this is a blog

sometimes I write slightly to fairly bad things and I post them on the internet

[aripinthesky]

It wasn't until she was almost back home-the train was speeding through the outskirts of New York, past car graveyards and polluted water and warehouses tagged with endless graffiti-that she realized how long this had been preoccupying her thoughts, her everything. She's too distracted to note for more than a second the giant stuffed bear dressed in tattered and weathered rags hanging from the metal latticework by the train tracks, too distracted to pay attention to the Indian business man next to her trying to get home just as hard as her. And she's just thinking the same thoughts, in a circle, over and over again. What she does notice- the sun shining through a hole in the clouds into the city, the multiple layers to the view of the skyline that distance afforded her-she applied to her own situation, noting how you could easily live in the sun or out of it, how everything has layers on layers to it. Every decision she makes is immediately conquered by another decision, herself at war with herself. She's reminded of the classic image of a girl plucking at a daisy, he loves me, he loves me not. Except for her, the repeating rhythm sings "I love him, I love him not" and she can't decide which, not matter how many flowers she plucks petal-less, her fingers stained with pollen and her own indecision.

[aripinthesky]

It has been a long day. Another long day in the tired stack of long days that seem to somehow compose all of your life. And today, you stand on the asphalt of your driveway in your shoeless feet, still dressed for your day, and feel the fading heat that the day baked into it soak gently into your feet. It feels permanent, the driveway, like it has been there forever and will stay there forever, through hurricanes and floods and wars, just existing flat on the surface of the earth. And it reassures you somehow, to think of it as everlasting, because if this slab of rock poured here by your fellow humans can exist forever, you can make it through today. And tomorrow. It will be okay, the black pavement whispers to your tired feet, you can do it. Everything passes. You can endure.

[aripinthesky]

Come here, my precious child, and let me cuddle you away from the world and everything else, use my body as a shield from the useless hate of the universe. I want to keep you safe, to swaddle you in love and warmth and gentility until your scars and calluses have faded back into your skin and your soul emerges to shine from your face down upon the world. I want to take you to a beach somewhere that is no where, spend endless days in the salt and sunshine until the last bit of stress falls from your body and relaxation permeates you and everything you do. I want to devote time to learning about every nook and cranny of your personality, what makes your face light up and what makes you tremble and what makes you laugh, I want to know you. I want to hide you away from the world in a cabin in the mountains where you can wear flannel and we can have a fire in the fireplace every night and fall asleep around it if we so desire. Together I want to choose a hidden corner of the planet to spend time following nothing but our base impulses, to rent a small apartment in a giant city and spend our days walking through it and finding little coffee shops and bookstores and street corners that remind us of us and make them special, only to never return to them again, abandoning the memories with the same adrenaline rush that led us there in the first place. I want to find a way to spend time with you outside of time, outside of the world that we’re condemned to live our days in, marching in and out with the same stamp on them. I want to take you away from your pain and your hurt and your troubles and find ways to make you happy, make you smile as a default expression, make you feel whole as yourself. I’m not asking to complete you, but to watch you complete yourself, to see you find yourself in the whole wide world out there and to love it as you find yourself in it, in cities that need no name, in forests dying for you wander aimlessly through them, atop mountains anticipating your hike to the top, on beaches waiting impatiently for your toes to curl in their sand. I want you to be happy, I want you to find that happiness in yourself, where it’s waiting for you. You’re so lovely, and it’s time you got to experience that for yourself.

[aripinthesky]

I’m not trying to fix you, you have to understand, and I’m not asking to be fixed.  I know that I’m broken and constantly cutting myself on the pieces, and I know that the thorns dig into your insides more days than you can count but I’m not looking for a hero to journey into the darkness of my soul and return with my withered pale form into the light, whimpering with gratitude.  I’ve had that and it didn’t work and it never will because if you could really save me you’d do it by sitting in the sun and tempting me with crumbs of food until I trusted you like some silly story where you’re the human and I’m the animal.  So don’t waste your time and energy trying to save me, because I’m not asking you to.  And I’m not trying to climb inside your tangled mind and ease the volatile snarls of thought apart.

[aripinthesky]

So I like children’s movies where everything turns out okay in the end and the good guys always win and the people who die don’t really die and all the problems are nothing but solvable.  So I wish I was a Disney character so even the greatest of confusions could be resolved by a deus ex machina set of coincidences and circumstances.  So what?  What can you possibly say to turn me away from that, to criticize my center beliefs?  If that’s what I need to do to keep going on, then that’s what I need to do, and you all can fuck off about it.  My coping mechanisms are nothing but my own, and I’m not asking you to share my slavery to them.  If I need to remember even the most trivial things about you to make me feel good about myself, if I need to feel like a light in someone’s life, who’s to blame me?  The real miracle here is that I’m here at all, that I’ve been driven to spend the energy to keep breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing.  The repetitiveness is exhausting and draining and nothing but my fear keeps me running on and on and on, grinding my feet to bloody scraps for even the barest moment of fresh air.  So I need sometimes for all problems to be easy, for things to just work out with no effort from me, for the people who died to be cleverly resurrected.   I’ve learned to not even need it in my own life, just to project and pretend with the made up lives of imaginary characters.  And a part of me, a significant part of me, is proud of that.  Proud of my fucked up ability to keep going on after a brief respite into someone else’s imagination.  Because I have to be strong enough to keep running, running, running from the demons on my tail, the ones who whisper and hiss at me that everyone hates me, that I’m nothing but a disappointment to everyone, that I’ve wasted all the potential I’ll ever had, that no one ever has been or will be proud of me.  I have to run and run and run.  I have to.  I don’t even know the terrors my life would unhesitantly visit upon me if I ever fell prey to them.  Even when I stumble and pause for a moment and they nip at my heels, I feel the darkness swarm at the corners of my mind and debilitate me from the center outward.

[aripinthesky]

I am, in fact, conscious of my own sadness.  I’m aware that frequently I’m unpleasant and sometimes unbearable.  I know that everything that comes out of me is tinged with the black that permeates my soul.  And I’m trying for that not to be the case, I really am.  I try to be happy, try to provide some semblance of normalcy and wholesomeness to my conduct. I’m really trying, I swear.

[aripinthesky]

I like going through people’s old facebook photos, scrolling back through their lives until you reach the point where you look at them and don’t even recognize them anymore-you look at them and that’s them but not; you look at them and say to yourself “that’s not my person” because it’s not-they’re sadder or happier or their hair is a different color or their face is rounder or they look exactly the same but a different light shines from their eyes. When I reach this point I always stop and begin the slow journey back through the scattered unevenly spaced snapshots through time and look hard at them in each picture, looking for the development into the person you know, that in some trivial and ephemeral way you’ve laid claim to. There’s a flash here or there of them as you know them, and then from one photo to the next you see something important, something solid change behind their eyes and you just know, even through as unreliable medium as a photo, that’s when they really became your person, the person you know.  And after that scrolling through the pictures is quick and easy because you don’t have to scrutinize and question whether each one is them or not because you know already. You can just take the pictures at face value and not hold them up to the light and squint at them inspecting for forgery or deceit. Of course, this is what you should have been doing all along, but if we could just take photos at face value, would we even take them?

[aripinthesky]

You don’t realize a couple things about being separated from people.  It doesn’t matter by what, just that there is a gulf of time in which you cannot touch, you do not hear the other’s voice or watch their little idiosyncratic habits. The first memories to go are these little things, of course. How they tilt their head or drum their fingers or quirk their lips will fade from your memory first and you will no longer be able to accurately picture them saying and doing things like you could when you saw them all the time. And you won’t really notice without the correct version in front of you to point out the fallacies of your vision. And then one day you won’t be able to recall the sound of their voice, no longer able to summon it at will to perfect some imagined scenario you constructed in your head about how they would react to something that has happened to you. So you will scrounge through videos to hear their voice, even tiny background scraps of it for terror of losing the version of them that lives in your mind, your last version of them. And the last part of your version of them that had any integrity, their face and the way they held it, that will leave you too, until all you have left is an off-brand version of them composed of the tattered scraps of memory you have left and a conglomeration of photos and videos that host reflections of them. It will happen, your mind will betray you to make room for new memories and new people to live inside your head, but you will always have one person who you’re trying to get back your version of, listening to the same trite videos over and over hoping to recapture their voice and looking at photo after photo hungrily and in vain to retrieve their face. You will composite these things and cram that into your brain and view  it with unease, because it can only look how it looks in photos, still and frozen and abruptly switching from one emotion to another, and it can only repeat the fragments of its voice that you learned by heart from the backgrounds of videos.

[aripinthesky]

What was best about him though, what made me sure he was a good person, was the way he laughed.  The laugh consumed his whole face and made it all crumple into a smile with slit for each eye, wrinkles spreading pleasingly out from the corners and even his forehead got caught into this spasm of joy, and then his whole body would jerk and curl up.  His hands would come up to his chest and cross and he would bend double as laughing almost consumed him.  What I’m trying to say here was that he didn’t laugh unless it was worth it, and when he did laugh he put his whole soul into it

[aripinthesky]

I feel like what you want from me is not something I’ll ever be able to give, not a version of myself that will ever exist, not really.  Maybe for fleeting moments in the dark, yes, but not forever, not for the long term.  I won’t be this way forever, and I can’t even say I’ll be this way in five seconds.  I’m having to trust the fragile idea that you’re taking what you want, that you’re not unhappy that you’re not miserable that everything you want is something you’re getting out of this because this doesn’t seem to be your usual thing, your usual way of dancing along the wire of too much, too little, too edgy, too safe.  In a moment of fragility, of brokenness, I might ask for the truth, ask you in a brusque demanding tone to clarify for me what it is, exactly and explicitly, that you want.  And you’ll pause and think about it and waffle on about it, struggling to find the words to define what it is you want and I’ll take away from it not what you really mean but a fractured version of what I wanted to hear and we’ll continue bobbling along until you can refocus your eyes and suddenly one day you’ll realize that I’m not what you were ever looking for and in that moment, in the center of a busy street, in the quiet morning hours, while we’re eating dinner, you’ll make up your mind that you love me too much to let such a thing matter anymore because you’re different now or that idea of a person will still sustain you and you’ll leave me in the inevitable and endless quest for a perfect person to fit the correct criteria in the correct order.

[aripinthesky]

Nobody wants to see your broken bits, the parts of you that go thump in the night and scare you.  You’re way too old to ask your parents to go check for you, but you’re still scared.  You still want them too.  But even though they love you unconditionally, and they do, no one wants to see your broken bits.  Not your friend since you were six, or your roommate in college or the girl who signed your high school yearbook with “I love you, stay in touch!”.  No one wants to see their own cracks reflected in you, to see the imperfections we all carry laid out in plain view so that they can see them and wonder if their brokenness looks the same, just as scary and ugly and repellent.  There is the rare individual who will come across to you as wanting to see the parts where your soul doesn’t meet up, but they’re lying just like the rest of them, peeking and then flinching only to peek again, fascinated by the mutations and wishing only to examine them, to trace them to the root and wonder at their growth to consume you, a whole person.  Because let’s be honest here, they consume you like they consume everyone else.  You do not look in the mirror and see what’s good about yourself; you look in the mirror and see that your hair won’t lay perfect or that your nose is off center, or that you’re a terrible excuse for a person.  You’re a slave to your broken bits, a slave to looking at them, fretting and stressing and thinking about them day in and day out.  It’s exhausting, looking at the gaps in your soul, the darkening abyss swirling menacingly around to nibble at the whole bits of you that are left.  And you know that, you feel it in your bones that your every movement is tired and every night is sleepless though you remain inert for hours, you know that carrying this weight is making every step twice as hard.  But you can’t stop looking at yourself in that goddamned mirror, wishing and hoping and beating yourself into trying to be better.  Because you are grotesquely fascinated by your cracks as well, you also try to fathom why they consume you as you develop ridiculous coping mechanisms to deal with them, smoking and drinking and keeping everything in the perfect order and setting ridiculous goals to try to make it okay how broken you are, how parts of you unrelentingly go thump in the night.  And there will come a night when it will simply be too scary to go it alone, where you will terrify yourself into calling out for help, a single white hand raised above the waterline in one desperate attempt to call for help.  And on this night it might be your parents that you call to for help, or your friend since you were six, or your roommate in college, or the girl who signed your high school yearbook with “I love you, stay in touch!”, or someone else, someone who just happened to be there and just gets sucked into the darkened spiral of your mind.  And you can hope that they will be able to close their eyes and brave the waters to come out and get you or throw you a rope or a life saver even a freaking pool noodle would suffice, you just need a little help, just tonight, and tomorrow, and every night for the rest of your life. Because life isn’t about learning how to live with your cracks eating away at you, and it’s not about learning to love your broken bits, and it’s not about removing your scars.  It’s about hearing parts of you go bump in the night and greeting them with a smile because you’re better than that shit, you’re stronger and faster.  Because if you weren’t, there’s no way you ever would have made it this far.

[aripinthesky]

Someday there won’t be enough light in the world to drown out the darkness.  There will come a day when the darkness has its way and consumes me in a spiky haze of glass shards and all I can do is let it because there is nothing inside me with the strength to fight back against myself because all of me is involved in this pointless civil war with a predetermined winner and it’s not about how it will end but when, and every day the deadline is approaching and every day I push it back by one more day because today I still have it in me to keep breathing, to keep eating and smiling and drinking and stuffing all the darkness down into the pit of my stomach where it will reside until the one fateful day when it won’t, when it will simply refuse to be quenched with consuming my mind and my heart and instead will unceasingly devour all of me in a darkened fog and then the world will be at peace because the war has a winner, and all will pretend that they didn’t see this inevitable day coming, looming on the darkened horizon of my poisoned mind and they will sigh and say that she’s in a better place now, that somehow she’s better off not fighting against herself anymore.  And it’s true, and that’s what makes the fight hard, to know that giving in would not only be easy but also probably better for me and everyone I have sucked into the darkened whirlpool that is my stained soul.  It would be almost selfless not to fight, but there’s one tiny scrap of me that’s not ready to give out, that stays true to my ultimately selfish nature and that’s the piece of me that I cling to, that I need and that keeps my heart beating, my stomach digesting, my lungs breathing.  Because even if the pseudo reality I’ve created is corrupted now and forever, it’s mine and I made it and I will stick to it with every shred of me that’s still fighting for as long as there’s energy to fight for it.