On Truth and Ignorance
I am afraid to write sometimes. I am afraid that the words that stream from my fingers will be too true to bear; the truths I run from daily will spill over onto paper, and they will be too concrete to deny any longer.
I prefer the abstract, the thoughts that scurry about inside my head, but they need to escape; they cannot breathe. They rapidly multiply until they become so backed up, that nothing can come out. Until it does. And when it does, it destroys any inkling of denial that I may have had. It kills me a little bit each time I type a word that clashes with my fantasies.
But at the same time, I am more alive than ever, because I know the truth. The truth is a powerful thing, and to hear it, to see it, to watch it scroll across the screen, can make you feel as if you are dying. But when you accept it, you are more alive than you have ever been, because you know a little bit more of the truth than you did yesterday. You are a little bit wiser, a little bit stronger.
But it does not change the fact that sometimes, I simply cannot write, because the truth of the matter is, ignorance is bliss, and I’d rather live inside that truth than accept the plethora of other truths I know exist in the deepest creavasses of my soul.
You Don’t Miss Them.
You give yourself to someone, and then, they’re just gone. In the blink of an eye, they’re gone. And they’re not gone because they wanted to leave. They didn’t push you out. They loved you with everything they had in them. And you left them.
You ran away and didn’t look back. And you don’t regret it. You don’t regret it at all. You don’t miss them. All you miss is the closeness. You miss the companionship. You miss the idea of them.
But you don’t miss them.
You notice the absence of tender lips to kiss, a warm body to snuggle up next to. But you don’t miss them. They were merely the soul attached to the body and the brain. You miss their matter, what makes them up. They are a person, always a person, but to you, they were a space filler, a midnight lover, a friend to talk to when things got ugly, when the world rained down its fury.
But you don’t miss them.
And you know they miss you, they miss you with everything they have in them. You were their spark, but they were merely a snuffed ember in your eyes. They want you back. They’d give the world to touch you, to see your face, hear your voice. They’d give it all, selling their soul to become only the warm body that you miss. They miss you so much, it hurts to breathe. But no one can miss you enough to make you miss them back. It is impossible. Feelings do not work that way.
Romance is a farce, you think, as you pull the petals from the flower, always ending up at “he loves me”. But you don’t love him. You never do. You never did. You don’t miss him. And as you stare at the browning petals scattered at your feet from years of plucking, you wish that you did.
You think you know someone.
Butterflies. Birds chirping. Voices melding in harmony over long distance lines. Sweet truths lies truths lies. What are you really saying? I don’t know you anymore. The boy I idealized never existed. He was an enigma, too good to be true, but they always are, they always are. Illusory. A dream. Just a dream, here and gone with the rising of the sun. Your voice lingers, just an echo of the voice I came to know and love, an echo in my hollowed heart. My eardrums can’t hold on anymore. Every dream ends. Every shadow fades in the dark. But yours lingers. It lingers in the shadows of the shadows cast by the moon. Dark. Lies. Nothing ever was what I thought, but it never is, it never is. Let it go, child, says my brain, but my heart holds onto your lies like sweaty fingers grasping dusty cliffside. Dear life depends on your hand reaching out to save me. But you are gone. You were never there. You were never there at all. I slip. I have fallen. But I always do, I always do.
Your heart, she does not lie to you. Never, not once. She and she alone knows the truth. The only lies you experience come from your head trying to mix things up, trying to pick apart that which is already in its simplest form.
Lies do not come from your heart; she is always the honest one. It is your head that you must watch out for.
The reality is never as beautiful, or alluring, or seductive, as the ideal. So let me be that ideal in your head. I promise that you want the idea of me more than what I really am.
If Love Were Enough, I Would Not Have to Write Such Things.
I would have sworn on my very life that you were going to be the one who ended my sorrowful search for a soul that twinkles like my own. If you would have asked me then, I would have laughed at the fact that you had to ask “Will you?” instead of “When will you?”
But my seasick heart, she is fickle, a perfectionist when it comes to men, and after the rose-tinted glasses fell from my face, she started to critique every last part of you, from the thickness of your neck to your deep snores that kept me awake at night. Even the excessive punctuation you used drove stakes into my eyeballs; your all-too-positive attitude made my blood boil, for you had no room for realism in your happy heart.
It is with deepest regret that I must leave, but you are not what I built you up to be (ah, but they never are). My heart projects its poetry onto the world, and you, you I could not even conjure up a single passionate word for; all I wrote were words of annoyance, sugar-coated phrases stating that you are not the one.
If you love me so, then please, just let me leave. You do not deserve to endure the pain of loving this poet any longer.
Going, Going, Gone.
I will keep on running, running, running, until I am merely a blur in your peripheral vision. Try to catch me, and all you will get is a mouthful of dust and words you wish you could say, that now, you must either swallow, or let build up inside your raw, dry throat, until they choke away your breath, rendering you speechless; we all know that dead men do not speak.
Awakening
One day, you wake up, and you realize that what you had before is pallid and pale in comparison with what you have now.
One day, you wake up, and you know that everything you thought you wanted in all the others was never what your heart truly desired; it is only what you put yourself through because you didn’t know any better.
One day, you wake up; you grow up and become a learned woman with a heart that shines and a soul that sings with passions and a love that you’d never thought you’d even be able to see as more than a spec, or speak as more than a raspy whisper.
One day, you wake up, and you realize that you’ve been imagining being with him 10 years from now; you also realize that you’d never imagined such seemingly silly things before.
One day, you wake up with excitement instead of dread; with hope for the future instead of that all-too-familiar pain of longing for the past.
One day, you wake up and realize that the world is beautiful; he is beautiful, and you deserve him.
One day, you wake up.
Today, the birds are chirping in their sing-song chatter, and I feel as if I’ve stepped into a time-warp, a wormhole transporting me back to yesteryear. I don’t feel ravaged by my demons; it is peaceful inside my bones, and I am actually excited about what is to come in my life.
I have not felt this peace in years. I wake up every morning feeling tired and defeated. But not today. I just cannot tell if it is an illusion, some set of circumstances being just right to remind me of past times, or if it is a legitimate feeling, a calm before the storm, so to speak, though I do hope it is the calm following in the storm’s muddy boot prints instead of the former.
It is, as if, I am the girl before the horrid monsters took their places in my body. I am the girl-who-once-was, if only for this morning. I am actually content. I feel normal. I feel peaceful. I finally feel like myself again.
And I could not ask for anything more.
Nothing makes sense. Nothing makes sense because this thing we have, this summer child birthed of freshly cut grass and humidity, does. She is flawed, but perfectly so. She aches to dig out of my belly, but she knows that to thrive, she needs time to mature. Impatient and imperfect. Two things that she should not be, but she keeps them in check; they make her beautiful.
She doesn’t really fit into the mold of nonsense that has become my life, but I will house her, keep her healthy, and when she’s really born, we can see the manifestation of what we’re building. This nonsensical thing, this love. Structured and unstructured simultaneously. Budding to life. Ready to flower, but doing so early will only cause death.
So we will wait. We will wait for the sense to become nonsense so it can fit like a jigsaw piece into our intricate lives. Patience in an impatient world. Love in the midst of turmoil and hate. This thing. This child. We have to wait. We have to wait for her to be born. And when she is, we will see exactly where things are going, at least for a little while. We can hold the future in our arms. Our future. Our life. Ours to keep forever.
