June 3, 2013

• When the light is finally on/out

  What would prove that you exist? What would you point at to show yourself ‘Look. Now don’t you know to live? Will you finally leave your foolishness behind? Do you not know if you justify cruelty through selfishness, you’ve only damned yourself twice over?’

   

  I don’t know when to take a person seriously. Which person is living and thinking ‘I am staking it all on this’? Are you? What, you don’t believe in stakes? You calmed those emotions early on, forgot about them? You can’t find anything either that would prove you exist? Nothing that says ‘Look – now don’t you know…’?

   

  You have no idea the radical effect the eyes of others have on you.

   

  I can already see it now – I’ll be driving on a windy mountain road one day, and I’ll rise above the tree line and see the many hills covered in sunlit trees and think – no, it isn’t special. That I’m seeing it isn’t special either. My family means nothing. I’ve romanticized everything.

   

  As life goes on you realize how invisible your pain can be to others. This should crush you into kindness to those souls you don’t know, which is everyone for – if you can’t locate your own soul, how will you ever locate someone else’s?

   

  What would prove you exist?

   

  Where is it?

   

  I’ve hugged so many people.

   

  I’m lying on one of those rough-threaded couches. This computer is scorching hot underneath. The board game I invented is lying on the black Ikea coffee table. The room is full of pictures and trendy furniture. I’m in it. I’m actually there. But how much of me? Haven’t I blotted out the past? Don’t I not know the names of old friends? Didn’t I hate my parents and tell the world to love everyone? Aren’t I about to check my facebook instead of fix my soul?

   

  Where are you – what do you point to?

   

  I don’t know who could look up at the stars and not be terrified.

   

  I know, I know – I know that one day I’ll calm down. This will all be gone. The night I was crushed by a million strangers from a foreign part of existence. That same feeling I got later in the night as, lost biking home, I laid on the side of the road beneath the phone wires and stars. I won’t visit friends in transition, I won’t know I once left myself somewhere, I won’t feel stretched in all directions. I’ll be fine. I’ll say normal things and think constructive thoughts. I’ll be reasonable according to the social sense of the word. My paycheck will tell me how far I’ve come rather than the diminishing of my demons.

   

  A man told me his theories, but I was just waiting for him to tell me who he was.

   

  You can either think it through or see it through. The world is a museum to me with ‘Do not touch’ signs on everything. I’ve broken the rules a few times, but they let me go before they even asked my name.

   

  Maybe a scar on your ankle from childhood? A mother on a bench holding her baby and saying ‘good morning!’? Reading a line in a book about a tribute of tons of yams required by the leader of a clan of concubines? Does that surprise you? What surprises you? Do you only float around people you like? Did you stick to your script today, are all your goals happy with you? Do you know that not knowing why you have your goals is the same as not having any? Do you know you’ve become the attitudes of others? That you’ve become the objects around you? Don’t you realize you would move past a hurt man if you were in a crowd? That you’ve stopped thinking hard about someone you say you love? That saying you love someone is to make sure you die happy, a person with a full life? That the world was born and the world will die – and somewhere in the middle of it was you?

   

  There’s no way to study the world. There being active minds means reality rearranges each second, creating a whole new one to find out about.

   

  Have you imagined dying with your most used object in hand?

   

  (Hopefully not a person.)

   

  If you’re annoyed with me, does that mean you haven’t discerned my self-loathing?

   

  Marriage still seems to me like it is based on a huge misunderstanding, that no two people really agree to that. Isn’t it all based on fear and control and selfishness?

   

  They will tell me my restlessness is based on a misunderstanding, but that is to think that restlessness can be based in something. Restlessness is based in nothing. It is to be without a basis.

   

  And the context of lives is eternity, but that’s a word that never filled anyone up. There are small oases where one can drink – a friend’s words, the odor of a certain night, flashes of your father’s face as you were growing up. Maybe you’ve never loved anyone at all. Life is so cloudy. Maybe I’m expecting all the wrong things.

   

  None of this shows the complications I think of that make me actually angry.

   

  Someday – I’ll calm down. Every old person I see puts my mind at my funeral. Someday I won’t think that though – I’ll think ‘Dave!’ Dave will be an old person I’ll know and we’ll have a friendship and I’ll no longer be alone at night living in my head, but I’ll be out there with people living in the world.

   

  What’s left to say? You can only think of so much after you’ve grown up and realized all that’s left to be redeemed. If we merely plan ahead we can make for better lives down the road – but that doesn’t change someone’s family dying of hunger now, someone living life with mutilated limbs now, someone living in a culture where there is moral outcry against every form of intolerance and racism and bullying and yet has never felt looked at by a person in their entire life.

   

  It just takes one scene away from you to make someone entirely unknown. On many nights I’ve written nothing.

   

  The things people are actually asking for they never say. That is the huge misunderstanding creating all the conflicts in all your relationships. You have to think about them and once you’ve put it all together go ‘Oh – I see. That’s what they want.’

   

  You unnaturally atomize the world into its parts. It’s actually all one thing. You just haven’t thought of connecting two of its parts in awhile. Somehow, your cell phone charger and the Prime Minister of Italy are part of the same story.

   

  Last week I would stay up all night thinking about things. They drove me crazy. The next day I was sitting down onto a couch when I thought ‘Life is in your head’ and for some reason this calmed me greatly. It seemed up to that moment I had always greatly exaggerated the importance of everything invisible. My mind was like a TV I turned off and walked away from to live.

   

  Other nights I am not so lucky. I turn off the TV and all the walls turn on with the same images.

   

  Where do you exist? Where is your life such that you would flee to it, or from it? Did you hide nothing from the world’s greedy hands? Is there someone you could call if one day you woke up and you were lost?

   

  Every scene unfolds and then vanishes immediately into a world people only pretend to access. The only difference your death brings into the picture is that you don’t end up in the next scene. When you leave someone’s house and close the door, you should feel the same way on their porch as you would at your funeral. What did you leave in that house? What are you leaving on the porch currently? You touch the railing. It feels cold – you brush your fingers together. What is going on?

   

  Of all the universe there is and all the life you’ll live, the most you’ll really come to know is the lives of three or four people.

   

  And you can’t think about that too much, or it’ll really start to hurt.

   

  Someday. Someday, lovely, I’ll calm down. Right next to you.

   

  But even then, I’ll be so sorry for the thoughts I’ve had. 

  • 2:20 am
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