Heart/Mind

In ancient Daoist texts they used to use a word called Xin. Literally speaking the Xin is the heart. But in these books the Xin was where the thoughts came from. The heart was where we all decided how we were going to act and do and feel.

Man were the Chinese so fucking wrong about that.

And I'm not talking about the axons, neurons, oligodendrocytes that fill this all too thick jumble of bone precariously perched on this too long neck of mine. All I'm saying is that if my heart could think, if my heart could make choices and decisions and feel the way I told it to then it might be a little less heavy.

You see my heart is more like a stomach. He hungers and wants for those sugary sweets and fatty burgers I always told him would not be good for his health. I tell him that he is not allowed to indulge in what he wants. It will only hurt him in the end. People won't accept him when they see how different he is.

But you see my heart is heavy and my heart does want for those forbidden sweets. Right now I've got him locked up behind an all too thick cage of bone precariously perched under this too long neck of mine.

He'll get out when some boy finds the key.

Looking Back

I looked back over what I've written over the last few years. It was kind of depressing to see how many of them are about me being unhappy or just dissatisfied. I like to think I'm a generally happy person nowadays. 

Maybe I only feel like writing when I'm feeling sad. If I'm feeling happy I'll go hang out with my friends and talk and party but I won't write it down. So everything in the blog looks sad but that's just because I don't write down the happy stuff. I think there's a statistics thing about that... That makes sense. I'm actually happy.

I know that sometimes the posts can get a little graphic. It sounds like I don't want to be alive or my life is going crappy but it's not. I mean there's shitty stuff that happens. And maybe I find myself crying myself to sleep more often than laughing myself to sleep. That's just how it goes. I know that I used to suffer from depression but I'm over that now. Things just suck sometimes and temporary sadness is just the normal response.

But I'm happy. I'm happy. I just have to keep telling myself that I'm happy.

Open Letter, RE: Fire

I am drowning.

I have no air. The time to breath or think or feel escapes me as I fall in and out of the rapids of my life. I slip out of the water only long enough to glaze on a smile and hiccup a laugh so that I can return to the water undisturbed. If I could just fall down long enough maybe I would worry so much about the air.

The heat is always there. It is an existential crisis waiting to erupt. Who what when where why is life? When each hour presses harder and harder on my lungs I can feel the ribs of my morals cracking. I fake tears to feel the warmth on my face; these are by far the most innocuous of my lies. These to You are only the seepage from overflowing dishonesty infecting the valley of my faintly beating heart.

I am the fuel. Lying. Waiting.

Come at me life. I've fought you down every day since before I was born. Maybe it's your turn.

My Bed

I sleep on the top bunk of a crummy single dorm bed. There are about 3 feet between my mattress and the ceiling, and about the same between the wall and the edge.
I have three pillows at the head of my bed, sheets, a comforter, and an extra comforter for the winter crammed to the side on a warm summer night.

Yet I stare through my closed eyelids at the day before we leave, the chains linking and unlinking in a haphazard net of frustration: emotional, physical, spiritual.

Never has my bed felt so empty.

Jenga

My life is like a game of Jenga

  Every brick stuck together like each tick of the clock
  inextricably linked yet so easily taken apart

  Sometimes
    I wish I could I could pull out those moments like a brick in Jenga
    take each dirty, embarrassing, humiliating mark from the tower
    as I watch the tower lean
                                    twist
                                    turn
                                    but not fall.

    I want to take out every brick in the tower
    Every brick until one more would topple the whole thing over

    I want to see the tower fall in my mind's eye
      just to know that I know
        what each brick means
        and wince and cringe and Feel
      as the tower becomes unrecognizable before my eyes
      only to laugh when the tower stands oh so precariously.

  But I let it stand because I know that it is beautiful.
  It was always beautiful.

  Other times
    I wish I would pull one more.

I never was good at Jenga.