To be floating in between everything gives the feeling of being isolated from anything real.  Humanity crows and guffaws at its games, its loud revelry and meaningless dancing, while the heavens hum soft tunes of salvation and communion of the saints.  But to be a human who is not quite with humanity, but not to the heavens, is to be between two worlds, and it is very lonely thing to be looking back and forth at the only places where people truly choose to live their lives. 

I went back to that dank alleyway years later.  I still couldn’t find your ring.

You feel amazing things, but you assume other people have a default of emotionlessness, and you can’t just come up to them and assume they know everything and overwhelm them. You have to start somewhere and build it all up. But that’s not being honest – you *really* feel the way you do. And so the world forces us to not be honest.

But soon enough, while you are on hold waiting for someone to be in a position to understand them, the emotions disappear altogether.

There has never been a round of applause for loneliness.

People could not accurately express despair before keyboards.  Only keyboards can go fast enough when the thoughts come stampeding.

You know barely any people.  And of the people you do know, you barely know them.

A poem with too much obscurity, and a poem with too little obscurity – neither will affect us much.

I want someone to read I know will never lie to me.  That I can always go to to find truth.

“Remember when was everything was simpler?” he said, his arms set on the railing as he looked at the trees.
“You know everyone says that, and they say it just like that, like they were robbed.  But things would still be simple if we had the integrity to keep them that way.”
He looked at me sternly, like I had spent the afternoon rummaging through his things.

Do not read too much.  Slowly the assumption will creep up on you that creativity and the courage to act was only meant for others.

Rhythms of life – there are so many of them.  And each person seems to have their own in a very real and indelible way.  Some people I know have very different rhythms than other people I know, and I always wonder what would happen if those people met each other. 

It’s weird how it can seem like nothing real is happening in your life for long amounts of time, but then in a week, a day, a single minute, things will suddenly start happening fast and won’t let up.

We go the same places, but they feel different in our minds than they used to.  What is it deep in our heads that keeps changing the way everything looks? 

This spring will be very tiring.  Human minds were meant for clarity at the beginning and ends of things.  So we pray that in the middle of everything, we will not lose ourselves.

The idea of sacrifice makes sense because the idea of investment doesn’t.

I have wondered if I could sacrifice for someone, if anyone could ever sacrifice for anyone.  Because a lot of the time when it seems like you are supposedly sacrificing something, you actually end up getting something back.  And if you get a return, it’s not really a sacrifice is it?

But when you think about how life is a very short thing, and how you don’t know when yours will suddenly be up, you realize that it is a very deep thing to serve another person’s interests, instead of doing something that will benefit yourself.  In a sacrificial action you take your life, which is of a finite value, and give it away to someone else.  You cannot earn your life back later; the part you used is gone, never to return.

There is an infinite quality of irreplaceability to the finite.  Once you realize how fast the glass of existence is breaking, you see how sacrificial it is to reflect it at someone else.

The crystalline seascapes sparkled in the daylight beneath which they openly hid the most illustrious wonders.  Waves lapped on the shore to mesmerize threatening bystanders, to numb their curiosity into idle romances.  The oceanic underworld constantly awaited a true visitor, someone who faithfully disbelieved in its placid appearance.

Two monks spent two months in a rowboat, away from the castle where they were just cattle. 

“Where do all the stars go during the day, Frederick?”

“I don’t know.”

“I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for my soul to be flipped inside out.  To turn into my own sort of night.”

The rowboat spun its fearful children into a dizzying clarity, a mood of a million mentions of meaning and marrying. 

“I knew a girl once.  She was sweet, but sad.  We always sat in the same tree and talked, but I think she knew I would become a monk.  One night she kissed me on the cheek before running off.  That was the closest I’ve ever been to a woman, and the furthest for I knew it was her goodbye.”

“I think we’re the only ones who really know women.  You can only see a well that’s infinitely deep from the top.”

Secret messages passed far and wide in the cerulean deep.  Starfish murmured and mimed their meanings, and they dreamed of the sky where they were born.

“I don’t think Father Cato likes me.”

“Your cowl is sideways.” 

William fixed Frederick’s cowl and then the two looked with knotted faces at the fuscous wavelets passing like uninterested pedestrians all around them. 

At night stars dotted the skies as William and Frederick slept the sleep of forgotten men.  The starfish, dark orange in the night glow, surfaced like a thousand morose children to behold their homes, the sky whence they had fallen.  Together they sang in starfish tongue:

Glory to the world of falling skies
These sad shores are half of heaven
If only we had landed there!
Then we too could live as men

They sank down as the men rose up.  It was still night but the clouds slowly thieved the sky as the slippery rocking of the boat rang bells of languishing rather than love in their hearts.

“I’m hungry, William.  I’m cold too, but I’d be colder if I could eat.”

“The Lord will provide.”

“People who say God has a plan have never seen the darkness.”

No one said anything.  Not the starfish below, the stars above, nor the men in their hearts.  The whole world was silent.

The silence was folded neatly and placed within a box, solemnly buried deep within all the meanings of their thoughts.

“You think people wonder where we’ve gone?”

“I’ve always had a hunger for outer space.  To see something that was outside of everything.”

‘Never again’ are strong words; people paced their planet in fear of the inevitable.  Who wasn’t lost at sea?

The starfish planted themselves on the ocean floor and twirled in patterns of hope.  The oval boat glided above them, swimming ignorantly through a land of infinite longing. 

“One day,” Frederick began, speaking in a voice of daylit tears, “Francis brought a bag of barley up to the chapter house from the cellar.  I and others yelled at him for not bringing up the second one that was on the floor in the pantry.  But now I’m remembering clearer than ever before.  I was supposed to bring the second one up.”

“I wish we could see further than our hearts.”

They soul-hopped on islands through the night, the sea raised up towards a beckoning sky, full of stars they had finally begun to wish to be, and the horizon-chopped moon that seemed much too big and bright for their sin-grey eyes.   All the while the starfish crooned, a night of hopeful orphans.

I wish I could walk the whole world in one night, just to know where I was. I would see how everything is related, who goes to bed early, who stays up to get drunk, who’s alone and who’s hungry, who sits alone on rooftops and who gets away with evil. Raccoons running into sewers and trains on overpass railroads. A world where you’re alone and you can’t run away from the fact of your own existence. It enlivens you every brush of wind across your face.

I don’t care for places that don’t admit of human brokenness.

You realize how many of your reasons are social reasons once you find yourself alone.

The deepest part of a person is in what they hope for. Because no one knows one can only move toward what one hopes. There must be some evidence for it, yes; but how much can one require?

There is a large question to be answered. Every intellectual reaches a limit – no one gets beyond estimation, the finding of a higher probability. So there is no idea of a pure intellect; life is based on further assumptions. What are those assumptions? If we don’t recognize them, doesn’t that make us less of a whole intellect?

The dreamlike way in which our lives connect; this is a good aim of art.

Driving around the city earlier in the evening I looked at all the houses and remembered how limited we are in our options of where to go. You live in a city of many thousands of buildings, but your city, the one your life actually happens in, is really comprised of only a handful of buildings.

You don’t see all the people other people chose not to be. People are made in very specific moments, quietly, invisibly, inside their heads, probably a long time ago.

Sometimes people say they have missed me and that they want to hang out, but they are people I have never really opened up to. I wonder who they think they will be hanging out with.

Most people think you only need to learn new words until you are about seventeen.

It is easy to do what the people around you are doing. It is hard to do what you value.

If you don’t work well with another person, either your hopes are not the same, or you disagree about how you would best achieve those hopes.

Everyone’s got a person they always love being around.

I feel like other people speak into my writing while they’re not even here. But I imagine what they would say and I try to account for it too. I try to make sure that yes, I think this, but this person would have this interpretation, and surely there’s something to that? But then I never say anything completely, purely, spontaneously. I am always partly other people. And I wonder, how much of me am I sacrificing so that I keep the idea that this other person makes sense. Maybe if I stripped away the layers of long-settled social dust I would see what I really thought, and that it is nothing like this other person says. But I want to keep my friends and so I convince myself that they must be right.

It is a very difficult thing to be honest.

What I’ve learned from relationship talk is that you should never try to predict the other person’s thoughts. 

If you only argue in general, you will only prove in general. But there’s no person who is ‘in general’.

I hear all the things you do not ask; they say you do not care. Perhaps you did not think to ask them. But there are ways we should be that perhaps we do not know about. We must stay awake.

There are always subtle goals implied by your actions. If you talk about the best kind of investments, your goal is a financially successful life. If you talk about philosophy a lot, it’s to not have any friends. If you are always smiling, it’s to not face the bad things of life. I wonder what the goal of my life has accidentally turned out to be.

You spend all your time planning your pleasures. How much time do you spend planning others’ pleasures?

People who haven’t been loved carry around a need to be loved, and they react more negatively when they feel people are being critical rather than loving. If they had been affirmed in the past, they wouldn’t be so sensitive. Everyone needs someone they know will cheer them on, no matter what.

There is this idea of ‘reaching’ for people. Some people you want to know about, to understand, to be near them. You desire the experience of who they are, the things they do, the things they say, the thoughts they think. Not in a hugely intimate way, but just in a real one, one where you both realize it is good to know people, and so you are happy that there is someone else who knows the good things in life, and that they’re here and willing to partake in it. But when you only ever reach for people, and they stay on their perch, their ledge, and don’t even seem to realize that you’re doing this intentional reaching, it seems horrible, like you might as well not only just not be reaching, but that you might as well not even be there at all. Sometimes you wonder if you just floated around if people would reach for you.

You think your life will stay the same, but it all disappears.

The only question is – what does a man do who is only forced to, but does not truly exist in this world? When the world is not your home, how do you treat it?

When I live in the suburbs with my wife and family I am going to have an electronic news scroller that shows all the recent headlines for our household.  That way everyone walking by will know what’s going on.  ‘Wife wants chicken for dinner, husband suggests meatloaf’   ‘Janie grounded 2 weeks after missing curfew’  ‘Dad wins Monopoly for record 7th straight time in a row, wife and kids grouchily resentful’. 

You know how there are some jeans that come with paint splotches or tears already in them?  Kids buy those jeans because they are the cool jeans.  Well I think they should come out with butter that has bread crumbs or dollops of jelly already in it.  That will be the cool butter.  Then kids will go, ‘What? You’re buying the regular butter?  So not cool,’ while rolling their eyes.   

Just once I want to see a cop checking his facebook on the giant computers they have in patrol cars.

They should come out with a Bond spinoff where he wears rags instead of suits and introduces himself, “Vagabond.  James Vagabond.”

If I were a police officer I would designate each kind of car as a Pokémon.  Yellow bugs would be Pikachu, red mustangs would be Charizard, and so on.  Then on highway patrols the goal would be to give each one a speeding ticket.  Gotta catch ‘em all. 

(Maybe hand them the Pokémon card with the ticket.  *grins evilly*)

I try to make jokes but I don’t think my friends realize that.  If they did I think they would probably stop being friends with me.  ‘Guys, did you know Phil tries to be funny?’  ‘He does?’  ‘Yeah.  I had no idea either. Apparently this has been going on for a couple years.’ 

That’s ok.  I’m fine with it being my little secret. 

Historians are the people who realize

that the present is the loneliest place of all.  

When your grandparents are alive,

the night sky is a huge blanket

wrapped around your warm body at night.

Tonight for the first time I looked up and saw

how thin, how empty, how full of echoes it is. 

And I felt terribly alone.

But what of the grand project of history? 

Dig deeper for their graves: you will find them nowhere.

The present is interminably alone with itself;

the lone frightful survivor of all its deceased cousins.

Flee, flee the feeling that you have inherited the world,

and make friends of the dead, for the dead

converse more readily than any other.

And what a wonderful banquet was history: 

Everyone was connected in the past, for it is easier

to imagine actions, communion, stories,

than people sitting alone for long hours on end.

But once all your parents and friends are dead,

you will see what history never told you.

The present is the loneliest place of all.

On my way to work I had a conversation with my past self.  He wasn’t happy.

Death is when all your moments are gone, and so each moment that passes is a small part of that larger death.  You do not have to think to the future to know what death is; it passes through us even now, taking each moment anew.

Yet each moment is the only life we shall ever have; you have never been anywhere but the present.  You thus live at the intersection of all the things; every arriving moment declares itself as the only life you shall ever have, and then quickly passes on into being part of the only death you will ever have. 

The extremity of our position is loud and demanding; but we live moderately, vaguely, sluggishly.

Of a thing some people ask ‘Why does it matter?’ of which others ask ‘What else could matter?’

Each of us is a balloon that gets bigger as each person gets to know us.  As they know more and more, we become a large idea, a full orchestra of possible thoughts and actions, a person with deep hopes and cares.  But then a stranger says hello to us and – pop! the whole balloon is gone.

We have to keep reinflating ourselves with each person we meet.  But it always pops just the same.

It is a much harder thing to meet people when you are older.  I mean really meet them.  For they have been many places and had many thoughts, thus there is more of them to meet; but it is all lost on dusty bookshelves, rotting in the libraries hidden deep in their labyrinthine caves of thoughts and memories. Only perchance in conversation will you stumble upon the occasional grotto, and pick up a book, and read a line, after which you will ‘hmph‘ and place it neatly back where it was.

You are called to do the right thing; you are always where you need to be.

Life is difficult, but there are two kinds of difficulty.  Sometimes there are external things – like other people – that are in the way of what we want to do.  Other times we are in the way of doing what we want.  We know what it is to life a holy life, but our will is trampled by angry crowds of thoughts it is natural to pick up from a thousand places.  The meaning of life is not a public thing.

I fall apart so quickly.  But I sometimes get stitched together again by a new thought, an unexpected caring word from a friend, a sudden encouragement from God.  It is a wonderful thing to help stitch someone together.

Do not make a list of the things you control.  You will be depressed at how short it is.

There is no pop culture.  Each person is their own culture, and the blinking signs and witty words will fade away, and we will find what is left.

You will meet many people in life, and they will think many odd things about you, about what you mean and why you are as you are, what thoughts you never say, the ways they think it all connects together for you.  If you could view every image of you you would see misshapen, jumbled scraps of clay arranged in every which manner.  Thus it is here you wonder where you are – what you are – amidst this sea of chimerical creatures, each of which you find mysterious and otherly.  And if you strip away your layers of social thinking, the dross that covers everything you see and think, you will find that the heart of you is down in that place people can nearly never see, the place where you hope, and when that hope is combined with your will, the place where there is the you that tries.

God wants to save each person you conversed with today equally.

We know so little of what we should be.  When we cannot imagine what our thought lives would be like if we were holy, we cannot see much problem with how they are now.  The goal of life then becomes to be moderately happy.  But if you glimpse the thought of a truly godly soul, one that could approach the heavens and not faint, it brings us to the weeping realization of our total uncleanness.  And the goal of an unclean person is not happiness; it is salvation. 

Lord, pick us up, for the gravity of filth is stronger than any thought I could rise against it.

Somewhere there must be a buried simplicity.  I am thankful I got to be alive.

That there is any hope of salvation ought to make us infinitely happy.

Always thinking about God, about the universe, about life - what is your actual relation to the world. You are in it.

I greatly long for and dread the day when I will be able to see my deepest flaws.

I admit there are some people who seem huge powerful forces that arrange everything that happens in their lives.  They somehow only have good experiences and their life adds up into an amazing chronicle of adventures and meaning.  It seems like they have a control that is making everything happen according to a plan.  These people range from my friends to celebrities.  But all I can say for me is that I haven’t got a clue.  I don’t know how everything fits together.  I don’t know if it will all work out, if things will come together and add up to something; I can only hope that they do. 

For as creatures of limited sight, what are we at bottom if not hope?  And so tomorrow God will give us a new day and we will try to stand up again, and perhaps out of the oblivion next to us a helping hand will come, and a new stitch will be woven; but a stitch is by nature temporary, and at night we pray that someday we will be made into a new people.

I jumped in front of the swashbuckling statue and struck my finest Napoleon.
“People only like war because violence is predictable,” said the girl with the lemon sweater and shoulder-slung carry bag.  “Only conversation will lead you out of canvas paintings.”
I snarled and jumped in front of her with a fierce jealousy for a true life in my eyes.  “I challenge you to a duel of meaningful lives.”
“I do that with everyone,” she said, bored. “Drinks?”
In the taxi cab I looked at her knees.  “I don’t know if I like doing nothing or hanging out with you more.”
“Everything’s just an attempt to escape boredom.”  She didn’t play with her hair. 
The bar was brown and smelled like cardboard music.  I told the bartender things and then we clinked glasses of ginger ale and whiskey.  “To never understanding each others’ family histories,” I belted, silencing the bar.
We drank.  A funny look crossed her temples and she pointed at me.  “A demon a thousand miles away seems very similar to a demon nine hundred ninety-nine miles away.”
“Did you just undress my mind with your eyes?”
We walked out into a rain that smelled like a fall ocean.  My suede pants were brought to their existential dénouement.  I felt like buying a barrel to store memories in that I could one day burn rather than sift through.  I smiled like a spelunker skipping school.  She smiled like an orca whale after the extinction of humans.
The cars made their turns and soon the street was empty of the noisy hagglers of eternity.  Water burgeoned like a revolution of ancient children coming out of their caves; I looked over at her, concerned that I would miss the water droplets splattering on her face.  Inches from our sketchers-planted feet was a guzzling sewer.
“Cities breed alcoholism, materialism, and greed.  There are no heroes anymore.”
I stopped watching the droplets and looked at her eyes burning blue as a white dwarf.  “I associate you with sorrow.”
It was a couple hours or days later.  I slicked my hair back and she hopped up and down on the porch of our dreams, a regular stoop in front of a yellow suburban house in a claustrophobic sea of its empty clones. 
“Yes?” a crinkled woman with a brown reef of hair asked.
“Have you found the meaning of life?”
We had a feeling, but not a comunicable one.
“No feeling is communicable, silly,” she said, popping her eyes out at me with her regular philosophy-wide smile.  She always had a Greek god’s sentiment looking at my head, as if to say “That’s where you live?”  It was endearing and infuriating.  I didn’t speak to her for a year.  I genuflected on her doorstep when I realized I never remembered a word anyone else said.
“Humans want badly to be loved and are the most hateable thing there is.”  She sucked on her milkshake straw like a rescue helicopter.
“They’re not any less loveable for being humble,” I remarked. “But most humility is just arrogance.”
“I’m done.”  I hadn’t started my honeydew milkshake. I gave it to her and she finished it in the time it takes a dog to bark at a doorbell.  She was wearing a malachite sweater; it brought out her freckled neck.
“Commercialism dampens creativity for all but a few,” I buzzed while walking with the stride of a Praetorian guard. 
“It’ll get better,” she hoped aloud. ”It’s a virtue to let a person finish their point to their own satisfaction.”
“My whole life is a point.”  She started running before I figured it out.  “Hey! All the world’s vices will not melt into one unexpected virtue!” I yelled like a street cop’s whistle a moment later. 
I had a knack for catching the world before it fell on her; she had a knack for finishing my visions of a perfect future.  But we were cynical children at heart that learned to cope with iPeople by swordfighting on park benches.
We were always walking, the perpetual myth of going somewhere.  In deathly winter mists we would walk and talk without seeing each other. 
“Winter brings out the best in everyone,” she said.
“Their silence?”
I loved her most for the times she would tear down the towers I had thought my most sure hiding places.
One winter day we walked and said nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing but the world’s kindness to change.  Then from within the blinding deluge of meteorite snowflakes she married me in her mind and said,
“You’re the only person who makes sense to me. I don’t know what keeps everyone else going.”
Vinátta, I thought.

I don’t need to ask you about your new relationship … I have Facebook.

I don’t need to listen to my annoying friend … I can text.

I don’t have to greet people in the street … I have my iPod. 

I don’t have to read … I have television.

I don’t have to find people on a friday night … I have Netflix. 

I don’t have to look at other humans … I have my iPhone.

I don’t need an actual book … I have a Kindle. 

What has happened? 

When you look at the night sky you are looking at the ancient past. Some stars we see are already dead. We can’t see that they’re dead; they look like they are still there, burning bright in the universe, letting the whole world know that they are immortal. But some day the news will reach: they will blink in the sky for a few weeks, a last triumphant blast of light proclaiming the fact of their importance—that they were a star—before they fade into the darkness and their days of life, having lasted for billions of years, go unremembered by their grave of a silent black hole.

If you look at the stars closely enough you can see your own death written in them just the same. Our present life, in fact, is much like theirs, an illusion that hides the fact that we are already dead. We see our fate, as sure as the brightest supernova, bursting in the night sky, a sad final bravura to the glowing life we had assumed we could keep. But now we finally see that we are living in the past, as already dead creatures merely walking towards our final end, blinking our eyes just as the those stars twinkle who the universe already knows to be deceased.

Turn your eyes not from it, for it is all there is to see. You are here on earth, as sure as you wave your arm in front of you, but you also look down on yourself from the sky, seeing your current self as a creature long in the past of this one sure fact.

The difference is that we are not stars, we are not public matter, for in that final moment you will be the only one to see your life story ignite and burn into dust.

But your black hole of a grave will keep you a secret just the same.