Complacent confusion

Take it back summertime. I remember when you wholly belonged to me, when I didn’t care, when I was good without trying, when every thought came easy, when I didn’t feel the need to recognize my romantic self Oh “feelings”, “feelings”, “feelings” I wish you would go away.
And now what? …that gradually growing feeling of complete inadequacy is slowly heaping itself upon my head and soon I won’t be able to breathe. I don’t know if I like it very much. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this life of endless hoops and back road mazes. “Feeling” lost. Why do they get to decide what is right and wrong? Hypocrites, the lot of them. They claim they want you to grow and become more than you are, but is it true growth when they point in only one direction and tell you that you must go that way? I don’t think it is as “liberating” as the claim. I laugh at them, and they don’t know it. Maybe one day I’ll have the courage to challenge them to their faces, but for now who am I? What do I know? I think I am with Mann on this one. “It is a fact that there is no society in the world so dumb and hopeless as a circle of literary people who are hounded to death as it is. All knowledge is old and tedious to them. Utter some truth that it gave you considerable youthful joy to conquer and possess- and they will chortle at you for your naïveté…literature is a wearing job. In human society, I do assure you, a reserved and skeptical man can be taken for stupid, whereas he is really only arrogant and perhaps lacks courage. So much for ‘knowledge’.”

This feeling of indifference is not motivational. I can’t see past the second page of this tattered book because the remainder has gone missing. They stand alone, in another room, where unseen eyes guard them every hour. To be beyond this place would be relief, a thing I can’t currently possess. Creep up, creep up, and crush me down, I dare you.

Romping about through invisible snow still leaves me feet soaking wet

Strap them on, the boots for blistery weather. No matter how much you prepare the flurries still seep in, and you find your socks steadily growing damp. So you trek back to the house, change them, and head back out. This time the outcome is the same. The subtle chill in the cracks between your toes brings this to your attention. Again you return and change. By the end, you have found that you have travelled back and sought change more than a dozen times now.

This time you double up, two pairs masterfully attached to your limbs by blue waterproof duct tape. And although this time it takes a little bit longer, after a while, your waterlogged socks make a squishy noise with every step you take. What more will it take? Should I stay inside, ignoring the call of nature? Should I stay in, alone, and sustain myself with a well-built fire? You ponder this for a while with your elbows resting on your knees and your head propped up by your hands as you sit teetering on the edge of your blanket-laden bed.

A knock comes to your door and you think to yourself, “Who else would be out in this weather?” As you make your way across your living room the sunshine peeking in through a crack in the pulled-shut drapes catches your attention. You gently crack the door open and peer outside, the postal man stands on your door step dressed in his finest pair of postal shorts and a short sleeved shirt. He has a bright yellow smiley face pin attached too his lapel. He looks at you bewildered by the presence of your winter clothes layered one upon the other. He chuckles to himself as he informs you kindly that the temperature today is a lovely sun-filled 73 degrees, “and well isn’t it nice?” You play if off of course, informing him that you "just got these and wanted to try them on" because you are ecstatic about an up coming ski trip in a few months. You lied and he believed you.

You have always lied, and for the most part they have always believed you. The truth is you have never set foot outside of your front door. You have never been out in nature, you have never even tried. You have just lied and lied and lied, until you finally believed it yourself. When will you stop? When will you realize the snow had never come and that it has always been a mild 73 degrees? And as this realization sets in you slowly work open the package with no return address that the postman has delivered. You smile to yourself as you pull out a set of flip flops from underneath the packing peanuts. You slip them on and for once in your life you give it a chance. And as you swing the door wide and step outside, you feel truly alive for the first time in your life. And this time, there is no turning back.

Nothing stands as it once did.

I believed in you. I believed in me.
I used to believe, but now I see
the end stands just feet in front of me.

I tried and I failed. I tried again.
This thought of breathing, this thought of sin
This thought is slowly winning within.

How has it come to this, this bliss, this pain?
Wrapped into one, fighting each other in vain
Making sense of this blotched black spot
Breaking sense through my far reaching thought

With certainty on my lips I speak into the dark
With doubt in my mind I break my soul
With hope in my heart I bend my will
And force this heart to feel, to feel.

Please understand that it is not what you think. I am not who I say I am. I have become lost inside of myself and I am unable to discover the truth. I am unable to face this hardship. I am unwilling to watch my heart bleed. I will protect it at all costs. I will see the demise of my soul before I will allow my heart to be broken by this thing. So I will keep silence close and a fake smile ever ready.

I am breakable

My heart bursts with these feelings that I can’t quite convey when using only simple black shaped blotches strewn across white blank trees. Thoughts run about, but they are ever escaping. Unable to form them into phrase, I struggle, grasping for nothing, everything. I want to laugh. I want to cry. I wish to live no longer, yet not die. Realizing reality defeats the purpose, realizing my reality, the reality of my life, brings nothing but joy, sorrow rapped into one. I cry for what I do not know. I laugh for what I do and others don’t, and I fear for what may or may not come. I stretch little by little until the strings break, the off-tune notes of the unchained melody of my heart wither and weaken. The song of my life turns to white noise and fades to silence. My heart ties attempt to reach any anchored place, yet I stop them knowing full well I should give aid instead. I fight myself. I fight all others. I can only lose. I can only win. I can only end. I can only begin. The confusion takes root and takes over, yet again, confusion in the knowledge that I know what will be. How they ask? “You cannot.” “It is impossible.” They see through wax. The light shines through, the hazy mixture of shape and movement, but they cannot see what I see. They cannot see how I see. I see only beauty. I see love unconfined. For this I choose to wander, to be led by a wanderer. For love has no permanent home, it goes where it is needed. It is not tied, nor am I. I am forced to roam; it is my purpose. I will see friends come and go, each time my heart will break, there is no doubt of this. I will weep for an absent family whom I will never cease to love. But I must go. I am a nearly finished puzzle awaiting the final piece. I will leave all behind, to find something that fills me more. I won’t know till I have found it, nor will I ever be able to explain it. In this, trust me. Trust that I know what I do. Accepting will be hard, and the wounds may not heal easily, ever. But something greater calls, and I must answer, something greater than myself. I have seen the days of my life in slow motion, rewind, pause, and fast forward but never stop. Today I push stop so that I may push forward. Love will carry me to the end of my fears. My heart cries for more, nothing more but more. It beats furiously trapped inside this skin, this mentality of a false forward momentum. Today I have realized nothing moves and I can’t sit still. I have to go, go away from it all. Risk the fall. Break the rules. Break my own heart for the sake of others, but only they will be able to piece it back again. Only once I am shattered can I be whole; so break me fear, break me life, break me love. I am breakable, oh so breakable.