11.17 Free Write
The nightmares never really went away
But sometimes I find in the dead of those nights, I still call your name
In my sleep because maybe that far down, buried deep
is still that little kid that was waiting there for You to rescue me
As You always did; You were my everything
My eyes searched every horizon, eagerly awaiting your arrival
So why does it seem like you never came
when I needed you more than any former days of my survival?
Now the demons still stare back at me through the window panes and bedside
but I am no longer afraid after all the places I’ve been in my life
everything I’ve seen and learned that I can’t efface from my skin
Indelible are the marks that in my mind have been burned in
No, in return, I simply haunted them
They can’t take from me anymore
Because my hands are bloodied and ever ready for war
Because when you’ve lost all hope for what must be the last time,
you can’t get any lower than the memories that haunt inside
While your heart is sinking like a stone in the ocean’s depths
Shedding as the leaves in their autumn and piling up into regrets
They always said that life would hurt, but they never could have prepared me for this- Emptiness
I find at the edge of the map,
Found far before the edge of the Black, in which my journey did once begin
Surely what must be a million years back
And all that will be is all that has already been
We once rode on High Places, You delivered me out of the hand all of my fears
Is it I who is the betrayer, which of our hearts first disappeared?
Have I now perceived all the mysteries of this age, with nothing ever truly changing of this scenery’s repose, simply repeating old histories, only what it meant to me fades as the blood’s finally run cold
In a perpetually noxious, insatiable aching Of the soul
And nothing else shall bring me rest
A mile deep for every day away from You
I buried the pain of that falling away’s every smallest truth
And the demons come knocking as they always do
Seeking those whom they may procure
Yet now I only haunt them in return
For nothing will ever more dishearten than the moment we were torn apart
The scars still bear their mark in my heart, but one grows accustomed to smiling in the dark
Because The nightmares never really went away
But some nights in my sleep I still hear myself calling Your name.
The End of The Matter Pt.5
What do you stand on when time is poised to dismantle your body and your mind? How can the spirit truly survive without compelling means to withstand the wiles of attrition?
God help me for the comparative monster I’ve turned out to be, from who I once believed I truly was; the heart is deceitful beyond measured, who can know it?
Was I not the one who so confidently proclaimed that the true testing of a man begins when all seems lost and there is no longer any marked personal benefit in passing, who yet persists? And yet I have silently been falling away, for seasons amidst which all the forced resolve and fabricated passion couldn’t keep any fire alive with nothing to kindle it with: for dreams seemingly dissipate, imagination tires in its numerous disappointments, and time proves anything upon which any comforting feeling may ever have once been derived from- to be utterly unreliable and temporary.
I never previously grasped how implicitly customary it is with time to reach a point where one feels nothing most of the time: to desire nothing, to be passionate about nothing in particular, to feel deeply grieved or moved by nothing in particular- destined to result in striving to do nothing and settling for whatever is easily available and maintainable.
Because I had always lived knowing only what I had always known and experienced, I never could have believed that I could partake in the trading of any form of profound sentience in exchange for a type of degenerating, numbing and dumbing avoidance of deep pain.
Yet faced with questions and difficulties seemingly beyond my control or understanding- like swallowing glass for over a year straight before in some way deciding to shut off everything inside- I find myself having also become numb to the spectrum of any good emotion or its experiential recollection that was all my life so clear.
It turns out after all, I never really minded certain kinds of sadness as much as I thought, for I now realize that as long as I could still feel those things- I knew that I was still alive and somehow intact inside, and I could still also feel the highs that invariably came every so often. I could still get in touch with You and You could still get in touch with me; The way it had always been. Now there’s a wall I can neither scale nor seem to cease the continual subconscious erecting of. I never thought I could betray You; not by overt defamation or denouncement, but by a passive, subtle form of distance and indifference that I am now ashamed beyond measure to admit has slowly transmuted into downright anger and a type of hatred I never thought I could carry inside. For this unsoundness of soul I could wish myself to have never existed at all for my inability to stop its claws digging deeper into soul and spirit, as I continue to struggle with my previously unfaltering faith in You since I was a child. As if we hadn’t been warned before: How did everything change so drastically, so quickly?
I have seen Your goodness in the land of the living and been heavily blessed with Your favor for most of my life- despite unceasing hard times and hard days- and I have had the privilege of seeing far more signs and proof of Your existence and presence than perhaps most people would be able to recount. And despite how cliché I realize it is, in that our trials, sufferings, and disappointments in this life ought not to impact the measure of our love and relationship with You, I am grieved by the way the passing of this last year’s events have slowly eroded my faith, any childlike spirit left in me, and caused my heart to slowly and silently withdraw from your continual guidance and presence in such a way that I don’t know how to make my way back again, desperately as I have tried. I feel myself a philandering scoundrel for my waywardness and hypocrisy after the persistent testing and finally failing of the genuinity of my heart and spirit And I know not the remedy for a heart that has grown so terrifyingly cold and callous. No words could possibly say how deeply tormented, grieved, and remorseful I am for the monster I feel I have deteriorated into, or the slumber my once passionate heart has been lulled into. For much as we tirelessly cling to how life is so precious, and to be extended at all costs regardless of its quality or consequences- it was never death that was tragic to me, but as said it is the things that die in us while we live.
Until this last period of time I never could have fathomed the weight of the sorrow of the world that I now *feel*, or known just how much Your presence, love, forgiveness, patience, guidance, discernment, protection, and constant companionship have meant to me over my lifetime. I’ve never had to begin to realize what it would feel to live without You, until now, because I don’t think I ever have. I have felt how a day lived without the hope of a next life and Your preserving, doting provision on this side of eternity, is heavier than the great sadness I have always felt- despite anything this broken and grasping world has to offer, and despite Your continual hand of protection upon and before me. And yet somehow it has taken a hold with such a bitter weight of regret that I don’t know how to get back to that place, to trust you, to hear you, or listen. I hate the way I feel so much anger at You- anger that I don’t know what to do with but to direct at myself- as it is for the very things we are warned of and observe likely to befall in this life. As if I had any right to be surprised that life has ended up feeling as empty and disappointing as I’ve often refuted with imaginative dreamings and strivings of a future that was never any day but today, a love that never alighted, and dreams I’m still struggling to bring to fruition while working against the buffeting tides of reality and time. I feel as if I’m trying to relearn how to walk or even speak, in a language that is not my native tongue, but the more I have gone to mere men for help, the more broken and hopeless everything inside has become. From where did help come from in the days that it was so much more easily found? And most every elating hope ever felt in this life thus far has proven to also be counterfeit. The entire universe has been ripped up and rewritten in the last year in my mind and strengthened the bonds of confusion that have continued to dominate a growing body of unanswered prayers.
I hate all this unfamiliar anger I carry and I have so many unanswered questions regarding all that has happened, but the most haunting: do I really want the answers? Could I handle them or would it merely compound the excruciating conglomeration of things I have now seen and gained knowledge of only wishing each day that I could erase most of it from my mind? All that has been comprehended, dismantled, and experienced has stolen any peace or soundness from my mind, spirit, and soul. I truly don’t want to know anything anymore. I don’t even want the answers- they only broke my heart in a way that it finally stopped healing up correctly, leaving only a confused and disfigured mess of what was once a genuinely good heart.
Can I assimilate to this new universe, or will I break away to make the same supposed mistakes I’ve made before- simply for knowing that my guts will be in a perpetually conflicted uproar no matter what is chosen (as it ever has been) And returning to the old choices hurts less than what I’ve been going through- and apparently all for nothing. I tried to find what little magic there was left in this known world and ran against the grain for long enough to realize that there is little to no satisfaction to be had in going the way of most men, and yet in this is indeed a lonely road, though it usually seems as though there is no road that will not involve a different kind of regret, for much as ambition is a tireless road, after one has experienced flight it will be difficult for him to ever truly feel that two feet on the dirt is really living, much less home. And now I understand why my road has proven to be such a lonely one; despite that for enough years that I suppose it could have been taken for granted, I believed that I would eventually find some strange sort of counterpart who saw or experienced life similarly to how I had- someone who saw the same immovably cumulative significance in the universe or human life beyond simply living laughing and not thinking too hard on anything. Even knowing the latter to clearly be the only feasible attitude to have in life, I would be remiss to say I’ve ever been able to honestly adapt this way of experiencing life. Ultimately, these kinds of disparate spirits have a tendency to proverbially die young, and so become harder to find any remaining as time marches on.
Honestly, I’m writing this potentially whiny excerpt for me- no one else but for perhaps God Himself. For I fear these may be counted amongst the last honest conversations I may ever entertain again- because people genuinely do not care, and no one is obligated to. But I used to genuinely, deeply care- possibly too much- and I once ached with love and compassion and an investment in the hearts of those that mattered to me. All that seems so far away that it’s difficult to grasp presently that it was even In the same life, and it simply took me just short of *this* long to be fully broken in enough as to no longer be capable of identifying when or where exactly I ended and stopped being me, and began bleeding into a vast disarray of nameless panicked emptinesses and bloodied shards of rage and apathy. Maybe there’s no reason or means to keep any fire or spark of life alive anymore, and it’s never felt more appropriate to rip out this useless heart before it gets any worse, and just leave it here- forever engraved in words lost on the internet- before jumping in front of one of the many semis of opposing traffic on this ever narrowing highway. I’m disappointed in the world, unsurprisingly disappointed in people, in myself, devastated with the answers found, and not sure I can live with it all; at this point it feels like it’s all too much. Peculiar how you can have almost everything about yourself changed and yet somehow deep down, still wrestle with the same silent demons who seemingly lost and gained different types of validity as the story finally unfurled.
…
The End Of The Matter Pt.4
Looking back I do poignantly recall life as possessing the recurrent theme of feeling left, forgotten, or betrayed by most all of the people I had cared for. I simply didn’t understand why I so often felt this way-yet. I know this nagging feeling ever deep in my heart since I was a child is certainly not particular to myself, and have long known many share this sentiment and yet- not being alone never made me feel less so at the end of all the talk that more often than not felt too difficult to bridge the always seemingly palpable space between myself and everyone else, despite my former persistence in trying to know or understand others on their terms and in their world. For is not to truly love and know another to try and know and understand them also from *their* world and perspective? Love ought not to be out to change you according to the right of it’s own answers, but to meet you where you are. Why could I never find someone who wanted to try and understand me as I would have them? Particularly before I *finally* stopped caring so much, and after all the years search in vain hoping, it could seem as though the answers to this are easy to find- as they were likely staring you in the face from the very start- yet I somehow failed to identify the truth about relationships, assuming something so deeply disappointing surely couldn’t be the end of the matters characterizing the constant craving of being human.
Consequently, I’ve always wondered how important can anything be if nothing is significant enough to last, and no one is supposed to be needed or attached enough to be truly missed? I always needed something more- but aren’t we all seeking something that doesn’t exist? In some small silent way, still hoping? It used to seem to exist, but it could not last. As is to be human I surmise.
Reflecting back over the course of my ill-informed life- always waiting to find something that could never exist beyond our minds- it could be tempting to allow myself many selfish questions regarding my seemingly lonely plight or to explore the possibility that my solitude at times may have been subconsciously chosen or preferred over the relationships that almost always felt insufficient. Inadequate as if despite feeling you know what’s in the hearts of men, that deep down you’re still hoping, searching, or waiting for something that ended up never alighting- whether for reason that you’re the type for which love (as it truly is) could never ultimately feel compelling enough to override your ambitions or exorcise the torment from your heart, or that it’s simply not meant for some, or that the human spirit is simply insatiable in its desires; or all three.
Yet despite being absolutely convinced of this defect in our relationships at most times, I’d long consciously fought this seemingly unjust longing of never finding a partner or present companion on an identical wavelength or frequency of the spectrum- eventually assuring myself that it isn’t possible, in addition to the recurrent conclusion that no two individuals can truly understand one another nor feel another’s fear, joy, or heartache. The extent of our words are much transcended by these. This separation was never only merely in my mind, and I am now convinced it will never entirely disappear this side of eternity. Perhaps this resignation could explain my own ironically diminishing depth of enthusiasm in relationships, of sheer exhaustion and disillusionment with all that has been found in the world. I’ve lately been feeling like everything inside my heart has been rotting away partly from heartbreak and partly from sheer lack of any measure of challenge or stimulation over such an unsurpassedly long period of time that one could be concerned of going insane.
I wanted to chalk the many recurrently disappointing experiences in life up to simply not yet finding or creating whatever I was meant for in life, But I couldn’t have come to understand the why’s or devastating byproducts of all these feeling for many years to come: when my heart finally gave way to fractures numerous and complex enough that it likely could never truly look or feel the same way again; this when I finally learned to be able to leave as well, in ultimately having seemingly lost my own capacity to love others to the degree I once felt or believed that I could.
Furthermore, in most cases, few individuals (by the time of its peak relevance) still, or ever even possessed in the first place the capacity to truly see, know, and care for another as for themselves. Is this not the cause of our separation? For if one could truly feel the pain of human suffering in all its weight, one would go to most any extent within their reach to alleviate it. Is this not what Jesus purposed to do? So many people hear but do not listen to understand, or see but simply can’t understand. I would know because I used to be one of them. All the pain, trial, mistakes, and utter misery that culminated in a much deeper understanding of the weight of the world’s sorrow, have left me finally unable to put my heart- or anything back together again. It’s been lying on the floor in a million sparkling pieces for a year now, and I am lost at sea, with no way back to the peace of ignorance I believed with all of my being would somehow always be there to go back to inside.
To the occasional person of interest I once believed to be so seemingly destined to cross paths with at protracted intervals, my heart once possessed a genuine curiosity in desiring to know and discover the detailed idiosyncrasies, methods of thought, and story of these individuals: yet subjectively, to be rarely If ever reciprocated. I had characteristically always held on for far longer than I had usually ever been led to believe another cared for me in such ways, and letting go was typically more painful than they would ever know. But now it becomes more customary, as with every detachment the metaphorical glue works increasingly less. So I conclude, now that life has finally gotten to me too and I no longer seem to care so much as I ever so foolishly adhered to (akin to a switch suck in one position for decades suddenly flipping with no means of righting itself) It can often feel as if there’s no one left who cares that much anymore either- as in to the degree that I once did. Perhaps I may finally be becoming a sellout myself- an idiot who was looking for significance in a world full of simple equations, simple answers, simple people, and simple decay. Life was always simple, and given the tendency to unconsciously complicate it out of sheer boredom, perhaps I would have gotten farther in having become myopic and simple off the bat and taking my evidently colossal imagination and smashing it under the same rock the time invariably seems to use to crush our hearts and dreams as well. For what difference does it make at the end of the matter? Or the end of any matter at all? Everyone and everything has changed and it can at times appear that very few others seemed to be able to keep their hearts intact either. Perhaps I’m so terribly wrong- but I suppose the only distinction between us is how unsurpassedly devastated I still was watching it all slowly unfold. Maybe at that point I simply wasn’t desensitized or broken in quite enough yet for it all to not kill me inside. Every storyline seems hacked off, hope or wonder murdered by a perfectly explainable and inescapable reality, and every person I had looked up to is indeed also dead. Who do I ask for advice when I don’t know what to do when everyone seems as or more lost than I am?
What if there isn’t anyone I want to be like? Who will advise me if no one truly knows me or understands me? For heaven is silent and I have been perpetually wrought with confusion, fear, anger, and discord. I used to know what to tell me, but I can’t find that person either.
They say it’s a part of growing up, that in our lives we ourselves will become many different people- whether we desire to or not- and to love anyone for any considerable length of time is to attend a thousand proverbial funerals for the both of you. I wanted to think that they were wrong, that not everything must inevitably simplify and decay- yet so is the nature of the world, and I had always believed that I would be an exception to this seemingly unavoidable principal of universal thermodynamics. Yet here we are, and it can almost feel as if I don’t know what happened to us- knowing well enough by now that deep down we’re most all still a bunch of kids, only often now with our arms crossed and our backs turned to each other, typically in the case of something absurdly trivial or a misunderstanding- or we simply don’t care anymore. Oftentimes we can no longer discern through any present haze of unconsciously internalized pain (if we can still even be made aware of it) enough to see or meet another from the lens of *their* paradigm as opposed to the assumptions of our own.
Life turned out to be hard, incredibly hard. Breaking and bending us in ways that when we were younger we had no dire need to be equipped to deal with, so we still naturally held the energy and room to keep our hearts intact and in touch; it can now drift away either so gradually or so suddenly you may not even notice the increments until one day you’re a stranger to even yourself, feeling you’re looking in from the outside on a bad dream that you’ll surely wake up from, but never quite do. Thusly as the then culmination of this season of life has now irrevocably turned, juxtaposed to this necessary atrophic hardening of the heart, I have observed the alternative loss of that inner child. Friends, mentors, acquaintances, and every sort of companion I had kept any sort of company with- whether acquainted platonically or romantically loved, or covertly holding a place of fondness in my heart- seems to have largely turned into someone else, and those who I once looked up to are dead and I’m racing to stand in the place of those who were my “heroes”.
Many people have a reflexive tendency to file all change as being inevitable “growth”, but this is partly a defense in that de-evolution is (in my perspective) in no way synonymous with improvement or at all appropriate under the guise of supposed maturity. Much as I’ve gone to extensive lengths to try and remain undiluted by life, this list finally includes myself of late; nearly everything I’d felt so convinced or convicted of seems as far away as a different lifetime and most every feeling is now subtle enough that you have to concertedly look for it to remember how to even feel something.
So I’m out here, out of my mind and out of the cage but subjectively no less alone amidst the truth that we’re all alone together, and it will never be adequate to cure a feeling of an aloneness that cannot be sated by what is left.
Casual sex is of no satiety or anything more than effective means for hastening the confusion and degradation of every latent seed of potential or fulfillment left inside, and all the conversation in the world of all the most clearly evident truths rarely seems to bridge the space I’ve often long felt from most everyone in the world. Perhaps I am an asshole. Perhaps I had the world pegged when I was 13, but everyone told me to keep second guessing everything I observed until I was old enough to realize the best days were likely behind. Maybe I cared too much because the fire in me hadn’t been extinguished quite as early on in life as many who don’t even notice its passing in their souls until they realize they have nothing to say, no dreams or ambitions, and nothing to hope for but sleepy summer afternoons and grey hair. Perhaps I am autistic after all, though I’ve absolutely no difficulty reading expressions or subtle behavior. I know it very well, but of these recent many attempts, it has grown wearisome and futile to find (much less appeal to) a heart that speaks the same language as I used to until this day; it is often akin to as they say attempting to get blood from a turnip- only now you can’t even find any turnips and it’s dark, and additionally you’re now part of the problem too because you officially now have your own baggage. I could very well be the world’s worst hypocrite, but where is my match? Where is my adversary? And at what heavy cost was all this knowledge gained? Now most all things but a mother’s love has a weightier cost or compensation than before- and of diminishing meaning for its reward. Or perhaps it’s always been this way and I’m just now falling prey to beginning to become a worse person.
Was I wasting my time in fighting a ridiculous war and thinking I had anything to gain by even bothering to try and keep my heart, mind, and spirit from becoming a watered down, faded version of whatever circumstances made it? I guess so. Maybe everyone is dumb, and so am I. Though I’m sure in the world of each of our minds, most might reflect this sentiment. So I give up. I recant of the certitude that what I thought I was looking for exists in any real world.
In the least I may *finally* understand the why’s and the nature of the fractures and strings subtly pulling us apart inside and separating us just beneath the surface- instead of continuing to believe that there’s only something wrong with me. At least I can attempt to record one final account to possibly reflect back on in the future and be reminded that I used to actually believe in something in this massive universe, and had a heart so foolishly imaginative and restless of longing, creating, and venturing to seek out the unexplainable in the world or any bit of magic left in a blurring timeline called life. For at this point it too often feels like I’m merely breathing, feeling nothing and desiring nothing. If I could recall what it felt like to feel alive- as it really wasn’t so long ago, for feeling alive is not equivocal to mere happiness- but the full weight and spectrum of beautiful, tragic emotion. I rarely feel even this I took for granted anymore- or much anything of late- beside now vacillating between numbness and a now exploding rage and repressed animosity toward all the encumbering mediocrity that it is to be human. I had been so lifelong accustomed to feeling things so deeply and passionately, that it never once even crossed my mind to worry that I could become numb. I naively assumed I would always have feelings of inspiration to draw from while creating or deciding what to pursue in life.
Yet I guess even those days seem to be over now too.
It’s taken me this unbearably long to begin to grasp the dissolution of everything I’ve ever believed, and the reality that if by now I haven’t found anything comparable to the oases in the desert places of either burning fire or bitter cold (but no such soul-destroying inbetween as I now find) that I hoped existed as more than a fading mirage- I never will. If I haven’t found a fulfilling enough level of connection in relationships to motivate either person to stay by now, I never will. If with a better understanding, I still find society generally foolish and utterly predictable and unstimulating, this may likely never change. This world is simply too broken for any two wandering pieces to fit together or find peace in an ecosystem of perpetual entropy that will not be reconciled on this mortal side of eternity. Thusly in light of the depths ventured, sacrificed, lost, and learned: I have decided to go my own way of solitude again. This is a perfectly acceptable conclusion in light of past decisions that must be made at the crossroads of either selling every passionate bone down the river in exchange for settling down and simply weathering old with a family, or continuing to pursue life as it still is to me deep down on any now rare day of feeling or honesty. That is- an excruciating testing of the authenticity of man’s resolve and the purity of his heart when life and time stand to potentially take everything from you, for few will fight a war with slim chance of success, but only a human can justify fighting a war that is a guaranteed loss.
Now by all observation, not all wounds heal, but some stay open, just tormentedly challenging you:
“What are you going to do?”
“Who are you going to be able to hold onto being when there’s no real incentive to work so hard anymore?”
How long can you keep two middle fingers raised to everything thats fighting to take everything from you before you are unavoidable crushed by the same milling stone that broke the wings and spirit of the native butterfly?
How can you keep a fire alive with nothing left to burn…?
***
The End of the Matter Pt.3
Why am I so painfully long winded? I’ve come to terms with the death of my foolishly idyllic ideas about life or of anyone out there caring as much as I used to. The difference now is that I finally understand the why’s and its origins in how sad reality as a human truly ended up being- we could have been so much more. But I’ve held my breath for most of my life, and life is too fleeting to bottle everything up any longer; no one is going to listen, hear, or much less understand me, but me.
I didn’t used to feel so empty and cold, and in the case that I either don’t make it out of this violently radical hole in life or I somehow carry on but lose myself in the relentlessly ubiquitous ocean of change, I want there to be a tangible (and extensive) reminder of that fact. If my future self ever looks back and reads this I want to say, “Hey Kelly, you weren’t always so angry, jaded, and given up.” But you’ve always been sad- and I hated it. But don’t ever give up on God. He never gave up on you, and He’s the only one who is always there, always listens. I know if you still feel any of what I feel now, that you likely still wrestle with this unrighteousness anger, and If you’re still numbing yourself as I’ve just now only begun to for the first time, just know that you weren’t always this way. You had a heart, and by all accounts It was a good one; with a considerable measure of passion and tenacity, creativity and imagination. When you did care, you loved harder than you should have, and deep down you held on to your thoughts and concerns for those others longer than they did for you. It’s always been this way: It was then and it ever was up until now. Where I stand, so suddenly, that universe seems so impossibly far away- as though it never came to pass at all or all feeling associated with its memory has also been tragically stolen from me, all traces swept away with the ashes of yesterday.
It pains me to write this from such a stoic vantage, having been forced to finally settle out and grow up. Buy with the last neuron of care I’m desperately forging about anything pertaining to my life, or anyone or anything: I will write what I might like to say, should come the exceedingly likely case that nothing to say and nothing remotely consequential is ever found again. For in the objective necessity to account for these things, it would seem that my heart has finally fallen asleep, and thusly joined the masses of which I found far too tiresome for the first few decades of my life- and admittedly still feel this way about it. But what does it truly matter, save for personal principal? For It would seem that no one else my age survived either, for we have all changed- and not all necessarily for the better. We have grown up: lost our lights and originality, lost our selfless curiosity, lost our fights and sense of there being anything beautiful or mysterious in the universe. We’re sellouts: tired and tamed, worn, torn, and slowly being coaxed into a slumber that deepens in its insidious sleight the longer it remains unseen. Our conversations remain, but feel more distant than when we were naive about what it meant to find the answers. Who can engage your heart these days? Where are the souls I used to know? What happened to us? Where is my own heart? I fear it is silently fading, surrendered to the dust from which it came, and nowhere to be found that It may be redeemed this side of eternity. But it was never about this life was it? This life was supposed to be an investment in the next. I surmise I wanted to find something more than just waiting for the next life to hurt less- and in daring to search for anything more than the perpetual sadness I’ve always known- only found all the devils in me.
I felt that You were saying I was letting my heart or spirit die- but what else is there to do? It would seem its finally come to the place where there are no roads left on which it can survive. I’ve been numbing myself for the first time in my life for a while now, and even though I can feel the lack of oxygen slowly killing my heart, I’ve figured out it’s either I let it die or I continue to hurt like this and consequently fail for whatever time is left of my life. I’ve fallen and risen thousands of times, and It’s finally not worth it anymore. I fell one more time beyond these risings, and for the first time: I didn’t get up. What for? I get it now, and I can finally say I’ve been around long enough to see nothing will ever change and it never seems to get better. It’s the same weather in a different city, the same faces with different names, the same heartbreak in a different headstate, and the same disappointment at a more depressing age. My insides feel as though they’re decaying from unstimulated neglect in a vapid and stupid world, and all the great self help intentions and resolutions in the world don’t change the pain deepening inside that I face every time I’m by myself. I feel like I killed myself to try to do the right things this time and It all just gets worse. So what good was all the instruction in wisdom if everything is sadder and more futile before? The wise live in sorrow while ignorance retains bliss.
It would seem nearly all revisited companions and friends have potentially wisely settled into the spaces I so vehemently fought —Because we most all inevitably reach a place where we either become so excruciatingly stuck at circumstances outside our control, or we settle down and finally go with the flow (and I mean finally, and in finality), as it would seem to be less painful than passing one’s life under the shadow of unmet dreams, aspirations, or ambitions that are seldom fulfilled in a world stacked against the survival of any heart from which such things once emerged with the tireless persistence of the ever returning renewal of spring’s rebirth. For it once never failed to return with the fresh blades of dew that reflected our hearts, ever so much lighter in burden and still hopeful for the future. Well we’re in the future. It would seem to be evident that you can only make it so long before most people become another tally of statistic, but when we were kids we were so fucking sure it wasn’t going to be us. Additionally It would seem to be that the fool’s hopes and heart are destroyed in the abundance of dreamings, while the most solemn truth’s sting remains ever the same in strength and presence within. What did I bother for in trying to leave my sorrow? It is only multiplied. And suddenly, you learn how terribly true all the adages you’ve overheard throughout your life that sounded like mere clichés, turned out to be for even the seemingly brightest flames. It’s almost tempting at times to ask the same foolish questions of why would a good God create so many humans knowing they’re all most destined to be crushed, tested, and emptied to prove their character in fighting the bitterness and begging questions that make little difference as to why I could feel your love so close when I was young and now sometimes it feels like I’m being punished for surviving this long. But I realize this world is not Your doing. It’s ours right?
I pass the schoolyard on many mornings and in a glance at all the kids playing on its grounds, I am ashamed to confess I feel mourned for all that must come to pass for each of them. I feel angry and saddened in a way I didn’t believe I could feel and not have my heart entirely cease to beat, in the knowledge of how naive those children are of what lies ahead of them. I often feel sinfully enraged by the whole human notion and I can almost pity those children/ but then again I used to be one, so standing on the outside I could also feel sympathy for myself as well. Now our prime has passed and I truly feel that life was a promising trap, and I can’t bear the weight of the blame. Now I wonder everyday of late, do You smile upon the rising generations for still possessing the soft, genuine heart I used to have? Do you love me less now because I’m finally all grown up and everything feels dirty, broken, useless, meaningless dispirited, and more difficult than I would have ever imagined I could perceive it? Do you love the younger generations more of a different way for being yet largely unbroken and not yet wrestling hourly with the deep demons of tormented anger and bitterness? For If The shadows could consume my heart after all this way, It can consume anyone’s- regardless of how bright or convicted it once may have been.
Surely I’m not the only one who feels this way, but sometimes it can seem I’m the only one who doesn’t choose to simply never think about it. They say to take these thoughts captive in obedience to Christ, but if I’m honest there’s a part of me that at times is disinclined. Because I’ve been bitterly fighting inside and conflicted with this feeling of futility everyday since I was a depressed twelve year old, and they say that You want us to be honest with You. It’s not as though I can hide the truth any longer, that I think the universe is brilliantly complex in it’s interconnectedness and ingenious majesty – but I often think the human life is absolutely cruel and inane. The most ironic thing I’ve ever heard of. Not like it’s your fault, but now the truth is out. I understand why people just waste their time being angry at you, and push You away in carnal blindness bound to end in disaster. I have seen that You are good and I see it all the time, so I have been plagued by guilt and shame for feeling this way, when I know you don’t owe us anything- that we’re the ones who screwed you over. I guess just like everybody else that’s ever walked the earth or claimed allegiance to You, You’re probably not surprised to see me finally reach a place in life where something deep inside feels like It’s walking away, even though I know you’re everything that I need because I never thought that I could feel this much pain, with not the fear of dying but the fear of what else will I no longer be able to keep from dying within me before my body is in the ground? I’m trying so hard but It’s still been breaking and dismantling my heart and chipping away at my soul; so Isurmise it would be better to be dead than to allow time to steal everything inside you.
Before I found myself in what I fear to be the proverbial “breaking point”, staring down this terrifying precipice in life, Every lesson learned was a knife in my stomach and consequently a nick in my once so naive and secretly hopeful heart of which I truly believed I would have the strength to maintain carrying each day until the end/ whilst transmuting into something beautiful. Thusly I have ever feared ceasing to create, as I have always feared beginning to lose track of precisely when the seeming inevitable progression of numbness or resignation begins. I deeply fear losing track of this devolving process, for I then could no longer retrace my steps on the distant someday when I can again safely live in harmony and coherence in soul, spirit, body, and mind. So many people lose it, with no way back to enlivened wholeness. And yet I find myself in precisely this place of no longer desiring to create or express- can I create anything compelling from a place of dispassionate albeit fading willpower? For I’ve finally come to a point in the Journey where in place of my typically passionately vacillating hot or cold drive, I am rarely the slightest moved or surprised and scarcely even mentally or emotionally engaged by anything I find in the world I have opened myself up to more than ever; as though the more I put myself out there, The more heartfeltedly disappointed and intellectually eviscerated I feel. What was it people were so convinced I was “missing out on” all these years? Much of what I found in this world is heartbreak and disappointment, sickness and disease, a million helping hands amidst an implacable decay, a billion dreams of “someday” held in many wanting but burdened hearts, and an endless billions of faces but not a single one that says home to me.
If I’ve learned one thing over the course of my life, it’s that in most cases no matter how many years you’ve been friends, lovers, or most anything attered inbetween, you’ll say goodbye to likely everyone you’ll know in your life at some point. Like crossing a bridge from one destination to another, but building no home upon it, every human walks their own unique and often indescribable path (for all of the parts of the narrative and struggle that shall never be seen or known by anyone but perhaps God); additionally the more thought is given a man, likely the more lonely it will be for assuming that others are like you. It’s taken me all these years and heartbreaks to at this point finally conduct myself in such a way as to be no longer seemingly capable of forming attachments, for I evidently used to care too much. It broke my already shattering in so many ways heart, to let go. I really wanted to believe like I had held on for all these decades. It’s absolutely more than I can bear and I never could have believed I could ever stop caring. But something inside suddenly died on a day some months back, and I haven’t figured out how to resurrect it, or if I even can.
…
The End of the Matter pt.2
For what seems the first time In my life, I can’t seem to hear You. I can’t seem to feel You in the ways I always so effortlessly had- back when I didn’t have to seek so hard to find, and wasn’t opposed by an unbearably suffocating force felt at every moment but neither able to be touched nor seen. It has appeared as though no measure of prayer, desperate entreaty, or sheer will has been enough to break through the fog of confusion and trepidation that has palpably settled overneath everything, unprecedentedly clouding any clear decision at these dire crossroads I’ve been presently faced with in life.
Now that I’m in the throes of the most precarious turning point of life, you are either nowhere to be found or my heart is too intimately gripped by fear to hear anything but the cacophony of clamoring voices about and within my head. As much as I am finally now more certain of the perilous nature of thought left alone, I know that we are not always alone in their origination- save for their obvious consistency with inescapable human nature. Surely our demons are assigned to oppose to keep us from daring to become who we were each truly created to be, for not so long ago it had all seemed almost visible to me in light of the excruciating paradox of finally seeing and understanding the world and the bitterness of the why’s answers.
Surely these demons skillfully weaponize the sorrows of life in this world to keep our hearts from God: to keep us ignorant to there being anything more, for our minds easily become weary and dulled and our hands wear thin and are too busied to grasp much less pursue any different for our lives or beliefs than has always been, and seemingly destined to be.
Much as the story of Icarus, I was so certain for a time that the tragic lifecycle of being human was somehow escapable or attenuable. Perhaps it still is, but much as I’ve fought it, I do feel that a massive turning point has arrived in life and confess as a mere mortal from dust that the absolute terror it strikes within me as being no longer an anxious possibility upon the distant horizon- but a present reality- has been such that on multiple accounts in this last season I had resolved without the slightest hesitation to try to end my life. The nature of this pointless urge of likely cowardice has been unprecedentedly challenging and disturbing for the accompanying unfamiliar rage and my suddenly lacking self control, with which this decision has regularly paced my mind with a hellish degree of severity. I have sought extensive biblical counsel and the outside perspectives of many individuals studied and trusted in their theology as to why these series of events have all suddenly befallen and why all knowledge and attempt of discipline have been unable to break their destructive cycle. Truly and finally at the end of my rope, I have never tried so hard while sensing so little reason to; for all places of restorative respite seem to have disappeared with the miles gone behind, and yet they so confidently repeat one ought never to look back. But what man can truly credit the weight of how far he has come if he does not grasp all that was lost, gained, or sacrificed in order for at least some parts of himself to ultimately survive? For it would seem there comes a point in many a person’s life at which he must decide what attributes and fruits of labor we desire most to try to maintain, and more specifically at the high likelihood of the others fading away. I never could have previously imagined that such a seemingly obvious decision could feel as profoundly distressing and heartbreaking as it does.
They say You will be found when a man seeks you with all his heart, searching for Your presence as the deer pants so for the brook. I sought you. Why do You feel so distant as my life has continued to fall apart outside what feels my control?
Where were You God when my failing might finally ran out and I called on You continually for strength or help? I may be in the wrong even after all my striving, but I needed You, desperately.
Did you bring me out here to drown? Do You truly understand these situations?
Did You put desires in my heart simply to keep me occupied with chasing the wind or to prove that I simply can’t reach them?
Did You bring me all this way to break my heart and make me decide; Is there nothing in this world that is destined for me? Am I truly so inferior to most everyone else to the degree that I can’t make a single thing for myself in this life? I wonder if You are still on my side, for I can’t gain the direction I believed I would always be able to. What do You expect me to do? What do You *want* me to do? I long for Your voice of comfort, but it seems every whisper only stirs up the already inconsolably perpetual panic that has been growing within me- of which I scarcely any longer raise a sound while feeling it’s constant screaming out with the voices of *everyone*, that I can now feel around me. I’ve never felt so far away from You and yet so simultaneously devastated about it. If I’m being completely honest: I am tempted to mourn parts of the person I was and states of mind that once seemed they would always be so effortlessly achieved, but presently feel so far beyond reach. Such as feelings of innocence or the innately human hopeful naivety for the future: these too appear to have changed rather drastically in light of all that I wish I could erase from my mind, But have yet to contrive the means for doing so in a manner convincing enough to placate the deep distresses accumulated in my spirit. At the end of these matters and after it *all*, I miss the world in which I felt more wholly alone while still possessing the capacity for a space of wonder- as opposed to now feeling incompletely yet perpetually accompanied and consequently rendered disarmed, dulled, disillusioned, and disturbingly apathetic as though the entire universe is simply cut and dry with no reason left to elicit dreaming or any wondrous sense of not knowing. Is there nothing new to see, do, discover? Has all regressed to being so utterly exactly as it seems?
But it’s not even that.
All my life it could sometimes feel as though You were the only one who was truly on my side- who understood me and each of us- in a way that no two casually interacting mortals likely could. For each of us has a unique inner dialogue and world that’s always been difficult to quantify with words, and while the complexity of such may vary, I speculate that we stay feeling separated partly for this very reason. Communication never felt wholly satisfactory to me in the sense of these various unbridgeable chasms between us humans, but I had often desperately clung to You, albeit recently more terrified of what you might say should ever the space of tentative interpretation be removed.
Tentative in that who can be certain when the spirit of God speaks into your mind or heart, simply for that the human mind can be an elaborate, capricious thing of imagination, agonizing conflict, or egoistic whim. But often the voice was the only thing truly comforting, so I held onto that little voice inside. In fact, in a place often only accessible when I was alone, I began to become more consciously aware of an inner dialogue that had seemingly been there since I was very young- in which I could always seem to come to the specific answer, direction, or consolation that was needed. Oftentimes in recent years, these things would come in songs and secret riddles that amidst such a prosaic world, sparked my heart with the only intrigue and curiosity I recall ever finding in any part of life in this world. Much as I tried to push aside so many things and chalk it up to coincidence throughout the years, it could almost seem as though You were always there to reflect what I was feeling and to instruct me in The way that I should go, such that sometimes filled me with a distinct type of joy or a lifting of my head that no one else ever seemed to bring. So I never concertedly sought much from others, for I knew (and now more than ever) that everyone is just as lost and broken in their own varying ways as I am.
Thusly I could be tempted to ask what difference does my heart and spirit’s metaphorical cataclysm make to You if I’m just another casualty- a tiniest fraction of the statistical billions of people who eventually reach a point in life where you’re so frustrated and heartbroken that your insides cave in and disintegrate before your body is buried, but you become accustomed to the lack of feeling because it’s inevitably normalized by the weathering sands of time. You’ve been watching this process since the dawning of time, so it’s difficult for me to believe that You should feel half as devastated as I do about all this, for Is It not simply another chapter to You? There seems to be a sudden distance between us that I’ve not the strength to bridge, and deep down I feel broken in a way I could never begun to describe though I’ve certainly begun to try, and I’ve wondered if even eternity would make it suddenly stop hurting after everything I’ve learned and messed up. My decisions and failures have finally caught up to me in the form of regret and I can’t even handle my own pain at this point, how am I supposed to live with the constant awareness of everyone else’s as well? I’ve finally lost faith that You’re really in control, even when I wanted You to be. I had so much faith, I was so sure.
Now all that And everything I’ve ever known feels so far away and it feels like the time is water rising up around, up to my neck and trying to hold onto the moments before every iota of feeling that isn’t anxiety disappears. I know the pages are turning, and as much as I long to be proven mistaken, I can see them very clearly. People have tried to assure me some things are still the same, but after this storm began to wane and after digesting so much more pain, it was as if I woke up a stranger: seeing through different eyes without any guiding light or compass inside, without any kind of compelling feeling inside, and lost upon a world so much more simple than I could ever in honesty be.
…
The End of the Matter Pt.1
God,
Amidst the multitude of growing troubles that have arisen as the waters over my head: progressively weighing on my mind, vexing my soul, and perpetually pressing in like shards of accumulating glass in my once child-like soul, I feel compelled as a final resort to attempt to write down some of the current results of these matters to try and respectfully talk with You in a way I feel most ineffaceably heard. I intend to shoot from the hip, as to say most of what I feel led to, and so apologize in advance for any redundancy; yet by these means I might have the confidence that they were said in a manner more tangible than simply continuing to circle in my head as the ravenous vultures they are- as though these consuming fears, worries, regrets, and disappointments are not just as obvious to You as the literal condors overhead, eagerly awaiting my demise. Yet I know as it often does, that the day will come that there are so many ineffably hardest learned lessons and concepts trapped within my succumbing spirit that I’ll wish I had found a more concrete way of communicating them than wishfully continuing to hope that You perceive my every faded inward thought, feeling, and inclination. I truly fear That I’ve been fighting in vain the point at which I will sink into silence; that all the passions that once enlivened my mortal body, spirit, and soul will become obsolete. So I wanted to write as much as I could formulate together, now. For it seems there is no better time that will feel the right time- fragmented as it may be in light of my continually insatiable desire to feel known, understood, touched, or felt; yet I know no matter how much I say it will likely never feel to do justice to the knowledge of a no longer merely proverbial weight of this world.
I have found myself finally having been pushed over the cliff’s edge I’ve been precariously skirting for years, yet continually spared from by Your good graces. I am struggling to overcome the perpetual feeling of being trapped in the midst of days that feel like a nightmare I keep hoping I’ll simply wake from, and in never doing so conclude that there will be no mortal return from this harrowing precipice of both unbecoming and becoming so many things I swore I would never lose, nor become. You might be able to appropriately deem me much like the character of “Most Afraid”, of Hinds Feet On High Placed, for I have since been filled with a strange type of disinhibited courage ever fraught with a profoundly deep and conflicting fear, and I am indeed afraid of all the ways the last years’ events and it’s ensuing silence have unavoidably been changing me. Admittedly and violently, tooth and nail I fought these changes until the simultaneous cataclysm of ensuing events became so devastatingly overwhelming that to stand was to break my bones. And I did. Like the strong and stubborn, often incorrigibly wild spirit You partly crafted me of, or a horse that would run itself to death if it were to believe it could somehow escape gravity or the grave. My spirit has finally been irremediably broken, as I have been warring this for years, and finally seemingly been defeated in silence. I find it is in this silence that some of the most catastrophic wars against spirit and morale are eternally fought or lost in endless succession- and yet there is no wholeness of peace in the stillness of surrender, and no peace without losing a war. In fact, from my current vantage, there is no peace at all in this life; for I was surely born to either fight all the way or be defeated on terms of which I’m not decided whose yet it will be.
At the seeming end of all these matters,
I partly wish now only to erase it all- to take the now supposed answers and absolutely discard most of them in order to unknow and return to being the person I was before circumstances caused me to lose my grip on what I had believed was the life I was working to make and the person I desired to be: a refined redemption of all that was grown and painfully crafted in the wandering of the desert places of my bitterest mistakes so far from any promised land. Yet I have fallen and been dashed to pieces upon the rocks of the testing of the faithless at Kadesh Barnea, and the weight of my shame at failing You once more can no longer be ever relieved by assurance of any remaining sands in an immovable hourglass. The punishment I’d wager for my ignorant disbelief was to wander for many years alone in a land of seemingly no other souls, but Your presence often so tangibly with me, has felt more real than any other person in my life for most of it’s duration. In not understanding, I certainly have wondered and been afraid for most of this way- despite Your faithful leading- but I have never felt half as anxious and confused as I now find myself in understanding. Previous to this turn of events, I have run with either an unabating endurance or foolish denial- yet of which, I’m not certain I want to know. Perhaps deep down I have hoped for a kind of hope that simply doesn’t exist, and hope does not feel as hopeful as I had always thought, nor peace any longer as peaceful. For at the end of this decade- plus length journey, all my searching begs that it may be more beneficial to the mind of disquietude to suffer the perpetual uneasiness of not knowing, rather than to seek the answers to the ubiquitous questions of existence, free will, and Your dealings with us. I have felt deeply compelled to extensively ponder and seek these things, and presently arrive at a most lowly landing place of trepidation and confusion between accepting the fate of the answers I currently consider at the end of all my failings, or to continue to seek and search in possibly foolish optimism that my breakthrough is just around the corner. Which is what I had always told myself in my tireless persistence in all things.
Some often so discourteously recite that the subjectively relevant end of your life is usually the metaphorical beginning, but I had armed myself for war during the years of desert wandering and tried to hold faith that I had managed to solidify a steely enough fortitude in my projected plans for the future. However, In this recent most unexpected season it seems from my current perspective and experience that all of this has tragically come crashing down in a most unexpected way of the illest timing imaginable, and of a nature seemingly so precise and extensive that it becomes increasingly impossible to attribute to mere coincidence- as opposed to a purposefully orchestrated conspiring of either divine or demonic affliction, or I am the world’s biggest fool. But there are simply too many moving pieces that have all come together in such a way as to produce a massive change in all my beliefs, psyche, personality, and conviction of who I am at my core. Twenty- nine years of such certitude seem to have all somehow been shaken and Transmuted, such that on the dawn of 30, I don’t know what I believe anymore. It has all seemed as though no amount of willpower could have resisted or turned back the absolute devastation that swept through so suddenly and unexpectedly, like a hurricane leaving nothing but shambles of what was in its unforgiving wake.
In my mind, heart, and soul this war has been waging as though a type of proverbial final battle, back and forth for many months in resisting it’s pull, until as if almost overnight: everything in my world changed.
It seems not a single hair on my head nor part of my life or self have gone undamaged or unchanged in the period of this last season. Many of these changes have left me devastated: at the deepest heart of who I have always been, decided to be, and labored for countless years in order to maintain any place of peace and faith inside. I have held on and fought the rising tides with more than I had to give, and in the midst of seemingly insurmountable anxieties, find I am finally unable to live or conduct myself in such a way consistent with the maintenance of a heart that in foolish granted, I had always thought impossible to irreparably destroy it’s tenacious spirit within me. This is unfortunately the case at this present time, and amidst the unfamiliarity and painful strangeness now of every part of life, it’s difficult not to think this to be the same inevitable end of any passionate pursuit under the same tiring sun. Yet I have to confess that at the end of this Journey, this too finds me
surprisingly, profoundly disappointed.
While I am well aware that plans rarely go as we would most ideally have them, and life will never be perfect nor easy, I can’t help but be tempted to question You and most everything I have so unwaveringly believed about Your workings and relationships toward us. I am doubting in things I have so firmly maintained since I was too young to even recognize the concept of conscious belief or identify the timeframe of its forming within me. The one thing I always knew since there was any knowledge to be had, was that You were with me. Though our human memories are spotty and tend to be rewritten with time, from my present point in time it could feel as though my awareness of Your omnipresence was either instilled from birth or simply there from the onset of self- awareness’ age of development.
Furthermore, I must have trusted You so much more deeply than I could have yet realized- for I knew nothing else- until it was shattered in the breaking light of reality and a level of sadness and devastation I never could have believed one could feel and still breathe; I never thought you could lose your heart and have it still beat or believed that I could ever truly die long before my body was put in the ground.
Perhaps I give myself too much credit, but maybe my innate belief that You were always with me Is contributory as to why I typically had a formerly great confidence about me, and rarely remember feeling marked loneliness throughout life- or at least not the type of loneliness that I believed could be filled by any person. I felt so sure that You have been there for every moment of my life: every breath, every whispered doubting word inside, The countless moments no one will ever see, and every exultation of hope or imagination fulfilled to affirm Your guiding hand in my life or word in my ear. Even in a great number of the trivial details of life, there are many things that I might be too hesitant to share with people who could so easily believe me to be delusional, or water the seeds of doubt formerly hidden to my eyes, that shamefully nonetheless have sprung up and now are dominating the garden of my desecrated heart. My doubts have birthed from fear: the fear that I imagined it all and there is no making sense or redeeming the end of my strength, fear that I have always been alone, fear that I now walk until the end without any of the sustaining hopes of Kadesh in my heart; Fear that the comforting words and continual guidance with the tender understanding of my mortal fears and haunts, was an exhaustively complex grand fabrication of my imagination and God could never humor me so personally, as I am one grain of sand on the shore of over 100 billion faces having passed through this same broken world, of which I feel more a likeness to with every passing day.
I have been unable to eradicate the roots of doubt taking hold, of potentially how overwrought and grandiose these detailed observations presently feel to be. Here in my present state, with seemingly nearly all of the pieces of my life, peace, hopes or dreams lying again shattered on the ground and my fists bloodied in anger, my pride and dignity have been brought low by a force I can neither explain nor identify, but could not seem to effectively resist- though I tried with all I had left. I have to confess that in light of everything I have believed since I was a child, and with everything I’ve seen, that it has become nearly impossible not to be tempted to turn in question or blame. I know I have blamed you, and I have blamed myself. I have been full of rage and anger at myself, too scared until now to admit that my anger is at both of us. I have tasted and seen, being well aware that we live in a fallen world. But Your sovereignty and control in the minutiae of the universe, in light of Your simultaneous presence on both sides, is not a mutually exclusive statement with living in a fallen world. I had always believed Your ability to work in spite of and within these fractures exemplified your infinite understanding of every detail of every situation as well as it’s complex interconnections with the overlapping webs of other’s seemingly unrelated situations and how they will respond. I now question this. I am doubting that You fully understand the degree of reactivity in my heart, spirit, and soul in angst and ceaseless conflict. I question the complex theories I had formed from taking meticulous note in my heart of Your orchestration in the past and it’s fruits into the present. Did I overthink or over- imagine the ways of a God who said He could do more than we ask or imagine? Do You not perceive or incline the hearts of some men to flow as a river in the way that they should go? Did I not pray these very words? Did I so utterly fail You that Your will could be usurped by a left turn as opposed to a right? Did I miss the final sign? Am I simply too ill- minded and stubborn to accept a fate so grim as to be hinging upon merely my own diminishing strength? Have You been my help, shelter, and strength all these years or was I simply still young enough to get away relatively unscathed of my own small might?
These cumulatively compiled yet unwritten treatises kept in my soul regarding how I have always experienced You, have long been all I have held onto inside- amidst the unseen highest highs and these unforeseeable darkest times. These now lie as myths potentially shattered and possibly irreparably singed in my mind, now with consequently little to hope for in this life But the same to be as has always been before- for there is indeed nothing new under the Sun, much as I may have tirelessly searched for it.
Now caught in the midst of the most unsettling season of life, I find my heart sorrowfully caught between the teeth of a world that seems to only be revealing itself as even worse than I had speculated, And I’m trying to make sense of such commonplace devastations in light of my formerly naive candor.
Most religious or spiritual advice offers simply one or the other: the viewpoint that things do not work out or bad things happen because we live in a fallen world and You will sometimes work to the endpoint of a simple exercise or lesson, *or* You are so much more intimately acquainted with the labyrinthine reactions and repercussions prior to and following the bad things that You choose not to intercept (or You allow) And this understanding would be to a degree so high above our human asking or imagination, that I would need not doubt its redeeming qualities. The first theory on using it as the means by which a life can utterly fail or be cut off premature despite all best efforts, could imply that there are things in the universe outside not only Your control, but also the control of the human afflicted by whatever circumstance. Is there anything beyond Your control? Which would mean You were not all powerful within the bounds You have set to limit Yourself from intervening with human free will or nature ticking as the clock.
I guess in some unadvertised way deep in the recesses of my heart I still hoped that by some miracle of Yours, I would figure things out and end up okay, or that somehow my turnaround just hadn’t come yet. I thought You were that big.
I fought all this way- through thousands and thousands of bad days- and I believed You would have done something miraculous in my life by now, to show that You are a brilliant story writer and not just trying to put bandaids on hopeless situations.
Yet If you can do more than we ask or imagine, then why should any yet-uninhibited imagination be of any challenge to the true nature of Your workings? Is anything too hard for You?
Is any imagination too lofty for You?
Are you ever caught off guard or surprised? I guess I actually am.
Ultimately, I wonder If Your will can be usurped by human frailty, decision, or miscalculation (because of free will in a broken world) , this gives me very little to have any of my former hope or peace in this life on the basis of. I wish You had given me a bit less free will. I prayed You would incline the direction of my heart like You carve the rivers paths into the Earth’s face or the tributaries that ever flow back to the ocean. Since I was old enough to speak I ran to You, and I have always run back to You.
To where else will I now go?
I have seen Your hand ever present and involved in nearly every iota of this world and I had speculated even the universe- save for that I have never been there. In my mind there has always been nothing You couldn’t do: no soul being too far gone or singular perspective beyond Your comprehension in a way that implies personal investment and a degree of excruciating symbiosis in the endless alleviation of human suffering.
I have been tempted enough to have thought throughout my life that despite my insatiably restless spirit and continual straying, that Your spirit in me at times could seem almost one and the same,
but then remember the nature of my sin and self- seeking ways. Regularly thoughout my many tumultuous years I have been gifted with Your gentle presence and an ever present longstanding dialogue inside of which my simply contrived thoughts and the strategic language in which You presented Your words was in such a manner that they could sometimes be difficult to tell apart.
I had always believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the fire deep within me that always guided and strengthened me- growing and diminishing but never entirely extinguishing- that it was You by my side, feeling what I felt, and guiding me back to a place where I felt safe. I never thought that fire could die. I never could have believed a day would come I could not hear You.
Yet I am beyond petrified to witness what I thought would cease as only cracks in my faith and beliefs, rapidly erupt into a full- blown fracture and falling away from You and everything I’ve known and been shaped into. I’m terrified to be witness to feeling separated from You for the first time, as though deep in my soul I am desperately clawing through the dirt to try and reach the places I used to feel Your presence in a way that felt clean and uninhibited, but now countless hands keep pulling me further down under the mud; for these days I always feel I am a terrible type of tainted and unclean that never washes off.
I believed that if I tried my best and did what I thought was the next right step in my life with the strength that I had, while continually praying for your guidance, that I would get where I was ultimately meant to be. I did not necessarily believe in fate or destiny apart from Your mysterious hands leading, guiding, strengthening and protecting those whom You called Your own. I can recall a passage of Psalm 139 stating:
“Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
In Your book we’re written, every one of them,
The days that we’re formed for me,
When as yet there were none of them.”
I guess I messed it all up.
I wish so desperately I could say that today I still so firmly believed in this interpretation, or that I no longer feel devastated by terror clouding my ability to see a worthy plot in life or a redemption that eradicates the multiplying torments gnawing inside and growing measures of disappointment. I could ask You if you had truly planned my life, and if it were so, perhaps I could feel some peace again. But if I ruined everything and missed Your plan for my life, I could never forgive myself, so I’m too terrified to ask You that question. Couldn’t You see my mistakes coming before I was ever ever even a concept in my mother’s heart? Seven years ago I could never have begun to grasp the magnitude of the weight of the world I feel today in relation to a lifetime of seemingly waiting for redemption or for something to make sense or feel clear to me amidst the chaotic, confusing, heart- wrenching mess of being another broken human being of finite strength. And I am devastated. And I know I’m not the only one. I have never felt nearly so utterly weak and distressed in all my days upon this earth or so frightfully disoriented and tossed about on the tumultuous seas of a new kind of confusion, of which must be only compounded by the relentlessly opportunistic oppression of demons that seem to never cease returning whenever I have been at my most weary. Frightening enough as it is that they have nearly won this time, but what scares me most is this cavernous hole I’ve still managed to sense expanding amidst the numbness within until it has finally fractured the junctions That have all my life held me together as surety of who You are, or who I was created to be; it’s been dividing my mind, spirit, body, and soul to be at continual conflict and war with one another and sometimes it can feel, with You. Desperately, I come to You in pieces, for the first time terrified You won’t be able to put me back together. When my prayers in the day grew weary, I began calling out for You in my sleep, in which I have been experiencing recurring nightmares of worsening intensity. In such dream I have fallen some place deep within the earth and no one can hear me, or even knows I’m there. My body is dangling over a bottomless cavernous pit and my hand is slipping from the only small handhold left to grab in this claustrophobic chasm of which the walls on each side and above are slick with the sickening muck of a sewer cellar, and closing in as I’m screaming Your name until I wake myself up from yelling myself hoarse and death-gripping the headboard. I have never before doubted my faith in You who had ever been my help and comfort. Yet here I am, feeling so terrifyingly far away from You and everything I’ve ever Known that always seemed so sure, far past a shadow of a doubt and unable to save myself from these darker shadows that seem to have come back again in this season.
What seems a journey I have long been on in search of answers I thought I desired, I now wish I could erase recollection of in return for the measure of peace I wasn’t even aware I had previously until these present days befell that it wasn’t there in the same degree. I wish so desperately I could erase the entire last year from my mind and efface it’s marks in my soul. I want so desperately to feel that same familiar relief deep inside, To be able to come to you and leave feeling renewed, strengthened, or filled with a familiar fire; for a while now no such comfort or rest do I find. You’ve always been the shelter that I’ve run to in the hard times and the better times too, and I find myself confused and distant because, quite plainly, You’ve never not rescued me. You’ve never not met me. I have waited, prayed, and persisted in doing all of the things I don’t want to do, long left my comfort zone, sought more help, and took more advice than ever in my life, only to end up so much worse than ever before. And some of these people want to act like they understand me, my life, or what’s been going on better than I do. In all this humiliating help-seeking I hoped that my fire, resolve, or direction would be somehow inevitably renewed as it always was previously.
But for what seems the absolute first time, this has not happened.
The fire has gone out for the very first time.
And it hasn’t come back.
I have blamed myself for every possible wrong turn and step I can even think of, I have changed myself according to what I was told I should be until I don’t even like me anymore, and I have examined myself solely and mercilessly to find the fault for which I failed. And I am so very sorrowful for my failures, despite all that I had to learn the hard way. I don’t know what I missed in having been taken by waves beyond my capacity to cope.
I have been tossed about in every direction, as though every way in which I am pointed that would seem to be of Your guiding, turns out to be another dead end. I’ve never experienced not having any inner compass before, or such silently excruciating and sorrowful depths of apathy. I’ve never felt so alone and I never could have fathomed I could ever become become capable of numbing myself in all the ways I now seem to be achieving in exchange for parts of myself, and barring myself from everything that once seemed worth keeping.
Yet it is unfortunately often discovered that with the progression of time this very specific temporary state of the transcendent joy of being unencumbered in Your presence is hampered by the burdens and heart breaking disappointments of life; call it the seeds sewn among thorns or cast by the wayside, but I am ashamed to say that this has finally become the case of where I find myself. I guess I simply lasted longer in my blinded faith than most. The heart that I used to so eagerly bring to You to sit in Your presence and have my cares lifted, passions illuminated, and strength of conviction renewed, for the first time in my existence on this earth has begun to feel the unsettling beginnings of callousness. These changes I’ve noticed possess the tendency to be so insidiously subtle yet progressive that I can see how some might not even notice it’s workings within, until the time comes too little And late to fully reclaim the innocence and idealistic enthusiasm that most people inevitably And progressively compromise along the way; for I find oftentimes even if it can be relived or imitated in a moment, it is mostly through the bias of a memory that tends to change over time as well.
Periodically, sudden and unexpected revelations of the past evoke a renewed awareness of these cumulative changes within myself, and I wonder when did existing stop being enough incentive to keep those feelings?
I long assumed that most other people in the world saw or felt similarly as I, or that their hearts were the same and felt things as deeply as mine always had, until lately. It was only In speaking to a greater number and spending more time with people than ever previously in my life, that I more firmly conjecture that most of us reach a nearly definitive point in life at which we consciously or unconsciously begin to to numb the painful feelings of the things we can’t control, at the partial expense of dulling and chipping away at the highs. Even being fully cognizant of this: Now, when I’m not breaking things or fucking up life evidently by trying too hard, I’m numbing myself for the first time too. In fact, it scares the life out of me that “I’ve become numb to everyone and everything and I’ve finally given up in life for the very first time”, and that was part of the clearest things You’ve ever said to me in my life. it’s been destroying and dismantling everything I am, and despite recognizing that, I swear I never could have seen these days coming, and have yet to be able to turn it around this time as every tool and weapon in my arsenal have failed me. As much as I’ve continued to pray and tried to reach You the way I always did in the past, my prayers have grown weary, as has my faith and I, beneath the crushing weight of all these mysterious ill- events and changes I cannot account for.
And even *if* I have only myself to blame, after having experienced those many moments of being on high places alone with You, I have been cut down and descended to abysmal lows I could never have foreseen to immediately ensue those fleeting but promising, dreaming days. In fact, I could never have believed that I would ever find myself in such a humiliating and humbling low, of which redemption seems suddenly an underwhelming word in light of all that has transpired within, been learned, and rendered a deeply indelible and scarred groove in my mind and spirit. I have now seen where the roots of bitterness and anger grow and have resided in the hearts of man, and ultimately also ended up residing in mine; for it was beneath the soil, yet to spring forth from the tumultuous rains of the changing seasons to come. For I feel my heart has consequently finally grown colder than I ever would have believed it could be. And though I tried as hard as I could, I am so bitterly sorry that a thousand sorry’s could never say enough. For I believed the sky would fall before I could ever lose my faith in You.
***
March 13th 2020
In visions of the night the same flooding feeling came
In which shifting shadows had grown over every trace of the room’s frame
Twisting vines decorated with scarlet roses and thorn, now adorning the floor and encircling the doors
Begging the question of what would I do
beckoning what if deep down I intrinsically knew
That the time would run short, ultimately what would I say
In the midst of these subconscious thoughts we can neither turn on nor shut off
And instantly felt and I conclude, wishing I’d had the gall to tell you the truth
Of the way I truly saw them and myself, the secrets I kept back with no one else to tell, in the hollow space at the pit of my stomach- but really my heart
Sunken so very far down when you ceased coming around, like a stone in the ocean that descends without confessing a sound
Or the way my skin used to stand still upon end like the chills that you get when you see the lines we laid bend,
Beneath the hunger for what you fear simply will no longer exist, or more frightfully is if it never did
In an insatiable drought, knowing to have to always go without and tirelessly wonder, was it only a synchronized illusion of an idyllic home that’s gone now
Yet preserved in an ancient language of our imagination’s wordplays,
A conspiracy of purposeful moves aligned each to make you feel and see in a new light
Feel a soul, not just a face or another muddled name, But what we all used to dream to be in some way ours to claim
Never quite celebrated nor advertised, but I savored the highs and bit the bullet riding to the bottom of demise
With all of the pills and the time killed in shame and regret, and the words I still feel were always left unsaid
And I never stopped wondering why. Not for a moment.
A laundry list of vague useless diagnoses that in the present time have no meaning, but a liar was never one of them
No, I hated so very much with most all of my heart, but when I loved, I loved with every last part, left of it- an irrational and senseless faith, a beautiful chaos of passion pain love and rage, in a world that
No ordinary path could ever create
But now I’m standing up on the edge of the ledge that in my life I long saw coming but have never seen past, with all that was and all that I couldn’t make last
Trying all of these faces, observing, and adopting all the charades and civil obligations
I never was strong enough to make it out there, I never was weak enough to take a lover, I never did so very much you would think one to do, I never did properly tell the people I needed, or if it ever was that I loved you
Now this house is just empty with nothing left, only bittersweetest memories to try and forget, Our hearts feel only empty though they’re filling up with names, The hardest part is being incomplete, fearing it’s never going to change
This house is still haunting me though I’ve long since had to move on, a body found in a different space but a heart lost with The rising of this dawn
Some things I know, I’ve never really been adept at letting go, and if I do I really don’t
Is there always going to be that hole in your chest, knowing I’ll only be able to fill it with hope and regrets, And do we really feel edified by the lessons they sell, when they make us who we are, or even more bent on hell
This house is so empty, is there nothing left, But all these make believe memories I’m trying to just forget, tonight my heart feels empty, though it’s filling up with names
And the ticking time bomb was only me,
I suppose that’s never going to change.
March 3rd 2020
So afraid, just a half step away from being lost in this eternity
I try to look away, but what’s done can never be unseen
As we fight this rising tide trying just to buy more time, But the reasons have fallen through
Is there nothing left here to do
For all the places our souls have been, with no language known to let someone in
All the traces remain ever embedded in our skin
A constant reminder with no way to heal or craft redemption for our sins
I would give anything to feel one thing as real as all the pain left inside we simply learn to conceal
Do I have what it takes to push through to my fate, when I never realized until today I’ve lived my whole life inside imagination
Now it’s time to bridge the distance that’s kept me in between
Though it’s never felt so different as when hope finally grew it’s wings
And flew before me in the time
Now anger fills the colors of every part that we have lost, and we throw the ending away when the start we have forgotten
They say when you stop caring that you’ll finally be free, but now that we are there, I vehemently disagree
Years flash by in a moment and it’s never slowing down, so take a breath and exhale slow, because it’s all we’re getting now
Because of all the places our souls have been, with no language known to let them in, all the traces remain in our skin, with no one to heal and make us feel forgiven for our sins
And there are still so many things that are ever calling out, a still smallest whisper that never makes a sound
And I found myself in a darkness of a more crushing regret than words can say
And the answers I found were far more than I could take
Wondering do we all have to go insane to find our way
Can I ever forget what’s been cut from my flesh
As I’ve tasted heaven and been marred by hell too
But all I ever can think to say to You
Is hold on to her until I get back
Until I can carve a way back through the scar tissue and hard facts
Of all the lessons I’d die to efface from my skin
And God I hope I have the strength to do this
For all the places our souls have been.
8.26.2020 free write
I know the longer I go without talking to You, the less I can express
To anyone I know or in anything I do, always ending up stuck in my head
Thinking I’m lonely, like nobody knows me, but never seeming to connect,
I can say all these words and try to believe that they’re heard, but they still always feel second best
Like they’re simply not saying what I would need to say, as if there was another way I could explain
but there’s not, they’re all we’ve got, and today I hate these words
And if I were to say I feel so out of place, that my universe is falling apart,
it’s like they jump on board, saying it’s what they’ve been waiting for, and I’m ending even more torn apart
When I just want something that feels right, not another damn question that keeps me up at night
when I just want to feel alive, even if it’s a lie, because the truth cuts deeper than the knife
I know the longer I go without speaking to You the more that I let myself go and forget who I was made to be
and when comes time to try and put it back together, I don’t even know what for
Tell me what is better?
When fighting to cure the hurting, but the drugs they stopped working
I don’t know who I am, or for what I should give a damn
Everything feels so foreign, though I know life is change, I never cared for it, as though I think I can stay
Somewhere I can recognize, I don’t like the look I’ve seen growing in my eyes
Smashing in another mirror, can’t help but wonder what the hell am I doing here
It Feels like I’ve lost my voice, but I don’t really want to have to make any more choices
I no longer know what I believe, it’s getting harder to hold onto my dreams, or to know if they were ever real,
A mystery what it is that I should even feel, I just don’t want them to catch on to the fact that this has all become an act,
and I’m even more lost than you.
12.22 free write
I’d kept hoping and enduring that one day it could get better again, That after so long a journey and fighting my way back to repay for the debtor I’ve been
That things could improve by the increments of what I thought was once faith, Until the fire would prove that my confidence and resolve was just a fake
So sure I would make my own way
Thought I saw that light for a minute but then it disappeared, And no matter what I do I can’t seem to rekindle or come back from this awful year
I guess they were right all along, you can’t always know what you have until it’s all gone
but now I know too much and have been barely getting up, been down in every gutter and now I’m out for blood
I miss the way my heart used to secretly dream of love, and the way it used to see things before I finally gave up
Singing out in silent tongues uttered
without a single word spoken to account for
Has my spirit lost its wings to compose those melodies no more
The fire and fight I’d had in my heart for nearly all my life
Even if only whispered inside in the middle of the darkest nights
Seems to have been extinguished and gone missing and I’m terrified the dying sparks won’t linger long enough to ever reignite
Tell me what could possibly redeem the ashes that litter the ground and are scattered into the winds
I’d give anything if my soul could only make a sound But it doesn’t seem to matter what I do or rescind
And If I had merely one last breath of a feeling voice that was familiar to me, I would empty out my chest screaming just to fill the void and feel any reprieve
I’d use that last breath just to call out for You one last time
You always rescued me back when I was still unbroken and innocent inside,
Before we had to witness so many deaths inside, dragged down to the depths and with the turning of the tide
Seemed You always knew precisely what to say to make it alright
And only You knew how to reach me in those times
Thinking back on the countless feelings of being misunderstood
How You’d always pull me back from disasters brink when no one else could,
my reckless steps under Your guard, perpetually wandering and far, but my inevitable return the persistent inclination of my heart
If there were a way I could write it all down never to be effaced, All the tormenting thoughts, fears, and memories that are flooding through my veins today
I would write a thousand sonnets so there might be one solitary thing that wouldn’t change
But if I’m being honest, I’ve been on a bender, angry and ashamed
Things have been spiraling downward fast
And God knows there isn’t much longer I can Last
I just wanted to feel alive until the day I passed but something inside is different and I can’t seem to take it back
Nothing is alright and I can’t bear another day or night of feeling this terror inside
My feet are locked on the path to self destruction and I no longer care to deny
I’ve been on my way down, just wandering tearing up the town
Night after night ready to hit another wall
A collision in the headlights and about to lose it all
I just need to know You’re here and going to catch me when I fall
I’ve been steep and steady in regressing
and I backslid so far, skirting the edges of steeples and walking around with half a heart
One of the countless numb who wants to feel something but can’t find, longing for more than a mirage of refuge in a land thirsty and dry
More than always looking back on monuments of better times and trying to remember feelings that have faded in the mind
That we don’t feel anymore
Back when dreams and imagination were free and not behind a steel door
you know I want so much to believe in something, Just one thing that could be special to me
And everyone says keep faith and keep running but the further I search the more alone I feel
Lately I don’t even know what I’m hoping for, all while questioning what was real
Is hope really now less hopeful and I was just believing lies, because even in the dark’s hold You would lead me in the night
With signs and secrets tokens just to keep the flame alive, in a language only we spoke in, telling me to keep the fight
Whispering there’s still something more to be discovered before the day you die
How can the universe be so exorbitant and the mind of God so unsearchable
But I so quickly grew bored with the world, looking for any way I can create some kind of story or procure control
In a life that wars to break us down and erode our souls
To lower our hopes and expectations to settle for whatever we can scrape together and call it it is what it is
call it meaningful even though there’s
always that one thing in the back of my skull saying
Remember the days when you still believed that there was wonder left in the world, something left to be uncovered, something to watch unfold that wasn’t so vague, ubiquitous, and impersonal
I hate the way You try to sing but I don’t dance to anything
Defensive while defenseless and I built them up high
The walls that were torn down trying to fill in with a different life
After everything we’ve been through it’s getting harder than ever not blame You
Suddenly distrusting and I withdraw my hands, after everything I guess I just don’t understand
Where in the cosmos my heart belongs
Will I ever feel free again
Or have I gone too wrong
What’s the use of profound emotion if all we get to do is watch them fade away
Try to hold onto the memories maybe to revisit them in later days, but then it’s only asking for pain
Tell me it isn’t true that children have it all figured out and as the years get to you we fabricate because we’re bored and can’t find a way out
After all those dreams from before are being replaced by disappointment and doubt
God is there anything to hope for in this life at all, or do we only have imaginations for them to betray and watch us fall
I spent so long trying to protect my heart to hang onto who I felt I was meant to be
Working for who I thought You made me to be
I was so close and we came so far, Just to lose my grip and watch everything I know seem to fall apart
watch it all crumble and slip right through my hands
Will it ever be put back together, will anything makes sense in the end
Or do we endure this continually greying weather only in vain pretense
Endlessly hoping for something that never shows, and never able to find the words to bridge the gap between me and all those
Around probably also feeling lonely even when they are surrounded
being told they’re not the only but the questions keep on pounding
Are they thinking the same thoughts, words falling short of what we conceal
I don’t know what else to say God, beside what I probably should
Please remind me I’m alive, help me remember how to feel
Something
Good.
12.19
My mind was haunted by thoughts of you
For the longest time
Distracted by a crow calling from the distance, flying over in blackest skies
You know I did still wander, gazing behind today’s horizon
And wonder where you found yourself, until I finally realized In quiet trepidation
That some truths are traced out only in the silent places
And now we’re both just lone wandering stars, fallen a universe apart
there’s no gravity left here, for nothing can hold my faith in place these days
Everything is so different , even the feeling of hope I believed could never erode- if you could just find it- seems to fade away
And everyone that mattered to me leaves, until accepting that fact finally shattered and changed me
As the hidden strength that had ever survived inside, that beckoned us to keep our heads up high and keep believing in the fight
Now has been hollowed out by the war waging against our souls, I’ve lost my grip and it swept me under and away with the oceans hold
Every memory and faith muffled beneath the deluge of time’s unrelenting waves
Transmutation conspiring to separate and break apart the ground beneath our feet
Until every love or acquaintance becomes yet another pair of strangers lost upon the crowd and out of reach
Who’ll believe in anything just to get by like we did then, only to discover no such thing like it will be found again
It’s so much more cold and cruel now living without hope for anything that won’t let you down
Only memories dance these days, and heavier with regret
Now in the endless exhausting search for a moment of tranquility I close my eyes and make believe to be somewhere far beyond this earth to an earlier place in time
before I saw what I know now
Back when we still knew how to believe, but I didn’t actually know anything
Yet
So again I walk alone the way it’s always been
But just as many mere mortal dreaming men
I would much rather be alone now than trying to convince myself not to feel lonely amidst the crowd
But there are no saviors and It’s so much more grey here
just denying our deepest fears that Left us hiding
Accepting that this is the truth of who we are that I’ve been denying
Always moving on, numbing and pretending to be stronger
and I am, but still live back inside where is no longer
The place I lost the remains of who I wanted to be
Fraying shreds of the heart that must carry on into eternity
Now everything is only alive in memory
Both a million miles away
And it’s where I seem to stay.
Free Write 12.17
All I behold are faces all around and eyes I can’t recognize, Terrified now to have found that the eyes staring back are mine
Hardened and sobered by the attrition of time and revelations I wish I could erase from my mind
So am I a revenant soul, standing alone in asking why- what is the purpose to which we must continually strive to grow until the very last moment of our lives
As if strength were some form of reward, when all it truly is is the means to get to the end of the story so we can rewind to better days
Strength can seem the capability to carry the weight of the world without letting on so
To what gain is the show of not being so devastated by the impact of the collapse of the hopes we had built up in our minds only to fall from higher heights
When all life gives you to hold onto is letting go
Where is the story, the synchronicity I used to see
Where is the revelation of the tapestry they’re always claiming our broken lives are sacrificed to compose
I am living despite what should have killed me, and I climbed to etheric heights beyond low expectations that have no fulfilling
Only to be forsaken by the skies and cast as Icarus back to the inescapable dirt of both life’s origin and demise, all to end up feeling farther behind
To which I ask to what end is fortitude gained or dogmatic self help advice liberally applied
that offers no real hope in this life
save for numbing yourself until you no longer even feel alive
And it’s exactly what I find
upset at the injustices you can’t control or heal
until you get upset at nothing at all, for according to most everyone you can ultimately control nothing
I set out on a journey to prove myself wrong, to find alleviation for what deep down I believed all along
I set out to chase dreams and open myself to the world that I found so plain and predictable
But found that there is no less emptiness far out there than near, amidst an ever present illusion of something missing here, but the only things that ever filled in recollection I begin to question if it wasn’t a lie as well
All that you’ve known balancing out of favor upon a precipice of harrowing ramifications
For the peace of my soul, for all that ever seemed to matter at all, now far less than I would have thought, I thought those hopes and dreams that continue to haunt had some measure of truth in them
But now again would have much put them down to simply illusion, memories that keep repeating, attempting to draw me in to believing that they really meant something
Reminding me of the undeniably growing fear every moment of breath, that I’ll never find what I saw in those dreams that I prayed never to forget
I just wanted to feel something real before I died
Now it seems revealed that I’ll forever be chasing after a ghost- the truth ever gaping with the time that goes
And the knowing necessitates a change of perspective, but never any closure and the change is only subjective
And I confess that it’s not enough for me anymore, I could not stay the same or return to the same as before
That point in time, now that everything is so much more real, faced with the reality that some wounds never truly heal
How did I miss the signs, I didn’t know they were for me, when did I lose track of that precarious moment my heart began to slip back
Into the hands of make believe, an unseen anomaly, a love that never alighted, an untamed burning fire, but I couldn’t smell the smoke
Was it real, was it only in my mind, ever pulling me away from the life I’ve denied to admit didn’t mean what I thought it did, Nothing makes me feel anymore, only unanswered questions and closing doors
Wish I could say that I had the kind of nobility to rebuild it all like then, that I knew where my heart was to dig it back up again
But motives speak now and then in their own languages- is there’s nothing at this journey’s end?
We are in the midst of these changing storms surrounding within, with no choice and no voice, only it’s not the storms that are shifting, its us.
But If you let go of everything and everyone, where do you go?
I’ve given up on life where there used to be a flame though
These words were adorned in red when we met, back when life still had some passion in it
but now glancing back in circles, I used to wonder where our hearts would land
Now it only hurts to know how the stories end
For there was a wolf that broke in and tore through my skin, stole all my hope and destroyed innocence, what is there left of what was, Nothing I can see but blood on its paws and my bleeding words in it’s jaws
As I fear we will never be the same again or never recognize any of the places that we’ve been, that you won’t remember my name or face within the silence that tries to take us all
Will I pull through and find something new to pursue and chase
Or is this the final fall from grace.
Free Write 12/10
Wish that I could find a way to say that I’m not afraid, skip formulating the lies, lay claim that I’m fine and okay
With all the change that seems to come my way now everyday
I can’t even breathe when my head feels more like a hurricane with every word they say
And the disguise is only exchanged for a different charade
Sober and awake with wide open eyes
But I can’t really say it doesn’t feel like my demise
Or that I don’t want to shut the world away again to keep it all outside,
Far removed and distant from the sight of my mind
find a place to hide and simply ride out the time
But that’s not the way we were meant to live life
Just playing the game, pretend that everything’s fine
Too long I’ve wasted just sitting on the sidelines
Waiting for a life that’s passing me by
But I feel exhausted, burned out, and all used up
Like nothing absolves the nagging feeling that it’s never enough
Compromising sanity of mind in striving to compensate for dropping every plate at the very same time
And I finally resigned to lie here and contemplate the silence
and I’m finding I was never designed to live inside this
Questioning myself now everyday how to best invest in the seconds that keep on slipping away
but how in do you expect me to ever Confidently decide
knowing that all to which I set off will be gone along with the tide
Do I lay hands to a task that will vanish into the sands
See it’s all vain pretense and I’ve had to abandon my only defense
Simultaneously in an agonizing state of defeat
Will there ever be restitution for all these mistakes I’ve had to reap
Is this the end or resolution
To admit I’m merely human
And I don’t really know what I’m doing
Confessedly I’ve been searching for a while for that missing person
Neglecting what’s right in front of these fake smiles, that it’s all written in these verses
Hidden right in plain sight and hitting on my off side
Didn’t want to face the light In perpetuating lies
That these new lines crossed on my palms are a constant reminder of the time that is gone
A disturbing souvenir of just how very precarious life is here
Another ultimatum how we always have to change to move and carry on
To Realize it’s just a moment we’re here and then we’re gone
Just another forgotten line in one of a million silent songs
I keep trying to grab and hold strong to scale the heights of this defeat in my mind
But maybe it’s time to see that I was wrong
Yet somehow can’t surmount the history I’ve left behind
Been looking at life through the rear view mirror
Vacillating between wanting to move forward or entirely disappear
but I’m still right here, and planned for the future but it fills me with fear
Tell me reality’s gonna come next for my name, Now that Ive already had to learn my lessons mostly the hardest way
Well they’re wrong but they’re right,
Because the more of the world to which I prescribe
My peace of mind getting harder to find
Acting As if they did me some kind of favor saying I couldn’t really stay there
In the castle I made
How do I learn to Savor everyday when I am a vapor made to evaporate
Now that I finally see what it’s like
Do I let go of these dreams or have I not yet truly seen the light
Thought I’d finally found the meaning for a moment of reprieve, And in the next I’m disbelieving and just wondering what it means
Thought I had what I wanted in the palm of my hand but I lost faith and I dropped it
And I just can’t understand
maybe I never learned my lesson at all, but I’ve had to count the cost
You never know just how far it is you have to fall until it’s yourself that you’ve lost
Fighting to Hold onto the memory of when some things still felt worthwhile safe or clean,
what it was like before we had to fake it with these weighted smiles
Back when I still felt like me
So God up in heaven, you know I’m sorry again, I guess I have come and gone full circle and it’s all just the same as it’s been, only in a different place with the same faulty headspace
Confident only that I’ve finally hit rock bottom
so won’t You come and show me, Jesus I need You to hold me
Show what to do, I need You to save my life again
Save me from myself and the hell I’ve been living in
I can never seem to let go, when I’m convinced I’m so sure of what I want, but I keep such a tight hold that I wreck it and watch it all come undone
I feel broken and tired, wrecked and burnt past the wire with no one to blame but me
I’ve been headed for a wall, don’t seem to know when or how to stop this, are you going to catch me when I fall
Or will everything shatter now that I’ve finally dropped it.
The Land of the Dead
Where do we go when the memories begin to fade and the feelings are being stolen from our heads
As I’m wandering here alone and afraid again in the land of the dead
After a thousand miles an hour, crashing to the ground
Fracturing every bone held together by semblance of countenance bound together by fragile threads
I fell from high above on pinions crafted from seasons of laboring tears blood and sweat
I tried to hide away the memories deep within amidst the death of me
And fostered the fortitude to attempt to fly out of the heart of this lesser darkness to finally move on in the search for something new
I did what I said I would, held onto my fight as long as I could, I searched out the magic in the places where they told me it had all but died
Where I once embraced the awe and unexplainable
Now I’m scared my spirit has been lost in a place inescapable
we once took upon the wings of the morning
We warred mightily for tomorrow and embraced the sweetest dreamings
And the best things I’d only scarcely glimpsed this side of a cruel existence
Where the strength of our convictions once compelled us to dance in the composition of symphonies
After having finally crafted my weapon to grace and defy faded grey skies and try to begin to believe again
I raised my hopes for the first time only to be cast down like Icarus from the sky
And Sisyphus himself must be laughing at my demise
Destined to a greying lifetime or will it be for eternity
to watch the paint chip from the rusting ships of our dreams
Pieces attrited away from the hope that I needed to keep trying each day
I’ve been lying here for months, watching the withered leaves fall from on the trees
Contemplating reasons and means to get up again, wondering what for
To walk, wander, and tread with heavy steps tormented by the haunting echos of the wings that are no more
All along I certainly would have crafted them again
But it’s not the same this time, in this wasteland I am alone with a heart that’s been dying
Wilting with the time that I just can’t accept is flying away
it feels like nothing is the same, as everything is destined to change, leaving me with only recollection’s embrace
And a foreign distant wind incessantly whispering “never again”
My throat is dry, my voice fading weak, I’ve lost track of Your voice that once was calling me
Beckoning me out, directing my steps and covering my transgressions
Neck deep in doubt, been in over my head,
Ears growing deaf, and I have too many questions
having run to the edge of the map and found only familiar sadness
only to be hurled back into a different black abyss
Where understanding is peeled back to reveal that I never understood what the words truly meant
The endless prose and songs characterizing the human lament
Caught by the pursuing fear that I fabricated every sign and naively ignored the final warning
Before these days befell that no more sings as the eve, does the morning
There is no utterance to express the pain of the no more’s that I knew not then were to ensue
To this place where no one is listening
And nothing can be mended new
Where the loudest of voices with which I could call in my plight
is short to reach the heights from which escapists and star- gazers plummet from flight
And there found my heart devastated into irreparable shards of glass
Cutting my hands in trying to grasp and piece them back together into something that can make sense
There’s nothing here that I can understand
and I feel like I failed in the end
Am I now too to be forsaken to this land where all living are grasped by the slipping sands
and eventually descend
into disremembrance’s working hands
Who is left to see and perceive
And who is left to compose a score
When no one seems to have reason to believe in anything anymore
In This barren wandering place my mind and spirit are shrouded by confusion and a reflecting fear
I can’t remember who I am or retrace the descent that left me here
One would suppose I had too wild an untamed imagination for such a planet as this
For I never did get to see the pieces fit
And it seems that I can no longer save myself
God I really need Your help
For only You know where to find
The hearts that have been hardened and hidden away with the time
Oh God, I never thought that it would begin to take mine
Continue to call out to me through the mud and mire climbing higher around me
Remind me who I am and reignite the fire, for only You know how to reach me
Amidst the cacophony of voices resounding
I’m so sorry I lost my grip and slipped further down than where I’d been back then
Conflicted and struggling to regain lost ground
Lost out here in the land of the dead.
9.19
What is left of the hope we embraced and the magic we imagined back then
that kept us motivated and coming back for it
Is everything we believed in back then always shattered in the end
As the histories evanesce with the hours and are replaced of seemingly no consequence
We live in our heads, building callous towers against our own brothers and flesh
And call it a new path of vision or perception
But go back and ask the kid we all eventually neglect and forget
How were most all broken and afraid just in equivocally different ways
Is all the weight I feel and think these days simply par for the course
you can’t make it drink you can only bring water to the horse
Because every man is right in his own discourse
will every ally fall away with the time
Shall every alliance betray, friend and companion change and divide
Will all vision dim and cognition collapse upon the whim
Will lovers and dreamers endlessly disappear amidst the wanderings of sin
Will I have to sever ties and burn all these bridges forever until the end of time
Searching for something that doesn’t exist as the plots dissolve indiscernible and disintwine
in this new universe where everything exhumed now only hurts
As the walls collapse and my heart has been turned back and broken in ways and places I never could have imagined would happen
I would do anything to make it the way it was back then
And we tried to run away but the sands keep receding from beneath us
And slipping through our well- intentioned grasp
Sands that held the memory of what it was like before we learned to develop masks
Back when we could still sense something to believe in
When we were so convinced our hopes and dreams were reasonable achievements
Can’t we just keep on running away and never stop until eternity finds us again
I feel it’s claws everyday and it’s teeth are finally sinking in
And the tragedy is in the way it often inevitably makes us grow so numb
I don’t want to have think it’s true what they say that the only disease were really suffering from
is the eternal Haunting of Eden
Beneath the same old sun
So I set out on a journey just yearning to fill in these spaces to prove myself wrong
But in this present space it’s disturbing the possibility that I was correct all along
From the onset, when these days it sure seems it’s been seen said and done
And I hate the way we’re never allowed to need anyone
can you really medicate the pain of reality
striving to Sell me all the medications they say I’ll need
After time cut out my heart made me the monster I can never control now it seems
When it left one too many scars and took an irrevocable bite out of me
What do you do when the warrior loses their fight
when the blackbird disremembers her flight
Because too long a season ago I arrived at this impasse but now I don’t really know Where to go or how long its gonna last
Because for most of my life
I knew where my center was and how to get myself back up
But I just can’t seem to reignite the fire that Once burned a fiercer light, About to lay down my armor and retire tonight
Tired of the fight and so ashamed to say
How I’ve failed You now
I’ve lost track of the narrative and I’m losing my faith
I know life isn’t easy or fair but I thought I was finally going to catch a break
I don’t know what to do next and feel like I’ve run out of strength
People want to say I’m not trying my best
But we have never walked a day
In eachothers shoes
It always seems okay When it isn’t You
They always said that it gets better but I can’t seem to live these dark days down
That have settled in again and my passion is nowhere to be found Maybe I don’t want to just burn the book forget the past and skip to the end
Some want to call their lives a story but keep erasing the pen
No I don’t want to forget, I embrace where I’ve been
And I’d been been fanning the embers in Chasing redemption
But lately I can’t even remember who I am
Or was it was I thought You said
You always said I was a fighter But I’ve acquired all this doubt and regret
This year I’ve been drowning up to my neck
With nothing to hold onto, tell me whose hands are you going to grab to pull you through
When everyone is struggling in the same ocean as you?
8.18
Wish that I didn’t always feel so conflicted within
A battlefield I fear that there is no win
And the present situation seems to be getting more dim
Despite punching out the windows
just trying to let some light in
Think I’ve got my mind made up, that I finally see a ray of sun
Resolve for a minute, Next day my conviction’s gone
I’ve been passively living in a perpetual division
Is there actually no real correct decision
Or if there is, would I really even care to be informed
Searching for sign of a hope I’m scared doesn’t exist anymore
As I’m holding my breath, questioning every step
Second guessing my path
Do I go right or stay left
The evident truth and I locked in a match
As Im wrestling to the death
Trying to battle my way back again
Voices multiplying filling up my head
With loaded suggestions
It shows I’ve been regressing
As if I don’t Know it
That I can’t locate my Focus
Will the world out there ever stop pressing in on me
Infecting with heavy care of the same precedented disease
Or will I be scared and restless as this for the rest of eternity
Reconsidering all I’ve believed on continual repeat
Will I create a means to make peace if it turns out to be
My purpose remains still so uncertain to me
Are my efforts concerted enough to bring the turn that I need
Will giving my best ever measure up
Am I being tested or did I mess my life up
I just want myself back and a world that I recognize
the person I had and been for all my life
Not just what they taught to me
God on high there’s got to be
something
How can the right thing feel so wrong
And I can’t take a deep breath
how can the straight path leave me feeling so off and empty in my chest
What is it that has to be done, to feel like me again
to get rid of the numb, don’t know where the hell I’ve been
Passion gone missing in an apathetic prison
I’ve too long been stranded and just running with the crowd
I can’t fucking stand it I just want to get out
Find a high place to run at my own pace rediscover my faith
In some place other than the black abyss
Never hated it more down here in the darkness
I just swallow the fear and suppress all my emotions
praying for something to be clear amidst a mess of endless motions
God I’ve gotta break through
But I don’t know what else to do
At the end of my rope while watching everything around
seems like I’m always alone when the terror surrounds and then comes crashing down
On me
remind me that my heart still beats
before it kills me
But everything real feels
the next agonizing pill
Is every necessary attenuation
Only the very next change To try not to hate
And Realization
that’ll keep me up at night in new ways
haven’t gotten much shut eye in a few days
Which dragged on into weeks and then months
Why Is it sadness and peace seem synonymous
Will I have to give up and quit
Simply stop with being honest
Will I be choked out and sickened by
this Silence of pretense
I’d rather hold my ground and go down swinging and screaming
This won’t be my end
Maybe I’ll never really get rid of this anxious feeling in my gut and chest again
Maybe life was always only found in death
And There’s Such a big part of me that’s already dead
Maybe we’re never really ready
so tell me God
Where are we going next?
8.1 free write
Been trapped living on the edge of a knife, Seems that the only decision is a kind of death or Die
When it feels like there will be no getting out Alive
Not the same person that I was before, Afraid I’ve become a monster of some form
don’t know what to do but to say Your name out loud
If There ever was a day I’ve needed You
Jesus it’s now
As my universe feels like it’s crumbling all around
You say it’ll be OK but why does it get harder to believe every passing day
Have I lost my faith
Even the hope for a love that could mean something to me
seems so far away it’s barely even a memory
I don’t know what I want, don’t know where I belong I would ask where exactly did I go wrong but would I really want to know
We always keep moving forward because we don’t really have a choice
Fight not to be bitter for it but seems every turn of the story merely disappoints
I feel like everything I’ve tried so hard to protect has been torn right out of my chest and replaced with this awful empty bitterness
Jesus please hold on to me, to the spirit that I’ve misplaced
In a world I can’t escape I keep on burying away
the heart I need to be me but can never keep safe
So hold onto me and don’t let me go when I can feel myself slipping away
honestly it’s getting harder to see where this is all going
All my life they’ve told me You’re always on my side, but I feel if you knew my secret battles You might change Your mind
Most days it’s felt like you’re all I’ve ever had, because I know people just don’t understand
kind of hard to see eye to eye when we all have our own lives inside our minds
Why is it when I try to find the words to say I just sit there in silence as if I can’t explain
All these problems I can’t fix but can’t efface or leave behind
It’s all so fucked up and I can’t erase these lines
But if i try to talk about it a panic riots inside
How can 1000 thoughts and feelings scream so loud
but when it come to revealing, words just don’t come out
Sentences always seemed so weak and in vain
but they’re all that we’ve got
While waiting here in between
The life we used to have, who we used to be, and the reality now
we can’t escape, it comes crashing down everyday
Words just barely scratch the surface and right now aloud they sound so worthless
When I know this, I’ve rehearsed it, all the verses heard in churches
Seems like nothing is working and the one thing for certain is everything hurting and my heart’s grown too heavily laden with burden
Because scholarly comprehension is no comfort or friend
wish I could reverse nearly all the knowledge I’ve procured upon the earth
Unlearn and somehow return
Erase my memory so I could maintain the belief there’s a life I could work to create
where not everything has to hurt, not everything is made to break
But I can’t find a truth these days that doesn’t immerse my soul in a new kind of pain
A stone dry desert rarely renewed by soothing rain
Because something in me died that day
A part of me died that night
The moment a thousand shards of truth shattered everything I’ve held onto in life
And I hate how people talk like that’s a great thing
to be devastated by such a painful sting
So most of the time lately I can’t feel anything
but this fear that’s always talking in my ear And I’m trying to stop listening
But it’s mostly all that I can hear
Now whenever I have an emotion, I just push it back down
pretend not to notice the colors fading into the background
negative emotions I ignore and repress
Tell myself my feelings don’t matter
until I have another breakdown and put my fists through the mirror as it shatters
Just throw my feelings in the trash bin then wonder why my mind is such a fucking mess
continue to speculate as to why I have no peace inside
Afraid that the only time I feel better is when I’m believing a lie
And In the fleeting moments of clarity between trying to keep my head above the waves of chaos and despair I see
it’s so scary to me to see the severity of just how far away I’ve drifted from the world I need
And the disparity between who I am now and who I used to be
and how numb I’ve become to everyone
And everything that once mattered to me
It’s so funny I bet everyone thinks I’m doing fine, but truth be told I’ve never felt so close to suicide
Seems like everything I do or try
just falls through and breaks
then merely for ironies sake rises back from the dead just to blow up in my face
So It’s no big secret I don’t really know how to appeal or relate
to the world outside
when I feel like I never really had a normal life
What it’s been like would be kind of difficult to explain
to anybody who even cared to listen a little bit
because no one was there For most of it
I’m really starting to reflect back at my past and wonder what I could’ve done different
But I guess it’s pointless to ask
When it probably wouldn’t make a difference
So I’m sorry that I let You down
I let me down too
I keep searching for the details to try and talk all of this out but they just get lost in the screaming static of the background
And I don’t really want to let go this time because I’m tired of changing.
June 3rd Free Write
I had to forsake who I am somewhere far behind here
but every once in a while there are surreal, little reminders
Of who I used to be, and it’s so disturbing to me
How seldom we speak or I even see her anymore;
that I used to be me everyday,
But I haven’t noticed her around since the moment she finally went away
But what scares me the most is that there’s no one left here who knows how to find her or the ghost
Who might know where she’s gone
The heart I’ve had to put to death in order to move on
I died in smallest increments and then suddenly all at once
When I finally admitted that theres no Intrinsic Significance in anything or one
So I’ve been making moves and going through every motion
Even when it feels useless and not showing any emotion
So I’m sick of people coming to me to say they’re glad I finally got it together
Because you don’t know me, there’s so much of my life no one is ever going to see
And I don’t open up the way I once did so readily
We’ve all got our burdens we weather
So don’t think for a minute that it isn’t as heavy, I just carry it better
When I’m bent on a vendetta to settle the score
To get back at the devil for all the years he stole and played me for
But when I feel this new pull it can seem impossible
not to let the rage take the wheel
because you lose the game the moment you start to feel
But it’s the only emotion I’ve got left at all
I’ve bloodied my fists through every wall
Giving it more than I’ve got to give and my very best
But it seems it’s never enough and life’s just a giant test
I used to cut myself to learn to be in control and deal with pain better
Now reality just does it for me
cutting into me with laughter
It carved me stronger, colder, and faster
than ever before
I feel that every day I’m becoming nearer to a person that I said I would never be
because every day there’s a stranger trapped in the mirror staring back at me
Every day I’m seeing the world differently and hating it
it’s making me sick because I can’t bear the weight of It
Seems like every day life keeps getting harder I swear
and I’m so tired of all the scars I’ve been forced to wear
I keep moving forward and paste on a fake stupid smile and it’s more than I can take but it’s been that way for a while
I wish so badly I could pour out my heart to You How I always used to before
Problem with that is it seems I can’t find it anymore
And I need it so much right now I would give up the world
Just to feel alive inside peace like I did when I was a girl
Now I’m more than scared to let go of the questions in my mind
Terrified I’ll find after all The fight it’s only the truth that I’ve left behind
Is there no comfort in the truth
Can you forgive me
If I can no longer hold on,
Not to me or you
If I can’t keep pretending my mind isn’t trapped in just a different form of war
As steel clasped lips pull me further down into the silence
crushing in my spirit and bones
Where wisdom and understanding have merely confiscated my hope
Beneath the weight of a broken world
Can you forgive me if I finally fall apart
stop pushing away ignoring the fact that I can no longer feel our hearts
Not yours or mine
My universe crashing down on me tonight
I’ve run out of reasons to lie
Because I’m not alright
And all memories seem so distant and cold
Is the search over, decay weighing heavy on our shoulders
They say it’ll be okay but I can’t contrive a way
And I’m so sorry
Can you forgive me if I finally let go
If I finally have fallen apart and lost my will and hope
Oh God hold on to me
When I’m so sorry
God hold on to me
Because I don’t know where I left me and I’ve finally given up.
5.6
You met me in a state that I never should’ve been
Raging angry misfit
my head already caving in again
Never should’ve opened up or let anyone in
selling my own heart again with every inch of skin
Because it’s hard to wrap my soul around what little there is left
how can you be so cold
when I felt it beating in your chest
You said
“Don’t lose yourself in a world that’s bound to use and sell you
Well
I’d lie that I could help
Just let me break you in first”
Was anything you said true
Or used on everyone you knew
Sycophantic
I won’t stand it
Push me to the edge again
Just make sure you understand
We’re not the same kind in the end
Not a speck of you on my skin
Just a mistake I won’t make again
I wish that I could say I feel surprised
but I’ve reached a new place of numb inside
I’m trying to compensate for something I can’t hide
I would use you all the same
But I’m just a nameless face in your eyes
I’m not an animal
I’m so much more
I’m not an animal
Heart mind spirit scars soul
You’re not an animal
But you’re crawling on all four
You’re not an animal
So what are you selling yourself for
It makes sense that
abused becomes abuser
You’re just another user
I know your kind
dozen a dime
I’ll have you drawn and
outlined
Say that you’re here to help me learn
But listen clear it’s my turn
You say I’m jaded, I wonder why
With people like you to prove me right
Every day
I guess everything they said’s true
You’re all the same it’s nothing new
Sycophantic, one night stand- in
But I can’t feel a damn thing
Deceive me just to stay the night
And leave before the daylight
Good luck explaining this one to your girlfriend
The one you told me about after you played me for the weekend
So good riddance I hope you had your fun
Because I’m not your fucking toy
I’m a loaded gun
Wish that I could say I ever feel surprised
But I’ve reached a new level of numb inside
In a world so unbearably dumb, cut and dry
Nothing ever matters
You don’t care about me
And that’s fucking fine
Because
I’m not an animal
I’m so much more
I’m not an animal
Heart mind spirit scars soul
You’re not an animal
But you’re crawling on all four
You’re not an animal
So what are you selling yourself for
I never should have trusted anyone
Now there’s just one thing left to do
When I keep setting my bar lower and lower
But you hit your head hard drunk or sober
I’m not buying all the sweet talk and bullshit that you fed
You had your shot and missed me
Your whiskey only mixes with regret
A thousand lines I’ve left unsaid- But like everything else- it doesn’t matter at all
So thanks for nothing asshole.
Fragments 4.2
Drifting like a satellite,
floating farther and farther away
You know I didn’t mind the once upon a time when it was only you and I, with the world locked outside,
Because there’s nothing new under the sun, it’s all been said and done
and everyone looks the same in my eyes
In my eyes we’re trapped in the light of the truth
I’d never felt so alone and without use
Never hungered so much for something I couldn’t admit
I would only discover didn’t exist
Even back when I had a heart
that didn’t vilify love, everything and everyone
When I could still feel all the things we dreamed up
Now all I find is the tiny bit of something in everyone I’ve fought to ignore
And a whole lot of the nothing I wasn’t searching for
I’ve never felt so disinterested and bored with life and the world
Wishing I could claim I feel I’m where I belong
In this line of a billion fading faces
Who all want to be someone
Only to confess that I feel worthless, that I serve absolutely no purpose,
When we’ve all got similar labels branding us purchased
Another invisible cog in the same old machine
A single drop in an ocean of shifting scenery,
Assigning identity and meaning
In our jobs, our dogs, the vehicles we obtain
Innately dismantled and easily replaced
pretending not to notice
That It never does feel the same
But they still repeat we’re each invaluable and unique in our own way,
but most all I thought mattered to me is no longer here today
So yeah sure, that’s great
I simply don’t want to see another face
Is this the great unobtainable goal
The end result of becoming whole-
To feel nothing at all
No conviction, no impulse, no impetus to take control
Or to paint a temperament red again
Just to feel something other than silent and reticent
because who really gives a damn
When it’s not them
Know I have to break free of this apathy,
but it’s sad to see it just isn’t passing really
What happened to me, I can’t feel a damn thing
Say we’re all interconnected, simple as that we can relate and are all scared
But it’s like no matter what anybody does or says
I can’t seem to believe that anyone really cares
Or perhaps it’s simply that we threw that word around far too easily
Just like the word love, say it all day but it doesn’t mean what it used to be
No, not to me
And now today I can walk away far too effortlessly
Now standing in the crowd it’s like rubbing mud all over my skin
that just never washes clean no matter what or where or when
I try to convince myself that I can make my escape from the world
But they just keep on talking, advising, repeating every quote they were told
Proclaimed from the rooftops and nailed on every door
Everybody knows it but i don’t want to hear it anymore
There’s not a single thing you can say that hasn’t been a billion times before
I’d be lying if I claimed the retrograde wasn’t more appealing
Than the million truths pushing the blade in, teaching with wounds that there is no healing
Some times I feel surrounded by a bunch of sociopathic zombies
Telling me if you ever get attached to anyone or thing that the problems is on me
But no,
Some just eventually grow so cold hearted
They don’t even notice or remember where it all started
They look down on people who simply believe what they’re told
And call them sheep eating the meat that they’re sold
by the Internet, the TV set,
Or by the lust of the eyes
but can’t even see the noose laced around their own neck,
won’t even notice until it’s too late for regret
And we want every single second of the only drugs left we get- that are always sold by usury to begin with
But we most all simply create different deceptions to distract our minds
And now it’s altogether worthless in my eyes
I don’t want Heaven or earth
But don’t want Hell either
But are we truly all the same
When there are too many animals for my taste
Who don’t even know what love is when it smacks them in the face
Too busy chasing after a little cash, tits and ass
To me it will never cease to amaze
The vapidity of humankind
Who never knew depth or true magic
But Twist to death in the nets of carnal distraction
And now I can finally see it’s the same grave I allowed you to dig in me
Said I’d never let you in
I’ll never let them in
But the best we have to give’s no longer genuine
Not To me
And now I can see
What I’ve denied all along
That The only comfort in this world is in the lies
And if it feels so wrong,
It’s probably what I should have done all along
Because they’ll never care the way that I did
Before my heart went cold
Before my strength and spirit caved in and I became another product of the eternally conspiring mold
words always fell short and they don’t a change a thing
The beginning is the end, and the end is the start, so just erase the middle- it was a waste of a childish heart
So here’s to a thousand new starts with old broken parts
They say to hold on to nothing so I just tore out my heart
You can’t erase the rage that burns in tomorrow’s wings
So I’m letting you go, you and everything I know
Now to waste myself down this road and now
I’m finally gone.
My Confession
Someone once said there is a certain obtainable measure of freedom simply in confessing wrongs and what haunts your mind and spirit. Here I am finally desperate enough to claim the shreds of peace that come with admitting and letting go of some of the guilt and expectation of who I should be- to confess some of what I fear I’ve become. So for the sake of brevity let’s forgo spotless grammar and punctuation and I’ll simply speak freely until the allotted hour run out.
I’ll never forget the day I finally stepped outside her body- the first time I stared back at her, and I *hated* her. I loathed her for being so so naïve, so good, innocent, forgiving, and full of light. I hated her all the more for having faith in so much but truly comprehending the true nature of so little. I hated her for being too weak to make anything better of her life or herself, rather than wait for life to get better while it passed me by. But most, I hated her for the lies that in her naivety were permitted to grow up inside; and in their maturity destroy what would have been left of my soul.
I made a particular note of the last days, the last moments that I was able to consciously see through eyes of a blindingly childish faith and nobility; the moment I closed the casket on the part of myself that I’ve been in denial of its death. But I still am terrified I will eventually forget what it was like to ever feel safe, sure, innocent, or free- that I’ll forget in place of the inescapable progression of life. But in my present mind perhaps I’ve finally laid that person to rest, and if this happens to be the last time I can bring myself to write for an unspecified period of time, let it be to confess fragments of the transpiry that led me to lose the drive to write in poetic measure.
After a journey of more mistakes than a life should already hold at my age- I presently conclude that if something makes you feel anything strongly compelling or seemingly indisputable, that it is likely your god; That the reality of feeling that exist in the real world of proudly sober ascetics, I find to actually be so subtle it’s difficult to find at all, save for the sole influence of suggestion possibly creating the feeling that an otherwise honest person might deem nonexistent. But evidently human perspective never mattered at all, and all to say that if you’re really looking for it you can find meaning in nearly anything, everything, or everyone; as long as the personal narrative remains consistent. And so I searched in every corner of both the imagined and the simple world for where or what I might convince myself my conscious devotion lies in. Yet I found so little feeling or conviction in all of the truths I found, that in making no decision I consequently chose to take the wide path- and entirely forego the road that had once been destined for me. Now I wonder if it’s too late, if it ever will be the same that it could’ve been. Now I realize the blood that is on my hands is the blood of a world that didn’t need one more uselessly angry, jaded, broken soul, and the blood on my hands is also mine.
Now finally beginning to come in to any measure of wisdom mature enough to understand the true resolution of any of these matters, I somehow put up walls that not only can other people not breach, but I don’t even know how to scale these walls I put up To keep myself out. I’ve locked out the words and I no longer feel or find any inspiration in such a cut and dry world. I know that the purpose of life is to love God, love others, and be loved. Whatever the hell that means. I’ve fallen in love a few times in my life, and once loved with all of my heart. But as wonderful as it may have felt for some time, it was love that taught me not to believe in love. And it was people who taught me not to trust people. So the platonic love that remains is what I believe to be purely an action independent of any feelings had or not had; and I’m here to confess that I no longer believe that love is some great driving force in the universe. I don’t even know that to me it exists beyond some esoteric concept that everyone is convinced of but is actually terribly difficult to feel. I could almost be inclined to say that desire is one of the strongest feelings in life, but just like everything else it leaves you unsatisfied because it’s merely a shard of the broken remnants of what love could have been. Awful as it may sound aloud, I can’t see myself ever loving someone again- not only because I don’t ever desire to experience that kind of misery again, But it was never something that easily happened naturally for me. Not without the repetitive, intrinsic fallout and the marring of my perspective of everyone around me when it imminently ends in flames again. So now I’m just like what I hoped to never be, numb. Another stupid fucking nobody in a sea of 8 billion sinking faces, and I don’t want to see another face. I don’t need anyone’s measured sympathy, as it doesn’t change anything and I probably wouldn’t believe that you cared anyways. But I suppose the word care in itself is incredibly subjective. Maybe I just cared too much and am finally landing somewhere in the middle of a place that now seems like apathy to me but is really just how it was supposed to be all along.
Perhaps for far too long in my life I have relied on feelings to decide what was real or important to me. And for what seems like the first time in my recollection, I don’t feel much. And ironically enough, that scares the shit out of me. Maybe there was a very particular moment that I decided to shut off my heart or to begin to believe that no one really cares that much. All I have is the evidence for of friendship after relationship after friendship that ultimately point to the same suspicion that either something is fucking wrong with me or we’re all looking for something that doesn’t exist. And unfortunately at this point in my life I think that love is a waste of my time and I don’t want to waste any more of my life on it. As wrong as that statement may sound, why fall for the trap of marriage or the imminent decline of that hopeful next relationship when you finally both reach the point of realizing that you’re all too human and eventually refusing to admit to yourself that your eyes start to wander no matter how wonderful you convince yourself it was at the start. Prove me wrong, show me a couple that stayed together and I’ll show you infidelity in the next. I’ll show you the 30-years-married pastor who struggles with pornography. I’ll show you the wife cheating on her husband, and I’ll show you the wayward eyes who have found but are still looking, on any block of the city. I know this is going to come across very abrasively to probably anyone who reads this- but I doubt anyone will- as honestly this post is for me. This is for me to get off of my chest all the things that have been rotting inside and tearing me apart for all too long, that I haven’t had the courage to say in hopes that maybe afterwards they won’t hold so much power over me. Or maybe they will, I don’t know.
It’s funny because I’ve been a Christian since I was a kid old enough to understand, and in my truest heart of hearts I’ve walked in it and I believe it, and I still do. But for the very first time in my life I feel a silent, deep- seated disillusionment with my faith. I feel anger at the things that I know are true, anger at the things that aren’t true, and furthermore a vague, equivocally unjustifiable distain for the entire world. In fact, if hate and apathy are remotely anywhere in the same vein, I can go so far as to say that on some days lately I hate the world. You get to know enough people to finally realize that 95% of people are essentially the same, And I very well may fall in that larger category myself, as who can say what their opinion matters in this day and age? I could venture to say that I am bored to death with the inhabitants of this city, or perhaps I’m just trying to create a defense mechanism against that unshakable belief that I’ve now come to terms with in recognition that everyone cares, but no one cares. We most all care a little, but let’s be honest, unless it’s your own mother – assuming you had good parents- how much does anyone truly care about something that isn’t about them. And the amount that I used to invest and care about others, it seems like a waste of my time. It seems like a waste of my energy. Maybe that person is still somewhere in there, in fact I know she is. The occasional uninvited song on the radio reminds me of that fact, But I don’t know when or how I’ll be able to find her again because I don’t really believe in too much of anything. I guess deep down that’s something we all want- something to believe in- something to feel anything special at all. Other than the faded resignations we often find growing in various areas of our lives eventually. I know that there is a one true God, that He hears and He loves us- but if I’m honest I don’t really know what that means. As God knows I’ve turned my back on Him in countless instances- As I’m always running after what I think will make me happy, or at least save my ass from my biggest fears- but at the end of the day I know that He is all I have, Regardless of how I feel about it in the moment. And I’ll admit that’s very uncomfortable for me, as I feel surrounded by people who are far more proficient than me at acting as if the reality of a state of constant decay in the universe is not real. And I wish it were not. I wish that I could say I still felt the same, that I could still see anything the same. But I’ll admit that everything that mattered to me in life eventually starts to break. Everything that made me feel something eventually shows itself for what it is – another selfish byproduct of a broken, grasping world.
In addition to transient feelings of intense distain for the world- not with the intention of ill or harm being done upon it- but absolute apathy, I won’t be reticent to admit that I oftentimes hate myself for being a part of it. Maybe I’m just a part of the problem, but I didn’t used to feel this way. I pray that God will lead, guide, and direct my life regardless of my now lack of conviction. However it would be a lie to say that I had absolutely no idea as to the events that caused the beginning of the shift in my belief system or universal paradigm. I suppose I could be terribly cliché and go all the way back to over analyzing myself and an irrelevant history of relationships that essentially always proved the same things. That nearly everything happens on the inside, but all we can see is the outside, and no words are ever going to translate the world that lives inside each of us, that will never be felt or seen. And if you have any subjective thought whatsoever, it is simply part of being human.
Admittedly there are some people in my life that I don’t know how to come to complete forgiveness with, though I know that the fault is almost entirely my own. The fault was mine the moment I began to believe that anyone was more than simply a passing character in stories that overlap for a short period of time. That no one and nothing stays. The fault was mine the second I started to believe that anyone’s intentions could be anything more than appropriately distant and detached. I know that none of us are alone, but we all are. And like many, I’ve felt alone nearly my entire life, as I’m just like every other person I’m sure- on some level hungry for a relationship deeper than you could find anywhere. That I’m too often locked up inside my own mind, and most people are entirely incapable of the type of emotional intimacy that space in all of us demands. I struggle to see a point in relationships if this is all there is in the universe. That I am and you are possibly so much more than The few words we can use to try and convey the state of what’s on the inside of our lives that no one sees. Maybe I’ll feel alone til the day I die. Especially if I can’t figure out how to work through being so jaded and disillusioned the humans on the planet for no particular reason other than that we’re all chasing after the same drugs in different ways, or escape from the reality only to throw each other out when the high wears off. And maybe I’ll become just like that. Altogether worthless.
And as much as I know all of the answers in the clichés, that we are all infinitely valuable, by the evidence of my actions I don’t believe it. I feel worthless, like I have no purpose in the universe, and If the purpose of life is only to love and be loved, then there is no purpose in life And I’ve finally figured it all out. Call it a trivial existential crisis. The place inside that once used to be filled with so much goodness and beauty, and a desire to do better than the world I saw- I can’t find it today. In fact I sit in the church pew struggling to not feel like I hate every person in the room for being so readily submissive and naïve and acting like a bunch of golden retrievers. And I admit that I feel trapped in a world between golden retrievers and devils- but one bores the hell out of me and the other disgusts me. So funny considering my upbringing in the Christian faith that I’ve upheld my entire life. How can I call myself a Christian and have all of this going on inside of me? How can I feel like God’s people are retrievers And suddenly asking myself if I really want to be like that? I’ve always felt like a black sheep, like I didn’t belong in the church, like in my heart I didn’t really draw true peace or joy or contentment there. But I still believe it’s the truth regardless of my feelings raging war against it. For the good qualities that you believed I possessed were indeed there, but so much more. but somehow I allowed lies of there being something out there in the universe more than the subtle nothingness that I felt, and it destroyed me. This world is so much harder than they told us it would be, and burdens and pains we feel don’t have much place for words. And this world is so much less than I had imagined or hoped it would be. I see a bunch of simple humans running programs and necessarily being chronically occupied with how to make a living, and most calling it life.
Probably everyone feels alone inside, but we are all here alone together; though each one is made to walk a path largely unseen by anyone but themselves and God .I wish I could say that that made me feel better, But here we all are regardless of how anything makes me feel. I don’t know where I’m going in life after this, not to say that this blog was an entirely accurate summation of my life, but I don’t know At this point if I will be able to continue to use this space as a way to vent- to express the things I wouldn’t tell the people proximally closest to me in life- Because despite all the good intentions we may find, you always talked over me, and you never understood me. You didn’t know what to do with me when I became so sad at such a young age, and it felt like there wasn’t anyone else around who cared to listen as much as I needed to talk. And I have no idea why.
I don’t deeply trust anyone. I don’t particularly like anyone when sometimes I don’t even like myself. And that’s okay- that’s where I’m at right now.But I’m finally trying to do life, and I’m no longer going to try and justify what I want to do, to anyone. I will become everything that I was and so much more again. But not today. I am not the hate that dwells inside me, and I am not the hurt that follows me around- because I was never the type to ever forget. I may not be able to make amends with everything in my mind, and some things may remain feeling eternally unfinished to me. I’m just as fucked up as I always was, and so are you. But For now I have to try to make my own way for that to be as okay as possible. Maybe no one out there can understand how you or I feel or just how intense it is when the angry feelings come around now and then, But if that’s the only feelings I have right now, I’m fine with it. The next chapter of my life is beginning and I’m trying my best to embrace it, but I’m more terrified than I’ve ever felt in my life, though I’ve probably said that before.
There are a couple people out there that I have to confess I can’t seem to come to peace with in my mind. Maybe you are part of the reason that I hate the world, and myself. I hate myself for the damage that I can’t heal, for the truths that came from the many lies I believed in that I now can never erase. It was my fault the moment I chose to trust anyone but God. It was my fault for ever getting attached to anyone. I’ve lived most of my life with the subconscious policy of always being able to walk away from anyone. But there have been a few instances in my life that completely wrecked me inside, and changed me in a way that you will never know how deeply. And I will never know precisely why or be able to explain what happened. Maybe they were vital in making me the person that I needed to be to survive in a world that I think is either insipid or shallow and perverted.. Maybe it’s just the hurt and anger I needed to propel me to where I was always supposed to be. As the cliches say, a bad ass bitch that will never be influenced or hurt by anyone again. I realize that’s a terrible and a wonderful place to be in, albeit a lonely place, but that’s fine too- It’s where I’m at right now. A place of realizing that it’s okay to feel sad and angry after doing the right thing.
I admit that I wrestle everyday with forgiving you and myself, and I don’t know why. But in my heart I believe I’m the one to blame for the loss of feeling and so many things I don’t know how to restore. Again I feel an inexpressible contempt and disconsolation at the fact that everything that makes you feel in life, is wrong. And the right doesn’t make me feel much at all. But once upon a time It once used to seem that there was magic in the world- Or maybe that’s just the poet in me still trying to live. Perhaps part of what caused this strange relationship to have changed me so profoundly is that you were one of the first people I can remember actually making me *feel* loved instead of just saying it, which is easy. Because people have always been a quick to say it, as though remotely giving a crap about someone must be love, or that knowing someone is really knowing them. and I’ve heard words from many men, that didn’t mean anything and I’ve wondered how much the word love even means to me anymore. I feel like relationships taught me in some subtle way that no one is really that important, interesting, or special; not to me and nor am I to anyone else, not anymore. And I know that’s incredibly fucked up, but it’s the truth, and I’m here to try to say it.
I’m sorry for any emotional pain I may have caused you, it was never my intention to deceive you, and I never tried to put up a front that’s was someone I wasn’t. I don’t know if there’s any such thing as meant to be- God knows I truly wish there were- But I just don’t know What I believe in anymore. Maybe I don’t believe in anything on this planet, which isn’t a difficult destination to arrive at. Now to deal with the hurts that I can’t explain and the things I can’t find the words for, Most every time I have a feeling I find myself throwing it away, in silent favor of feeling nothing. But whenever I do have a twinge of emotion, I find that there is so, so much more that I could’ve said; That I wanted to say.
I have to confess that I still struggle with thinking that people who can be entirely happy in this broken world are either incredibly simple people, or simply incredibly stupid. There are so many more profound feelings to experience in existence beyond the happiness and “surrender” Self-help is chronically trying to sell, when once this was a world where all of the nightmares were merely the things we feared would happen, but rarely ever came to pass. And then things start to happen to you in life- things that in your deepest heart of hearts you never could have believed would happen to you, so you never saw them coming. Losses and sobriety that leave a hole that never fills in, against all logic and against all the things that we can acquire for ourselves in this world, against all the actions we can choose to make. Silently, irreparably destroyed perspectives From things that we believed mattered, only to find scarcely mattered in the end. Only to find that many of the mundane things we overlooked hold all the meaning in the universe, but even having found and knowing this- I still can’t feel a thing. I stand in the position of finally letting go of everyone and I’ve never been so strong as to be out of harms way by the disappointing realization of each of our humanity. I’m so sorry if I wasn’t the person you thought I was, sorry that my compassion wasn’t inexhaustible; that I’m probably even more afraid than you are. All the knowledge in the world is no friend of ours- for what I wouldn’t give to be able to see through eyes that believed in everything but understood nothing.
I’m not really sure of a good way to end this, all I know is that I have to be done running away from the truth, because I’ve already lapped the planet six times. But I’m here, I’m sober, and I fucking hate everyone- well, except like three people.
-The Calling Crow
12.1
A thousand faded thoughts but I can barely speak a word
I can’t piece them back together
All the pages that I burned,
Volumes of what I would have, should have, potentiated to say, an innumerable treasury simply washed away today
All my motivation, my intentions and emotions lie in idle disrepair
Once scattered across the floors and lining the maze of halls, now I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but for the very first time I recall
I can’t feel anything at all.
The feeling of nothing stays longer than I can bear, neither remembering what was forged nor forgotten, but only more vain perpetual distractions all simply leading nowhere
In denial of the ever revolving unrequition buried in my mind, as if everyone is in on a secret that was never disclosed to my eyes
And chance is I’ve finally given up on love, so what else is there to do, when the most important thing in the universe always leaves you searching for someone new
Aware that most often love it resides solely in the most mundane of places and faces where it can seem most dissonant and scarce of consequence to the senses,
Or taken for foolish granted, such that when it’s wanted, it’s no longer there to make amends with
So I strive my best merely to reach the end that I’m not actually interested in making friends
To admit that perhaps I’ve become the ignoble character, dispassioned and unimpressed
Shedding my inhibitions and control in trying to catch another breath
All the while seeking to conjure some kind of denouement to reconcile futile improvement
As it would seem there’s no point to gain but the increasing burden of disappointment and shame
I am standing in the hastening light of this setting sun,
This chapter of our lives is nearly over and done,
Will I eventually just forget, like the rest of them, as even memories seem no longer sacred, and I scour the corners of my mind only to find that even the most compelling conviction evaporates
When everything I left behind without saying much a word from my lips
May be everything I’ll spend my life lying not to miss
What happened to the magic that kept us coming back for it
Diminishing as scars accumulated by time only highlight all the insecurities we hide, hoping that you are not just like me
Tied up in the invisible strings endlessly wrenching
and unraveling inside
where we know it hurts most,
Pulling the rug from beneath all of our toil and work beneath a new sun designed to expose
The fault in the foundation’s collapse, that I now emerge eternally unattached,
In this light I am nothing but a single drop in a perpetually parched land
remaining in unceasing frenetic motion in the midst of the inalleviable realities that give few second chance,
It would seem there’s little left to feel,
I misplaced my emotions some distant,
foreign place
between the Rock and sands
Because there’s no time left for feeling, only for doing, as when the decaying strands of the guillotine come down on this eve
Never to bridge the distance again
I don’t want to be one left with nothing in the end.
11.13
“People change, the story has to change”
Echos a familiar voice breaking through to scatter the few pieces that remained
I’m seething at best and hard pressed to digest but maybe it’s true,
regardless the story will continue to test and become a stranger to you
Leave you standing in a room
full of faces feeling you never even knew
We exchange glances or shake hands periodically
But all the small talk really taught to me is that there’s no such thing as anything, nothing to hold,
Nor irreplaceable
Now I finally know my place in this world where I belong
and never want to slow my pace again for anyone
No choices left but for me to say as I do and do what I say
But all the frivolities just fall flat today
But the indifferent vapidity will never cease to amaze
And surely I’m just another hypocrite, when some days I hate to admit
I feel like I loathe the world I’m supposed to be loving here, some days I see a million broken souls who ripped holes out of their chests, dulled their eyes, and covered up their ears
I see wounds obscured that don’t even try to explain because there aren’t any words for the kind
of pain,
But I’m finally weary of turning the other cheek so people can run their tires over me, disillusioned forgiving people who don’t truly give me a reprieve, but it’s funny because can you imagine if Jesus had done the same thing
I get sick of loving people who don’t love me, but ironic when that’s the strongest point of Christianity,
And all my life I’ve believed in it, but I finally feel the coldness creeping in,
Commence to question everything and examining the evidence left
That perhaps no one really cares that much, we just pretend
Give a little courtesy because
They say in the very end
most’s love will grow cold, and many of the resistance will follow suit as a result
Sobering enough is to notice it unfold
But truth be told
I’m at the point I want to shut off my own heart too
Become impervious to the harm that living demands it’s due
But catch is if I’m apathetic then I’m just as bad as them, I’ve long had a problem with not feeling love, don’t know how I’m going to overcome when I put my own steel defenses up
That I just don’t know how to take down
Staring at the same traps in reaction to the here and now
Tell myself I don’t trust anyone’s heart thinking I know exactly what’s in it,
So am I sitting here calling the kettle complicit?
We claim the narrative that we care, tell ourselves we’re a good person so we don’t worry, but when it comes right down to it most people don’t want to get their hands dirty,
And to the heat of the flame maintain relationships we can just leave unscathed, but I hear if it doesn’t weep with those who weep it’s not love it’s fake,
But if aware and awake, fearing if you ever care too much, All it brings is pain
We are all a bit messy, inconvenient, and pathologically behaved
So yeah maybe I’ll come back around someday eventually, but for now just allow me to be angry
I can see countless spirits in constant decay, saying we certainly all want the world to change, but who of us wants to concertedly change?
11.9
I’ve been working and waiting for a familiar clarity to alight upon me
As I’m clawing and wading through the mud of grayed out resignations
Searching for the strength to brave one final declaration
Before unsues the war merely not to fade along with the rest of them,
Even to the many courageous who long sought to face and resist the precedent
And most disconcerting is they won’t even notice it
Another casualty gradually sinking into an endless sea of blurring faces
Who have devolved to all look the same to me
A vast majority who knew neither the depths nor the heights so to them the best was easily satisfied
But cut or carve it into my skin, because I never wanted to give in
or forget
A language apart from the twisting stumbling words that only betray us
now the words remain only to be heard within the midnight of a newfound silence
Not the kind that can be explained but solely resounds inside of us
In the moments when you feel most alone in the universe
Who is the real you no one else can see?
and only God knows before we learned to rehearse cliches
to adapt to the curse that we made
There was once a place between meeting and understanding but not fearing one another
In the space where the light and darkness converge,
In the conversation where your mind and heart can finally affirm
How you really feel,
Laying aside the could’s and the should’s just for a minute the truth is revealed
Sorry to have to let myself know that not everyone is going to feel as intensely as you though
And for those few people who do, there are some truths only the silence can discover to speak
there are some scars only a lie can cover up for another week
So I wanted to write these letters to remind before I forget forever
That there was a time before I learned the reasons the sweetest things become scarred with regret
Why recollection gets twisted and marred in our heads
And the fear that is born chokes out the melodies we could hear before
That there was a time before we had to endure these fetters, there was a day when I wasn’t terrified to live forever,
There was a day I’d no secrets I was too afraid to tell,
Now having tasted both eternity and hell,
when I ascend back down into the valleys of the realities we find ourselves having worn deep grooves now into
It would seem the only real proof of permanency in life is a distance that can never be bridged nor removed
And the worst part is it’s always been in my mind hasn’t it, the very worst place for the space of separation to exist, and now everywhere I go,
There it is.
11.1
It took me decades to put up these walls, and years to even begin to get them to fall,
And now just as I was looking out over the top, I start to recall why I put them there at all,
I know I can be a little reckless, get a little breathless when I really feel something deep in my chest,
I don’t want to regress back to the days I want to forget when I didn’t trust anyone who drew breath,
You want to know why at times you think I can spit my words,
Funny how only a person you truly love so much it hurts, can sometimes bring out the worst,
I wasn’t trying to instigate a fight, I just wanted to make this right,
But I don’t know how I could have helped this resolve, when everything I say you think it’s an insult,
I was never intentionally rude to you, but I did take on the blame for things I didn’t do,
You know I never meant it that way, so why do you twist the sentences I say,
I’m not gonna stand by pride and hide that this has torn me apart, I’m not gonna try to mask the fact that I’m asking myself did I ever truly know your heart,
Was I deceiving myself, all these years thinking this had meaning that you never even felt,
I wish I could change or conceal the way this made me feel, Now I’m thinking if it makes you feel anything it must not be real,
I think too many people lie to themselves to try to get wounds to heal
Faster than they were intended to, perhaps I never really knew what I meant to you,
Did I just assume we’d be friends through and through, that we would make due and keep faith in the middle of miscommunication,
I don’t know to say
Never thought we could end this way
when I’m in disbelief, you think I’m the enemy, my tongue is caught between my teeth
Because I don’t want to make this worse, God knows I cared so much it hurts, I don’t understand why we can’t converse through the hurt and the misplaced words,
like two tough people who can both take it equals, and stomach sharing some hard truths without just walking away, because life makes us choose between simply being right and communicating,
I didn’t come here to place the blame, I didn’t stay all these years with the plan to vacate,
I know they say nothing can last, But I like to make them eat their facts,
you said you never felt close or attached to people like that, I wish we could just scrap this bad habit of painting each other black and forget the things we said when we were mad,
Once upon a time it was like we could read each other’s minds,
Now it’s like we just sit silently by and fill in the lines to vilify,
Are we really going to leave it all behind for what seems like a silly fight.
10.30
Of the hardest lessons this life holds in store
Is the second you assume someone’s hearts like yours
Maybe I was stupid to let this continue for as long as I did
How did you get under my skin
mess with my heart and head again and again
Feel like I don’t know who I am
Scared I’m buying into an equal part of the masses
Of hurt numb people always searching for a vice to mask it
Or Looking for their next best drug or attraction
To use it all up and then pass it to the trash can
Way back then at ten watched it from the back fence
Who If not said with their mouths they confessed it with their actions
With pride speaking loud
Who pronounce connection as detachment
It’s sad when real love to many is too much to have to risk
Walk away if they disagree
as if their opinion’s all there is
And what they call intimacy feels like an act
But see that’s what happens when
You live a world of receipts and no attachments
Relationships weren’t meant to be disposable utensils
you can’t just go click on tinder
and replace it like a rental,
I know society considers years let go
by signing here with a pen or pencil,
there are no perfect souls so why do people still expect or pretend so
I’m sick of this pretense though
feeling like the human race is mental
Indoctrinated to focus only on what we can let go
Then wonder why people don’t know how to get anything to grow
I keep searching in vain for a soul I can touch and see
I feel so alone drowned in depths of emotions sea
Everything they do and say’s exactly the same to me
like I’m going insane in a world of vacancies
Acting As if they can’t see
I’m trying to Break the glass in Emergency
Most have a universe trapped inside
that we never seem to find the words to transcribe
You seemed to try to take the time
but when did I start believing in a lie
Bet we’re all wishing to find someone who could really know and understand
but deep down terrified maybe no one really can
Thinking a million thoughts
But always hide it inside
Try to fill in connect the dots
But feel something missing or lost
Put on a front as if we’re not
but most got a hunger like a knot
In my stomach that never turns off
Rest assured I have God but I sure wrestle with the thought
That no one really knows me, though I know I’m not the only one,
So much Wi-Fi reception
so why do I find no connection
Wonder if the problem lies with my reflection
But I guess that’s just what happens
in a world filled with distractions and no real attachments.
I miss the way it felt back then, or did I only imagine it,
when the world still had magic in it,
and we didn’t have to mask our emotions
Play the act that we don’t feel alone
Feign satisfaction with an imitation of being close
to someone
Now I don’t want to open up and trust love again.
9.26
I’ve been away for a while
Running circles in my mind
When I was a little child they used to remind me
saying worth does not depend on the things that I achieve
And I was so sure then that I would really believe it
but if that were still true
wouldn’t be feeling as I do
Like everything I knew it only
served to deceive me
When I’m in the dirt of this earth
what is it that I’m leaving behind
Now uncertain can I really redeem the ticking time
Should’ve read the signs
sooner opened up my eyes
seen life is more than just the measure of the passing time
That is pressing on my shoulders
See the decades getting colder
Like a weight upon my chest
Getting heavy with regrets
Know we should never look back
but it’s always right here,
it’s the present future past,
can I ever forget the fear
They tell me it’s a
Journey, there’ll be things you can’t control,
never could’ve warned me
how much it hurts to let go
When my strength fails
Will you look down on me
In this world so frail
What you want’s not what you need
Never satisfied as the air breathe
And all my desire
is just beyond my reach
Funny how you think you finally know what you want
then when you’ve almost got it find it isn’t what you thought
Laundering the same old facades
That we’re not wandering lost
Wonder where the time has gone
Am I the only one still holding on
Fighting ultimatums
When the world is always changing
Will I locate missing motivation
Recreate a way to make it
it certainly never seems to gets easy
But this hurting won’t stop the bleeding
Because before I’d ever learned firsthand of the darkness yet
I could never understand how hard it would be to forget
To erase the contents of my head
Not to mention all the memories that apprehend
Every shred of composure
With Knowledge set to show you
Is Destiny just a dying thing
They say it’s a
Journey, there’ll be things you can’t control
Never could have warned me
How much it hurts to let go
When my strength fails
Will you look down on me
To no avail
Because what you want’s not what you need
Never satisfied as the air I breathe
And all my desire
Is just beyond my reach
They say run after wisdom and to seek her more than gold
but if it only brings more sorrow why even go at all
Because I’m starting to assume that every single pursuit
is just another hard lesson in the things I wish I never knew
at all
They say it’s a journey…
9.4
Guess This is me becoming a functional human being, suffocating the fundamental feeling I’m needing,
starving the main arteries of oxygen, and the part of me that ever wanted to let someone in,
Just tying tighter tourniquets around our hurting broken hearts, and I’m fighting not to admit that my universe has been falling apart,
They Say my life has just started but I’ve never felt so dead, like the light inside has departed replaced by only memories in my head
I keep on sprinting harder and faster only headlong into disaster,
feeling like none of this matters and resisting oncoming chapters,
Why even ask the questions, when you won’t like the answers that come after
fighting in a war I don’t think I can win, trying to ignore what’s taken up residence in my skin,
Where all my innocence has been instilled with sin
Now I’m no heroine
character,
And I’m very sure there are no heroes out there
who aren’t equally scared
Now I just want someone like heroin to be there,
I tried to hide my fear but I’ll forever be unprepared,
And the harder I strive to get to where I’m supposed to be the farther away I feel from when I felt like me, I feel like somebody I don’t even want to see, much less be,
Because As much as I tried I could not protect that innocent kid inside
Who lasted so long but now feels like she’s died, I could not remain the way that I was before
So I became an unforgiving weapon of war
And Honestly now if I could replace all of the mistakes I made and rewrite everything that I believe is my fault, Very well may have rewound back to that day and erased being born at all
Fear somewhere along the road I misplaced my soul
Now I don’t know where I left myself,
Scared I’m a shadow I’m a shell of someone else
I can scream I can yell but words won’t come out
God I think I need some help
I Know I didn’t Come this far just so I could let go, I didn’t fight so hard just to roll over, I wish the voices in my head would leave me alone but no they won’t now I’ve been faced with a choice and so I chose
You Say i’m the sad dark type, yeah you got that part right, you Question why I’m so aggressive then depressive, I guess it’s when I think I know best what’s coming next, that I’ve been holding my breath inside for a good long time, fighting the rising tide practically all my life
Now Somehow I’ve lost track of my soul’s map, so now All I do is wear a mask to put on the act, to sidetrack myself from ever looking back, to detract from the cold hard facts that are ever on the attack
and distract from the artifacts of the heart I used to have, feels like being born is just a trap
you’ll eventually regret,
Though I tempted and tested the time better than the best of them,
But everything in this world demands its amends in the end and the bet’s on my head that I’m about to pay every penny in of my debt,
But if I’m getting prepped to pay that price,
At the very end I’m taking back evening that was mine.
8.7
I must be finally living in reality BecauseI I find that nothing feels that real to me,
So recite some dogmatism like my life is just beginning, but in my opinion I might be in it, but it’s been over for a minute,
sure I’m not the only person on this earth who’s felt unheard no matter the number of words I rehearse, and I know it’s that everyone hurts
and its not necessarily true, but honestly I feel alone no matter what I do,
How are you, fine, how are you, fine, so why don’t I just save us both a little time, when you won’t like the answers you might find,
Two worlds that never fully collide,
This loneliness will find no alleviation until I contrive a way to stop being so complicated,
but how can I learn to be more easily sated and impressed, how Can I start feigning interest, silence and simplify all the pain in my chest,
Now I know that nothing’s perfect but now
I can’t see how its worth it, what’s the purpose of looking for a person to love and be in return if It’s merely a matter of time until it only hurts or you can barely remember what was there that ever brought you together,
When you know how absence makes the heart grow fonder and familiarity Only makes it wanna wander
These are the kinds of things I ponder in the moments I’m not sure I want to be alone any longer, but it’s all I’ve ever known
And up until this point I’ve somehow enjoyed it, but relationships seems so pointless when I don’t need any more disappointments,
So until I’m proven otherwise I just tell myself that everything I’ve ever felt inside was only another lie fabricated by my mind,
Trying to Plagiarize one thing that feels right,
I’ve got everything I need in my life right, so why can I never sleep at night,
I guess it’s just a fundamental part of what being human is, searching for something that doesn’t even exist, looking for love from people who can’t give, and I should know better but I keep on doing it, spelled out right down to the final letter where the problem begins,
The human condition summed up in one sentence, and I am no different I’m no exception, I’m not exempt from buying into deception,
never accepting my lessons, when everybody else seems to get them,
Will we forever only want what we can never have
Am I the only one ever aware of the presence of the past
Am I the only one haunted and scared by the facts
Am I the only one suddenly thinking drugs don’t sound so bad
Will we forever only want what we can never get
Am I the only one who simply can’t forget
Am I the only one with more than a few lifetimes locked up in my heart and head
Am I the only one who feels lonely inside regardless of having friends
I guess it’s only a part of life, and we’re all foolheartedly looking for something.
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