Wednesday 25 September 2013

Bad choices

Life is defined by bad choices. Nobody tells you that growing up and it's too scary an admission to make once you are well and truly an adult; but it's true. Any body who has truly lived will know that successes or the lack of them might define what people think of you but it is your failures that play out over and over again as the milestones, the markers of growth.

I turn twenty five in a few weeks and a summation of my bad choices and consequent failures lead me to believe I have lived a life fuller than I deserve. Make no mistake, my gross miscalculations of risk have lead me to my every victory and there are enough of those to please the world, pity the world won't rescue me from my own voice every night demanding answers I don't have.  

It's silly, how each bad choice is based on one single miscalculation over and over and over again. I trust the wrong people. Repeatedly. I trust the wrong people t burn me to the ground and most certainly the wrong ones to teach me how to walk on water. When I got it wrong the first time I believed I wouldn't again. That I would somehow find wisdom in that betrayal and guard myself. My circle of trust shrank to a quarter of it's former glory and then again and again until it was just one person whom I would trust with my life and every thought, the latter more precious by far. No this isn't about my soul being crushed over and over again, well maybe it is but what of that?

I can only write when I feel choked by every emotion I have tilting to the dark side. It is this side a lot of people choose to believe is the real me, free of powder and lipstick. Somebody I trusted could see into my soul said that I was filled with darkness that would extinguish anybody else's light. I see how myopic she is now, mostly because she couldn't say it to me. I would re-write that sentence to take the sting of betrayal out of it if I could re-write my whole life. My bad choices led me every single time to my good ones but the pain and insecurity that they each bring before the clouds part hardly seem worth the trouble.

Have you wished, as I have to live joyfully oblivious to the duplicity in yourself and the world? 

Monday 9 September 2013

World

The world is happy today. I can feel your happiness, dear world, in my bones- just as I feel the cracks in my skin, and the tickle of hair unbound but not free.

The world is happy today and I watch as you do a silent spectator. You are happy but you feel as I do only happiness in misery, you wonder as I do about a cruel world that will not wait to pick you up when you fall down running towards something you didn't believe would be. Cruel cruel world... oh how you mock me with you laughter and tickling bells while there is nothing but the stench of disappointment inside me, in everything you will let me touch.

I wait for numbness. I know from the muck you have forced me to witness that there will come a time when it will not matter, that the past. present and future will congeal to form a single moment that extends beyond the universe, where I feel nothing and hear nothing; I will be calmed by the unsteady beat of my own heart, numb to the pain it feels. You will take me there I know, but when? You have made me wait too long this time oh world of theirs, you heap your success on my failures squashing me lower than before and yet you will not let me escape.

Oh cruel cruel world, may you burn as I do. 

Sunday 1 September 2013

A complete life

Today a certain social media site, filled with advertisements that have no connection to me whatsoever, makes my life look complete.

I have a picture up that announces professional recognition- from speaking knowledgeably at a public gathering, many others that announce personal fulfillment- from travels across the country from different times, a new profile picture that make me look beautiful in the funny sort of way that only pretty people can manage.

There are congratulations and declarations of a brightly shinning future. Words I'm soaking in while laughing at the truth that I know- that there are smaller details that make me up- details scattered so far and wide I can't put them together yet.

But today I will believe what everybody is telling me, I will believe the illusion of myself that I find so easy to believe of everybody else. Today I will convince myself of having a full life and laugh secretly at everybody who will believe that illusion like me.
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I'm listening to Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone