely hanging on in the wind, until I have the far off look in a terminal patient’s eyes after their friends have tired of visiting, until they barely come anymore.

  Being alone is a good feeling to have if you are actually alone.  To be alone but to feel like someone else is there because their name and picture are on a computer screen is a horrible tragedy, a robbery of the actual emotions of your life. 

  The irony in most people’s lives go completely unnoticed because we don’t remember where we’ve been, what we’ve said, the scene when we never thought we’d end up like this.  It is not rattling to find yourself alone, but to find yourself with that feeling, with that thought once more, the one where you realize you’ve accepted certain failures in slow motion.  A young girl walked beside me as I walked back to work from the delivery car, and in a smile she made me realize everything that was wrong with me.  She asked me for a piece of candy and I gave it to her, and she smiled and loved me.  Because that’s how being a child is.  People give you things and you haven’t learned to check your hope, that you should flatten your emotions so that you aren’t let down all the time. 

  Don’t be afraid of finding truths you don’t like if you’re all alone; only be afraid if you as a child shows up. 

  Can you feel all the tension running through things, the holiness at night, the sinfulness in day, the want for your next conversation to make sense, to talk about things you’ve never talked about that you think everyone should talk about, the fact you’ve forgotten all you felt would make sense in the first place?  It is rare to have your own thought.  Most of the time I just have everyone else’s. 

  Because somewhere along the way, I let the world start teaching me everything.  The world taught me to fight, to look out for me first, to think intimately about myself, like I’m an Oz on another planet dictating to this body what to do for reasons I don’t understand.  It taught me to care about my looks.  It taught me to feel good for knowing the inside knowledge of something, and to look down on everyone who doesn’t have that knowledge.  It taught me to try to “find” a wife.  It taught me to rate people by how well they do their job, by whether they would do things the way I do them.  It taught me to forget about people I find boring, that I would rather not be around, like those people don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, since I am the grand scheme of things.

  I forgot it’s worth becoming good to not absorb everything I see and hear.  I dipped my toe in the water and the pond was made of ink and now it won’t come off and it’s very hard to forget about the things that you now need an excuse to unlearn, an excuse that can’t be explained in conversation, that feeling you get when you sit down with yourself as a child. 

  I’m still trying to string this all together.  It seems so hard to connect things, they fly in from all over.  Most of the time when I’m thinking about how to think about my life I end up thinking I shouldn’t, but then I realize that I will revert back to however I normally think about life, and that current is one that tends toward nothing.  I try on a different personality with everyone I meet and none of them seem to fit.  Nothing ever seems to move anywhere, like we’re getting something done that matters; I wonder what would eventually make it feel that way, how it would be for God to invade a city that only thinks horizontally. 

  I guess there’s a start, a start that puts quietly to death the life you always imagine living.  The perfect friend does not exist.  The perfect parent does not exist.  The perfect boss does not exist.  The perfect girl does not exist.  Stop waiting for the phantoms of your imagination to suddenly land in your life, to affirm the idea of life you always felt entitled to have.  Look around you.  These people exist.  And only them.  Everything else is just an idea.

  God gives us the beauty of youth as a gift, but he makes it go away so we realize it’s not what really matters.

  Words kick and scream inside to get out but they often die because the time wasn’t right and then life never gets lived.

  The modern world gets tiring, how you are happy that a good thing has started to grow, but then it gets ripped away by a job or school in some other city.  Sometimes it feels like we set up the world today so we would feel hopeful until age 22 when our second batch of friends all move away.  You wonder how the man divorced five times can keep a straight face at the altar of number six, but how do you keep a serious hope when you feel a new friend growing in your twenties? 

  I’m sad.  But sometimes you have to just say it.  Then it’s ok.  A big part of sadness is when you never even say it.

  I know things about you right away, like how much you like it when people smile when they see you, or how good it feels when people say they miss you.  I really just hope for the day I’ll know for sure that lives are deep, and that I really helped one.  But with sewers this rusty and colleges where our childhoods drift into oblivion and computers that lull our souls to sleep sometime I wonder if I’ll ever be in a place where anything will be sure and clear.  But I write these things down instead of forget them, so I won’t forget them, because I know there’s a place where my hope should be.  Hallelujah, some nights these skies are clear and I find myself alone for just a moment and I hear you whispering to hang on.

  • 3:06 am
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