There are times that I don’t know who I am anymore. There are pieces of me that I find scattered throughout the landscape of my life. The loneliness of being me is suffocating in moments. I both hate and love who I am simultaneously. Every morning I struggle as Albert Camus did…”should I kill myself or have coffee?”
There is an innate discomfort in being one who cannot connect with the world. I shoulder everything. I bear the burden of being me…of being the role I play in each person’s life. I want only to be loved, to be validated as important in someone’s life. This need to feel important to someone has haunted me day in and out. For what should I feel important? To whom? My parents never found me to be of interest, as if only in a role. To be someone I had no recollection of being. To be something I was incapable of being. I was an alien in a world I knew not. I grew to be someone I knew not how to be. Who am I?
Every day I long to be important to someone, to something, to fill this void of unknowing. I have lived long enough to know the importance of wanting. I’ve spent my days making others to feel…loved. How does this feel…I do not know. I reach out to the nether world, to this describable worth of knowing what others feel. But I do not know that they do. I wonder if others have the same path as I….an eternal curse of wanting to be important. To be eternally valued by another.
This thirst, unquenched, is only to be recognized in a desert of longing. I feel not what others feel. I abhor them. I hate them. But who can I reveal such things to? No one, lest I be cast upon the stone of rejection and acquiesce to a feeling of continuing unknowing.
Who knows such things as I? I have bathed in the knowledge of what is. I have pondered the ubiquitous feelings of searching. To what do I owe my findings? With what effort should I apply this revealing? I want to apply this learning to an individual. To one whose mind can comprehend the unveilings of that which must be sought. To know is to wander. To understand is to thirst. To thirst is to find a never ending supply of desert.
I know only dust, a paste in ones mouth that is never quenched. I have only this notion that I know what others seek. I wish to cast it off, to return to the days of unknowing, when the simplest of fragrance would enlighten the mind, brighten the day. Oh, but my curse is to seek from whence the fragrance came? From where the fragrance hails and to whom such affect belongs. I am lost on the simplistic beauty of the smell only to realize that it exist as a fragment of my imagination.
My imagination, to one does it toll. To press itself against all that is natural. To feel the push of its weight against one’s own sanity. From where do these thoughts arise? Who conjures such things? Who puts this mind upon oneself? I ask only so I may converse with the mind I was afforded. To what end does my mind foresee? To what does it want?
There is no endorsement to the weight of a mind. It is ceaseless in searching, its thirst for understanding, only to be found wanting in its unending prodding. I, me, cares neither for its desires nor what it seeks. It is an unwanted companion, a counselor that I did not request. I defy its suggestions and I curse its knowledge.
Every day I wake to its incessant thirst for more. Each morning I must hurl coiled steel to control this beast that seeks nothing more than knowing. Each day I must start again to require it to find gratitude in what I see and not submit to the desires of thirst. The vampiric mind only knows want, not satisfaction.
Today, as a thin film of darkness tries to envelop me, I must reignite the armor of simplicity seeking only that which I know to be true and thwarting such which only desires to know. Oh to reach the limits of knowing what is to be known. To quite the beast, to see the beauty in the leaf that falls, the air that blows, the kindness of another.
Yes, kindness. To one’s self and to others. It is this small action…. to be kind. Here is the freedom for all. Kindness. Its simplistic in thought, yet difficult in action. To think of another’s plight before your own, to orient your life to such. We can’t see another’s mind due to the activity of our own mind. Our own mind makes so much noise that it becomes impossible to hear one so different. We must be quiet, silence the marching of thoughts that seek only to confirm what we make believe, the narrative of our own story. In every story we find ourselves, there is another story waiting to be told by us…the authors of all that we believe.
