this piece of writing rose out of this moment in a conversation with someone special to me. it's far from the first and probably far from the last time I find myself face to face with this topic in between me and a person I hold dear, and it's hard every time. conversations like these often follow a similar pattern that I haven't yet found a way to break. part of that pattern is my own struggle to articulate what I mean in the moment and illustrate the discrepancy I'm trying to describe. in that moment I asked if we could put a pin in it for tonight and he was headed to bed anyway, but I stayed up and wrote this. if you feel compelled to respond, my inbox is open. here it follows:
âBut I just donât think heâs such a bad guy, I think heâs not perfect but heâs a human and heâs tryingâ
He spent seven years pestering the same woman to love him when she didnât want him
Look, explaining the difference between our perspectives and experiences feels a lot like this:
You live on land and I live in the sea
And you wanna yell at me from the shore that the land is the place to live, that land is home and land is great
But I was built with gills and fins and my oxygen is packaged differentlyÂ
And I poke my head up above the surface, My ancestors have been to your land, your place called home, and they donât come back.
They are pulled from their beds to be served on rice, they never come back.
Very few of you don these elaborate contraptions so you try your best to join me down here in the cold and the quietÂ
But you canât withstand the pressure and you donât know how to make your own lightÂ
So youâll have to forgive me if Iâm a little tired of hearing your fists beating on the sand and the rockÂ
Like a presumptuous salesman, or Mormon, or local council member
Disturbing my peace with your priorities and your objectives and your single-dimension point of view
What is it that you believe I can give you exactly, what do you want with my absolution
I want just one of you to come down here and stfu for a minute or two so your eyes can have a chance to adjustÂ
You wonât be able to breathe as above, but so below at least youâll feel the weight.
I am not responsible for what you have done with your land and I will not condone your overdrawn accounts.
I will share in this with you only if it is a dialogue, if you listen before you speak, if your goal is a bridge and not another highway.Â
But Iâll need to see what youâre all for before we sit down to any sort of table
Because I know what youâre used to: staff at your shoulder and cubes of flesh peeled carefully away from sprung bones on a plate for your pleasure and consumption.
Now you want me to serve you the change in the way of the old traditions, no.
I had no help from you when I was lost and spinning in the rip tides here.
You have yet to clean up your oily messesÂ
My task is to find a way to save myself and my line from sure destruction
Donât ask me to embrace your flustered and crumbling delusions, I am busy.Â
I believe this impulse of yours, at the very first and most pure bloom, is to find ourselves joined again as we once were for a time, and I want that for us too
But to have that is to let go of your faith in your own understandingÂ
And to surrender to the dark unknown places where you can trust you surely wouldnât survive
To come to respect them and figure them into your calculation of wholenessÂ
Currently, your world is the whole world to you
One tidal pool is the whole world to a barnacle
You must come to love your smallness, your nakedness and your inherent rattletrap mortality
We none of us on our own are able to understand everything, that not everything needs us to understand it and that your two eyes do not show you all there is to see.Â
Take on this responsibility of knowing that you are only you. Please stop dropping gifts with hidden fish hooks and yanking me to a place I donât belong by the skin of my cheek. In return, I will not hate you for what you have become and I will try to help you heal where I can. But please bear in mind, I have my own healing to do as your line has been in the business of hunting, consuming and exterminating mine for a long time. As my kind reclaim their power, yours is afraid they will go hungry as they forgot how to be satisfied long ago.Â
Take only what you need. Please give your silence and attentive listening. Please accept what is offered. Please be brave through the great unlearn. Please allow the tide in and out and let the moon illuminate the dark in her own time. Please stop struggling against, you wonât be able to win with your wits or your will. This isnât a war, after all, and I donât want to fight youÂ
(I never have, I actually love you so much sometimes I canât contain it)Â
So I need you to learn how to sit still and be silent, Iâll help you, you wonât be alone and you wonât go hungry. And I need to build my legs, for this long road, I need muscle, tendons and a much stronger spine. And slowly, weâll come back to the love we once had.
Enantiodromia. Evolution.Â
sunshine by nuhanotion on deviantart