Stuck In Me

    We are soldiers on a barren battlefield, fighting our war each day and night against an enemy we can neither see nor touch, but we know is there.  Be it doubt, sloth, fear, or anything else, we all have demons that we must choose to wrestle or run from.

    Your war is unique, often played out in battles that are just yours.  It is so easy to feel alone.  To believe yourself the only warrior, standing alone between life and the void, your philosophical struggles somehow sparing the oblivious masses.  Yet such thought only serve to embitter the mind and soul, to separate us.  Yet we were never meant to fight alone.

    I look out on the swarming hive that is our city, and I see everyone caught up.  In food, in money and work, in lust for power or flesh, in so many ways tainting and wasting until any idea of there being a purpose is absurd.  Yet we all do.  I do.

    To think you are above it is the true absurdity.  No matter how high you climb, how hard you fight, how many demons you slay, you are human.  You are.  It is our prison, our gift, our true challenge.

    Across time and our globe we have tried to define and redefine what we are, what we can be, what we should be.  Yet even in the struggle to understand, we lose focus, and find ourselves alone again.  Those guys believe weird things, their values are all messed up, they are petty and foolish, they are unenlightened and simple, they hate me and I must defend myself, they blew up my tower, they bombed my town.  We are lost in our own hate, in our own history, in our own solitude.  We haven’t the courage to lay down arms and understand the pain of these “enemies.”

    We are all the same.  Pale, light, male, female, short, tall, rich, poor, policeman, banker, president, vagrant, sex offender, terrorist, suicide.  We are all to be loved.  

    We need to stop fighting alone.

A Dress, A Choice

I often think of that dress I bought you.  Our lives were tearing apart, and I was so sure you were going to leave, and you did, but I loved to see you happy.  I always did.  And as you tried on this dress, I saw joy in your eyes, so I seized it.  Or tried.

It was expensive, I know, and I never saw you wear it outside the store.  Sometimes I wonder when you did, who you went home with, what happened to this dress.  But that is unimportant.  What mattered was what this dress meant to me.  What it symbolized for me.  A selfless gift in the face of hopelessness.  An acknowledgement that I had no power or control, but in this void I would choose love and happiness over anger.  Even if it would not choose me.

It’s funny, or maybe sad, that I don’t even remember what the dress looks like.  I remember the moment, and the emotion, over the details.  The dress I do remember, a plain purple one you’d worn so many times before.  I remember watching you walk away down an alley, in a moment that felt so heavy.

Somewhere in my mind these dresses have defined the end of an era.  One waves goodbye and the other a final gesture of love before we were over.

But nothing is ever over.  I carry in me more complex emotion than anyone seems to believe.  I can be torn with laughter and tears, smiles and rage, all in a moment.  Every moment.  I just choose to pull out what I do, but it is all always there.  Bubbling beneath the surface.

             I don’t want pity, I despise it.  When other people talk about my life and tear up it makes me angry.  I don’t want people to feel bad for me.  I don’t want to be pitied.  I’m not the one who quit, I didn’t run away and hide.  I faced my doom head on, and I did it with a gift dress in hand and love in my heart.  That is who I chose to be.

Wounded Warriors Wounding One Another

I never meant to hurt you.  I never meant to break your heart.  But somewhere along the way of my own heartbreak, intentions ceased to be.  There was just me, taking comfort in you.

You are warm, sweet, kind, and somehow still fun and interesting.  I never had to pretend to be enjoying myself.  You were trying so hard to not fall for me, and I saw that.  You wanted real, you wanted depth.  But I am spent.

You were so upset to discover I still talk to her, still love her.  You left and I understand.  I stood in uncharacteristic silence as you packed your things and left.  No one wants to be a consolation prize.  

Still, even knowing how it hurt you, I couldn't apologize.  How do you say sorry for loving?  For missing someone so dearly that, despite rejection, every couple days you feel compelled to talk to them?  For laying your heart on the line, even when you knew it would be crushed?  If anything, you should understand that.  We are both weary and weathered, and lost in a storm of need and emotion.

You wanted to turn this respite we found into something real.  In so many ways, we are similar, yet not in that.  After hurt and heartache, you spring back to your feet.  Tears in your eyes, but eager to find the love you've been missing.  I, however, leave my heart behind.  I venture forth, the same man, but lacking my soul.  Bit by bit, I'll salvage what remains, but dare not fall for me in this state, for I am a shell.  And I told you.  I told you not to fall in love with me.

I wish there were a way for me to satisfy you in the state I am.  But you will suffer no imitation.  And I?  If I were really wishing, love would not have failed me, and you would never have known me enough for me to wound you.

Seagull

    Are we all lost boys?  Does everyone else sit here and cry out “why?”  Why did I have to grow up?  Why could I not stay a boy, and spend my life dreaming of adventure and pirates?  My heart is too weak and naive for the world and the life I have.

    Heartbreak doesn’t make us better.  I convinced myself it did, that the scars I carried made me more beautiful, that my pain would temper me like heated steel.  But my agony has only ever led to compromise, to a desperate struggle to feel anything else.  And all paths lead back to despair.  Sometimes I’m forced here, and other times, a prison of my own creation.  

    Everyone gives you advice, tells you how to live, how to be, how to fix it.  All those people who don’t understand.  Who have not only not lived your pain, and are not you.  How arrogant to think your solution mine.  I feel insignificant in your eyes as you try to fix me.  You make me feel so much more broken.

    No one can truly know another.  We hold things back from the world.  We hide our darkest and saddest thoughts.  We have shames we never let see the light of day.  How can we not feel lonely?  Show my darkness, you say?  You can handle it, you say?  That vanity again.  I can’t handle it, and it lives in me.

    When I love, I am wounded.  And when I don’t, I wound others.  Yes, the world is beautiful.  But it is so vicious and vile.  It will tear you up, blind you, and leave you for dead.  It’ll teach you to be like it.  But I’m too tired to be vicious anymore.  

Free Form

    I am a dream.  I am a nightmare.  I am the energy that surges up in you when you lie awake at night and plan to be better tomorrow.  I am the cold loneliness you feel when you are lost to the despair in your mind each day.

    “I know what you need, and I hope beyond hope I am the one to give it to you.”  What was that?  A cruel lie?  Or a tragic truth, a surrender of love and desire, lost in this madness we call life?  Or even still, perhaps it just seemed like a sweet thing to say?  Say it now cause it sounds good, no idea how much someone might cling to it, how it could eviscerate one’s soul, once it has all come out, now that we’re all alone again.

    Or not alone.  Never alone.  Never with enough time or clarity to really know where we are headed, or why.  Rats on wheels in clear cages, watching other rats spinning and pretending we don’t all know what is happening.  Easier to lie to myself than anyone else.  Easier to pretend this game is what I want to play than to try to break free.

    But hopeless is as hopeless does.  The Cooler King tried again and again, and I have yet to have the courage to try once.  Inside is too small, but outside is terror inducing in its enormity.  And that seems it.  In the cave or out.  All the fantasies in the world dissolve in the face of cowardice.

    My dreams lie where ability and motivation never meet.

Nutshell

    Mortimer was born on an unremarkable spring morning.  His parents were simple people, farmers, and Mortimer was the fourth of an eventual eight children.

    He spent most of his childhood doing chores.  He was a quiet boy, who never really got in the way or talked with the rest of the family.  For a couple years, his eldest brother decided to pick on him quite ruthlessly, but he grew out of it, and Mortimer never complained or cried.

    When he was 18, Mortimer left home to move to the city.  Years before, his brother had left as well.  His parent’s had begged his brother, “Don’t leave, we need you.  The farm will be yours one day.”  Yet Mortimer was unsure if anyone noticed his departure.  If they had, they did not say anything.

    In the city, life was very different.  Everything was busy and loud, and it seemed no one had time for anyone, not just Mortimer.  He found a job, working in the storehouse of the city museum.  It was quiet, lonely work, but he found himself surrounded by antiquities and curiosities from around the world.  He would work late into the night, long after the others had left, and imagine he was a different man from a different age.

    It was a brisk fall morning he met Ruby.  She saw him sitting on a park bench, oblivious to the cold, reading a history textbook.  She started a conversation, and she thought his awkwardness was sweet, his quiet nature calmed her.  Her friends had told her she needed to seek a different sort of man, as she had been so wronged, and Mortimer felt very safe to her.

    For the first time, Mortimer got a taste of love.  Everything seemed brighter, fresher and more interesting with Ruby in his life.  He worshipped her, and for two years he poured his every thought, dream and energy into her.  And he was happy to do it.

    One summer morning, she was gone, and remained so for every morning to come.  Mortimer had at first been worried, but her friends assured him she was fine.  She’d met someone new, who excited her, and she was finally happy.  He had thought she had been.  But as time passed, he began to understand.  She was meant to fly, and Mortimer lived underground.

    More years passed, and he retreated deeper into his mind and the museum.  His life was there, his dreams lived in the artifacts, and he didn’t feel at home in the building he slept.

    One day, he was no longer alone as he stayed into the evenings.  A new guide, Pearl, wandered the halls and storerooms at night as well, lost in the history and mystery of the treasures.  It was only a matter of time for them to connect.  Kindred souls, their understanding of one another was a peace Mortimer had never known, or even thought possible.  

    Before long, they were wed, and Mortimer felt he had become the man he had been suppose to be.  He did not think life could be better, until the day she told him she was pregnant.  His heart unlocked, and he was truly joyful.

    But there was complication after complication, and four months later he held her hand as the doctor told them they’d lost the baby.  He held her so tightly that night, and each of the following nights, as her body shook with sobs.  We’ll get through this, he thought.  I love her, we’ll make it though.

    But it was too much for Pearl, and one spring evening, Mortimer came home to find her dead in their bed, empty pill bottles scattered about.  And as he lie there beside his wife, he held her and cried quietly, and wondered if she’d forgotten it was his birthday.

    Though his world and heart had shattered, Mortimer’s day to day did not, and he went on working away his days, and wandering the halls at night, until he became an old man.  The other workers would make jokes about retirement and laugh, and he would smile or chuckle and pretend to not get that they weren’t really joking.  No one wants to work with the creepy quiet old man, but this place is all I have, he knew.

    He was taking a crate of ancient ornaments into basement storage when he fell.  He tumbled down the stairs with his cargo, and crashed into the floor.  He knew he was hurt, that things were broken, but he couldn’t find the strength to call for help.  He waited for five hours until someone stumbled upon him.  As the paramedics were taking him from the museum, he overheard some of the other employees talking.  “Those ornaments were irreplaceable.”

    He died in Central City Hospital before anyone there had a chance to care about him.  His body remained in the morgue for ten days as the staff tried to contact family.  They were unsuccessful in their efforts, and he was buried on a county plot, in a row of John and Jane Does. 

We Never Said A Word

    “I really didn’t think it would happen like this.  Somehow, this was the option I thought least likely.  But I guess I should have known.”

    “It’s what I want.”

    “So you said.  But I’ve never known you to actually have a clue about what you want.  I mean, what do you want?  Why do you want it?”

    “I told you, I want him.  That’s all that matters now.”

    “I guess so.  I guess you don’t owe me a thing.  But I’d really like to know why we went through all we did for you to just walk away.   I mean, why start any of this at all?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “Ok, there is the answer I am more used to hearing.  You don’t know cause you don’t strive to know.  You don’t know because you stuff everything down rather than try to feel one goddamn thing.”

    “I have felt so much!  I can’t stop feeling.  I hurt and cry everyday and I just can’t do it anymore.  I’m making a choice because I just have to know.  I’m falling apart.”

    “So fall apart!  Fall to pieces and sort it out after.  Live and feel and surrender to the whims of your heart.  I don’t know how you claim to love a thing with a heart so cold.”

    “Fuck you.  You don’t know.  I can’t let it take me, I can’t put it back together.”

    “I do know.  I know better than you think.  I’m not some indestructible creature.  I feel and hurt and fall apart everyday.  But I fight and find a way through, and I am certain in the end it will be worth it.  I’ll have something most don’t.”

    “You can’t make my choice.  You said you would respect whatever I chose.”

    “I know.  I did.  I do.”

    “I’m sorry.”

    “Me too.  I miss you.”

    “I miss you too, Sailer.”