March 12, 2013

• She’d be so proud

  I didn’t tell you because I wanted affirmation that what I felt was real. I was only afraid that what I felt was different.

  The truth: we know we lost that long ago. But if only we were each masked in the same delusion! Now we have not only lost the truth, we have lost each other.

  Squinting eyes on highway drives; the electric currents between the contradictions in our lives.

  For what are our bodies if not the lightning between the poles of a contradiction? A man who boasts he is free of contradictions is the biggest contradiction of all: a man who claims self-knowledge and has none.

  Rampant divorce is sad and affects you too. How do you go on knowing ‘Relationships work, unless you try really hard at them’?

  We leave each other’s houses; we put a cap on our love for others. You will always be a being of moderate love.

  I suspect there is a sadness that lies in your silences of which you never speak.

  We are creatures with a limitless ability to desire but a limited ability to acquire; our hearts are bigger than the world they were born into. A planet of suffering!

  Only so much fits inside my small body. No words fit in it at all. They continue to do autopsies to try to find where the words are in a person; they haven’t found them yet.

  A word is so very different than a face. I see a face and it could say anything; nothing lies like skin. The most obvious part of you tells the most lies. What am I to do now? We cannot even fit the contradictions we are into sentences; we are a current that stretches between so many places, and a sentence is a mere point in the field.

  We have unlearned intimacy and are unable to learn that is could never be relearned.

  The world’s deepest suffering is beyond inference, for to be beyond inference is the greatest suffering.

  I believe in monogamy because a story is only good the first time you tell it.

  Death is the quietest thing; it creeps slowly down the corridor, never making a noise. We are the things that make all the noise; the air all around us is a speaker system of meaning and souls and sounds. Death is the smallest moment, not even a moment at all, but a smaller event that occurs between moments. Death has no meaning, it is the taking of the thing that can see meaning. We put a name to a blank spot. Life is the place where all our questions lie; death merely keeps us from going on asking them. Take interest in what is, not in what is not.

  Squinting eyes on the highway home; am I not here, where I am alone? But here lies contradiction, for I tell myself ‘I am me! I’m alive! I am free!’ but I shout from within a life of mimicry.

  When I’m by myself I can be myself!

  They could only see my freedom; I could only see my slavery.

  All those places you’ve left far behind,
  but you cannot erase it was what you did at the time.

  ‘How are you?’ they could ask. But I left my heart on a front porch three days ago in a talk about PTSD. What can I say? Just because I’m smiling doesn’t mean I am not living in a cloud of failure? I feel no pull to normalcy? That our only real hope is to make each other laugh?

  I can tell who you are. We never walk quite as fast after a heart break.

  When we’re all together I want to say ‘OK, stop. We’re talking about subject X, but should we be talking about subject X? Let’s all state what our goals are for this interaction. Also rate how important your goal is to you. Then we’ll compare all the goals and see what subject for conversation would satisfy the most goals. Then we will be maximizing what we all want.’ But that never happens because no one talks about that. It is not anyone’s goal to talk like that. So I can only guess at what others want. 

  Maybe you’ll be fine that you don’t mean that much, that humans can’t mean that much to each other; but some day you’ll find a person that will make you sad about it.

  To be a finite thing is merely to give up everything.

  I saw a picture of thousands of people at a wake in Karachi the other day and I thought, ‘If I were there, I would be so alone and afraid and think ‘AHHHHH I don’t make sense to anyone!”

  If I went to Karachi, of course it would be that scary. But I walked into a house on Saturday here in Columbus and there were quite a few people there and I thought the same thing. 

  Midnight walks in the snow. Long afternoons singing together. Jumping fences to backyard bonfires. Long hours drinking coffee on the porch. Light filtering through the blinds onto the pages. Grocery store adventures. Friends moving to farms. Shouting matches over chick flicks. Scrambled eggs and hope for the future. Walks at 6 AM. Vicarious snow days with the little brother. Coffee and more coffee. A feeling the word redemption means something. First crossword ever with a friend after they get off work. Throwing french fries in a rainy alley. Balancing oreos from our foreheads to our mouths. Sharing food, sharing life; staying up late in bank-vault darkness. The feeling I’m far ahead and far behind; that I’m full of everything and full of nothing. That’s there’s something to keeping going. 

  None of this feels like what was in the car with me on the highway.

  I think about people. Scratching on thoughts like they are glass boxes. How do our minds even do that? How do we pixelate people? How did I get your nose right in my thoughts? Do I get it right? But our noses lie anyways; our bodies lie, our words try their best. A thought of you never tells the truth; don’t form beliefs based on anything that can’t talk back at you.

  Life gets bigger and bigger but our heads stay the same size. Bodies are liars.

  To be a finite thing is merely to give up everything.

  but maybe it’s worth it.

  • 4:57 am
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