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.

Blink

Each blink requires a prayer - that the world before your eyes closed will be the same as the world when they open again. And there is no reason that this should be true! Of course we think that there is nothing that will change, that could possibly change, in the blink of an eye. But how much blind faith must we take with each blink that the world we perceive at that moment will choose itself to remain. That as a blink in a smile, a laugh, an embrace, you will not disappear. That in reading an acceptance letter, or seeing the acceptance of your friends, of your family, of your lover, the word "no" will not slip itself before your hopes and dreams. The safe world you see is not safe, the unconditional love before you is not unconditional, and the life you see yourself living is not a life lived. In a blink, you may be killed and your friends may abandon you so I pray. I pray that you keep your eyes open, for this life is too short close your eyes, even for a blink.

Hate

Like most other common sense things in this life, it has taken me way too long to figure this thing out. This thing called hate. To the three of you still on Blogspot, and hopefully zero of which still read my postings, I thought it was about time I tried to explain my hate. For the first time in my life I hated another human being. The hate festered inside of me as a painful sore. I could not for the life of me think of any reason to hate him that was not hypocritical in one way or another. I give up. But in this surrender I have found the answer. There is no human hatred without inherent hypocrisy. To look at another man in the eyes: a man that, for all intents and purposes, looks like you, breaths like you, thinks like you, and to hate him? Hatred of another is no more than a reflection of unhappiness with the self. Not to be metaphysical about it or anything but hatred brings more unhappiness to the hater than to the victim of hatred. No truly happy person has a need to hate and no one who hates can be truly happy. Humans are evolutionarily social, symbiotic creatures. Any relationship short of this is no more than a defect. To anyone and everyone who is reading this, I hope you can shed your hate. Whether you hate a race, a religious group, or just that one, goddamn person, I promise it is just not worth it. No one is worth the harm that your hatred will cause to yourself. No one is worth obsession, and no one is worth burning a scar into the fabric of your past. And if You are reading this, I am sorry. Not because of how our friendship ended, but because I manifested my dissatisfaction, with school, with my life, with my self, by hating you. You didn't deserve it then and you don't now. If you want to talk, so do I. If you don't want to talk, well, I still do. Know at least, in the darkest and most thoroughly ignored of your brain, that I admit it. You Were Right. But in the much more likely case that this falls on deaf, or otherwise nonexistent ears, I hope that simply writing this has helped me. Because right now, even separated by a continent, by months of silence, my hatred consumes me. No, my hatred owns me. It's just not worth it.

Christmas Magic

When we were 5 years old, we used to stay up every christmas eve to see Santa. Every night we would fall asleep too early but wake up just as early as we possibly could to see the presents under the tree. The pine smell and bright lights were magical, they truly were. And all the cheering and food and presents made us laugh and smile for the whole day. But as we grow up it's a little harder to see that magic. The lights are just L.E.D.'s, the smell is worn and familiar, and the myth of Santa died out many years ago. But the parents who put you to sleep every night, and the family and friends that you celebrate with, are they not magical? Is it not magical to see all of the woes and frustrations of daily life melt away to jollity and glee? However hard the fruit cake or dry the ham, christmas food will always taste the best and the laughs on this day will always be the hardest because it doesn't matter if you're 5 or 25, atheist, jewish or christian, boy or girl, genius or athlete, for this one day, the magic is real.