Ouroboric Fault

What now?

I ask,
I wait,
And time only passes when I move.
I can’t wait this out.
All I find now is decay
And the traces of those who moved on
While I waited
Supposedly, for them.

Why?

I can only guess,
But there could be a thousand reasons,
And I won’t know if you don’t
Tell me.
I would ask why,
But you probably think I should know.
No.
I can guess,
But blindly kicking answers around,
I’ll only find broken toes.

I gave up on walking years ago.

I once said I needed to know.
Now I say I need to disappear.
Perhaps the truth wasn’t pure enough,
But it only led me to more questions.
I’m too tired to think anymore.
I’m too tired to be anything.
I’m not really here.

How can anyone love me
When I’m playing dissolved?

Better question:
Who taught me to think I was playing?


There’s no crueler prison than considering everything,
For fear of missing something,
For fear of being held to task
Supposedly, for refusing the truth.

Self-doubt is the sickest poison.
Am I draining it out,
Or just burying it?
I feel sick,
But I seem clearer.

Emptier?
With all these words,

Clearly not.

Dreams Of Unearthly Solace

To lost friends, or to whom it may concern,

Tonight, I miss you.  Though truthfully, I don't hold to believing that I ever met you.  I'm willing to own that, and to own that I may be writing to imaginary friends, not to you.

All I know is that I'm haunted by a sense of a life I've touched only in moments of silent near-divinity and in deep, faraway dreams of heart-intimacy greater than I've ever known.  I suppose my current state is the product of a fearful spirit, and I'd do better if I truly believed I was okay.  But I won't simplify it.

I'm still dreaming, of places that songs graze with their fingertips, places that pictures are little windows into, places where the world is of a different nature and I am at home, or at least in my place.

Here I feel lost, a shaky hand scrawling words that lose their spirit in translation.  What am I, really?  I know I am something, because in my deepest moments of conviction I can feel it like sunlight under my skin, and my eyes are like a clear sky.  But I feel diseased, or broken, or traumatically shaken to my innermost doors.  Where are the walls?  Who stormed the keep?

Oh so poetic.  I fancy myself so sharp, so elegant.  Sometimes.

Who taught me to talk about myself like I need to be put in my place?

I'd like to go sit by a waterfall for a while.  A few days, maybe.

Is it time to wake up?

I can't believe that they're not telling me something incredibly important.  And I dare not disempower myself by saying that I don't know what to do, but...there is a question without words that I'm asking here.

____________

[ ]

I don't like words.

I don't like thinking.  Talking.  Sleeping.  Not sleeping enough.

At this point I'd rather not exist.  The only way I can feel happy anymore is if I forget everything, distracted in the moment.  As long as I'm conscious, I'm tied up.  I'm suffocating without ever dying.  Just endlessly suffocating.

I don't want to be significant.
I don't want to be insignificant.
I don't want to matter.
I don't want to not matter.

I don't want to be on any part of the spectrum of reality.

If I get close to this place, words stop forming into the intelligible.  They come out like stillborn mutant half-grown things, mangled and tied up in each other and missing vital pieces.  This place is outside of language.  And I hate it.  I hate every second of this.

I want everything to stop.  But I don't want to die.  I don't want to suffer physically too, and I'm not committed enough to make a permanent decision like that.  On some level I know this is just something expressing itself, but I can't give it what it needs.  I can't understand.  I don't want to have to understand i don't want to think i don't want to want anything i don't want i don't want I WANT IT TO STOP

All I can do is cry.

Not sure how I can still be so composed.  But then, I've worked full-time for years with sleep deprivation.  Sometimes I get as many as 7 hours.  There have been nights I've gotten less than 3.  Years ago, that was common.  And some nights I never slept.  I know how to function with insufficiency.

I need something desperately.  But I feel like it's already too late.  I don't want to know what anyone thinks of me now.  I want someone to care.  I want everyone to care.  I don't know.  But nobody gets it.  Nobody will ever feel this.  They might feel something like it, someday, somehow, sometime.  But they'll never feel this, my version, my experience.  They'll never understand like I do.  What are you always talking about?  I don't always get it.  Sometimes my mind fizzles out before I get to the end and I just give up and pretend it never happened.

Did it happen if I've forgotten it?

How does this reality thing even work?  I don't get it.

And I do.  My mind knows all the right answers.  I'm sane.

I'm just emotionally fucked.

I don't know why I'm writing this.  No.  I do.  I want to get it out.  I want the rawness of how much I hate this to be visible.

Probably going to be given a lot of advice I'll pretend to acknowledge and never bother even trying to follow or understand.  Because it missed the point.  It missed me.

I don't have the energy to try to communicate myself anymore.  I can't do it.  It never comes through.  Probably because I'm missing myself or something but I really don't care because it hurts too much to be alone in this.  I don't wanna keep trying to express myself just to be misunderstood or ignored.  It doesn't feel worth it.  I guess people just can't do that.


I'm out of words.


I wonder if I'm losing my sanity.  No, doesn't feel like I'm near that yet.  Just my stability.

This might be overdramatic.  But right now it just feels honest.
Still trying to be heard, even after all this.



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Rocky Ground

Growing is hard.

I know this is probably true no matter what, but it feels much moreso right now, holding handfuls of half-unraveled threads, trying to sort out which ones to weave back in, which to pull out, while the experience is undercut by the dull ache of open wounds and heavy eyes.

And I find myself surprised tonight by a soft voice somewhere inside.

"Gentle...be gentle.  You're coming back from the edge of death.
Look at what you're already doing.  You don't have to be hard on yourself."

I'm breaking up in the realization that I'm longing for my own self-love, for me to be proud of how far I've come.  There's so much pain there...

If I stop to rest, will I fall apart beyond repair?

This feels like self-surgery, every night, every silent moment, studying for my life in the spaces between, learning what I need even as I apply it.  And I forget that I'm worth my care, equally as much as everyone else is.  Maybe that's what this process is missing.

I push myself hard into the learning, sometimes harder than I ought to.  I realized the other night, it made perfect sense: this forward edge of growth is the only direction, the only purpose driving me to move at all right now, and when your mind's entire context has been shaped by the struggle against despair, agony of living with no meaning to justify the pain, feeling eternally lost, and longing for any end, no matter how dark, then to feel like the only options are to learn or to die seems natural.

Am I running from something?

Oh...of course I am.  Even without being able to name it, that feels obvious.

So what is it?

Emptiness.  I'm running from Nothing.  I'm desperate to escape, more now than I've ever been.  If I stop running, if I turn away from the one thing that feels like a ladder out of the pit, where else can I go?

And yet, beyond the fear...there's still something else.  I'm not only running from.  I'm running to.  I'm doing something I once thought I would never live to do: I'm creating a future.

Rather, the future is creating me.

I'm beginning to understand why it's called growth.  No matter what I, or anyone else, wants, does -- this can only be planted, nurtured, and waited on.  Who I will be is now becoming, and for all my self-surgery, this is beyond my direct control.

Learning how to balance my active role with the surrender required to allow this to develop is hard, coming from a framework of desperation.  It feels relieving to discover that what I once thought of as being-stuck is actually a movement of breathing.  I've almost forgotten how to breathe slow.

Friends (is there a better word for this?), I'm afraid to tell you that I need you.  But I think I do.  I can't learn how to be part of a We without you.  And to some degree, I think that I need your care.  Not desperately, but achingly.  I need to remember that I'm not alone, and that there's space for this growth even at this pace, and it's hard to remember these things on my own.  My grip on reality is stubborn, but thin and worn.

I want to be closer to you.

A Quiet Nightmare

In the quiet moments, when I am alone and the night seeps in around the edges, I feel my heart crumble in my hands.

That goodbye, only days ago, it was the quietest heartbreak I have ever known.  It wasn't deep or shattering, just an echo of cracks etched down to my foundations.  I lied alone, curled up tight, and the darkness quietly flowed into the room, until the couch was an island in the murky water and my clothes were soaked in hopelessness.  It's familiar.

There have been so many stories like it in my life, some looming like waves of death, others just another splinter in my chest, making all the old wounds ache.

In those moments, I don't long for any great love.  I don't long to fall deep, or be swept up in dramatic romance.  I would give all hope of those ballroom, garden and cathedral fantasies away, if I could just be held, safe and comforted.  I don't fight heartbreak; it will happen with or without the struggle, and holding on will only ever make the shattering that much worse.  But the lonely darkness that waits beyond is a terror that haunts every one of my nights.

An isolated death is the worst fate I can imagine.

Forcefully Letting Go

I don't even know where to begin anymore.

If I'm honest, it seems like anything true I feel that I try to express runs up against more and more opposition, and I'm tired.  I'm tired of feeling like a tool for others to prove themselves right, and I don't know what I really believe or trust in anymore.  At least...not in the terms that anyone else uses.  My heart's language is drifting further out to sea, while the call of everyone else claiming to know where I should go is all inland.

I'm not ready, and I refuse to be lied to.

Somewhere along the way, I became desperately dependent on the approval of those around me, above me, beside me.  And for my trouble, I have fallen on the side of the road, with the ashes of the dreams I claimed were my fire choked in my throat.  The things that once made me feel excited are now a source of guilt, a neglected duty to uphold the identity I built for myself.  I've made many terrible mistakes, but the worst was to shape my image around passions I was weak in.  They still ring in the back of my heart, and I haven't given them up.  But for now, they are mine alone, to listen closely to, to follow in the way that I know only I can discover, until my voice returns.

Whose life am I really living?

I do not know myself as I ought to, and I've stifled my heart until it's turned to a cold stone.  The world's voices are far too loud.

I've accepted no mentors.  I need to make this journey alone.  When the time for me to seek guidance comes, it will be my choice, not their demand.  I will not be anyone's mechanism to ease their conscience, or their need to feel right or superior.  Maybe I sound bitter.  And maybe I am.  But it will not be undone until I am ready to face it.

And I don't think I can become selfless until I face the fact that I am not.

Tremors

Tonight, I feel again the echoes of everything just behind.  And far behind.  If I claimed I remotely knew where I am anymore, I would be lying.  Or am I lying to myself?  I'm too dizzy to think about it.

My eyes have bounced from one thing to the next, carrying me along at a pace hardly allowing time to breathe, let alone think.  I didn't feel much, and I still don't.  I thought maybe I was weightless, but I feel the whiplash now and I know that it was just momentum, graceful numbness until the speed collapses into empty time.  Nothing but time, time to think and wish I could dream, time to wonder where I am, why I thought any of it was a good idea, why I still can't feel my own heartbeat by any means other than physical.

The question burns brighter, scalding and blinding, more and more with every day, every hour: Who am I?

The only answer I have: Not who I thought I was.

I see myself now, behind the curtains and the poise.  I am weak.  I am unclean and crippled, shot through the heart a dozen times over and half-braindead on overthinking.  I have tried everything, but it all leads to greater and greater wounds, and I wonder now if maybe the wounds are a novelty I seek because I can't feel much else thanks to their ruin.

Alone.  Alone.

Alone?  But...I have friends.  I have family.  Is that not enough?

No.  A voice from a tiny chamber inside.  It is not.  This is not enough.  I am still alone.

Small-talking about the troubles I've faced is like taking cough syrup for a cancer.  Only a surgeon could help me now, and all my friends know are home remedies and chicken soup.  Sometimes a comfort, never a cure, always leaving me gasping for more.  Save me, I'm dying!  Do you even see?

Dramatic.  Oh so dramatic, child.  You just need one good day to break through this.  One day of setting to your craft, one day of getting everything done before the sun sets, one day of reaching out to those friends, one day of good luck.

One day that never, ever comes.  I'm starting to think you're lying, and it never will come.

Were anyone brave enough to take me on, I don't doubt I would cry my eyes out.  I might well shake.  But I need more.  I need to scream this out.  I am being ripped apart by energy I keep swallowing down, a supernova spreading through my veins, desperation and hopelessness, anger and bitterness, and the anguished crying of a lonely child.  And the deep, violent frustration of an artist who cannot create, no matter how hard he works the gears in his mind.  He can dream well enough, but his hands will not obey.

Maybe I should stop claiming to be a musician, since I obviously don't have the discipline or drive to make anything.  Are all these plans in vain?  Am I hoping for nothing?  Am I just fantasizing about accomplishments I will never make to give myself some small sense of purpose, some lie to calm my disappointed heart?

I exist only for my own world these days, and the borders to the rest are growing thicker by the day, a hard shell.  Maybe the fire growing in my blood is gathering to break through, but I don't have a clue what to do.  I know that I'm dependent on everything I cannot control, and I've long lost touch with the only One who can.  He feels cruel, even though I know that this could have great potential, and perhaps still will.  I hope.

But hope is tasting so bitter right now.  Ever eaten the same meal for months on end?

I feel alone.

I feel so alone.

Will this ever end?

I pray that it doesn't destroy me from the inside first.