When Darkness finds me

I can feel you. 

You don't have to shout any louder, run any faster, be any heavier or any more anything, not even lesser. I can see you from the corner of my eye and sense you with every beat of my heart, creeping towards me. 

Your grey vapours only chase me harder when I run so I chose, this time, to brave your wrath, to cross my fingers and wait for you to pass me by. 

I chose to believe the false promises I made myself and I chose to believe the false comfort every disconnected whisper offered me because I was hiding from you in plain sight. I was hiding from the person you are conjured up by the recesses in my mind not deep enough to keep me safe.

I hate that you caught up. I hate that you chose the brightest day, in a room most filled with love in a voice I cherish deeply to wrap your vapourous trail around me and inch your way up to my mind while I stood paralysed- without even a whimper in self defense.

You know your own ugliness. 

You know I will succumb to the power you have over me. You enjoy the chase and it was longer this time than ever before. I didn't miss you. Not one bit. If I could wish you away I would. I let myself believe that is all it would take but you have proved me wrong. I will congratulate you on your victory, ever the graceful loser. You have taught me from practice, I will even thank you, gratitude flowing out of the wounds you stab into me. 

I wonder if this will be my last memory of these months in the rainbow. I stand here immobilized by the crushing weight of the knowledge you bring. 

You call it the truth and I want to believe you but it is difficult to have my mind reconstruct reality to suit a whim while you are twisting your knife deeper into my heart making sure I can see you through the haze of tears I won't shed from pride.

After all that I have sacrificed- laughing little floaty bubbles and flitting through reality, my pride is all I have and if you asked nicely I'm sure I would give you that too, but not while you suffocate me and watch me bleed out so clinically. 

It won't do. I won't give you that satisfaction, not because I don't want to- for you I would give anything, but because my pride is the only oxygen I will find in the dark lonely grave you have dug for me.

I will dream of flight and wine and dancing and sleep through the worst of this. I will wake up in another season having befriended my nightmares again. Companionship more reliable than your promised smiles in the dark- I am blind.

Of things jagged and Beautiful

I like broken things. I like laying out every piece, feeling the bite of every jagged end and wondering whether I should let it slip into oblivion at the bottom of a trash can, fixed back with glue and love to a measure of it's former glory, or find an artist to transform the broken jagged ends into art that is as stunning and under-appreciated as every broken piece is. I can spend years sitting on the floor of my room cross legged as the jewel tones of my curtains drift in and out of the periphery of my vision making up stories for every piece, drawing parallels to my life that don't really exist, convincing myself of the missed opportunity of that broken thing, the newer opportunities that await it, in my home or of somebody more deserving. I can spend lifetimes, as many as the strands of hair I have on my head. Because broken things don't make me cry. Broken people do, but oh how they appeal to me anyway.

I can't explain it. I love imperfection. I am obsessed with it, especially in people. I'm suspicious of people as clear as fiction- as good and neat- or not, as a character I could read about or easier yet write about. What hooks me is reams and reams of flaws tucked into a beautiful package of disdain. I like the complexity of broken people who are convinced of their perfection.  I'm obsessed with unraveling the flaws and chewing on them, turning each flaw to catch the light and observe as it bursts into the dazzling human brilliance that it each is.

It starts with a conversation. A simple hello, I find intrigue in that warm confidence. And then it begins, rapid exchanges of a humor I don't possess, of a confidence I can't be bothered working on. New cities, new experiences, questions- lots of questions that I hold my breath waiting for the answer to. It's a volley really, I like answering questions more than asking them. The things people are curious about say so much more than what any other conversation reveals.
One word builds one castle, one card over another, one idea over another, a simple exchange, a thoughtful gesture, a brutally honest- indifferently delivered truth seen as harsh but oh so endearing. A display of anger, a measure of comfort, the intensity of a plan, the casual comfort of knowing safety, of finding a smile everyday. Slowly the pieces come together- a reward for patience that I work at.

The warnings are clear, from me. I can hear myself shut down conversation with myself and not inspect the many pieces I've collected, a warning echoed repeatedly but gently, another piece of the puzzle collected. It's a cruel test of myself to feel every jagged end, but not find out just how deep every cut could be- I repeat to myself every lesson learnt the hard way from the past; of the parade of beautiful, good people too perfect in their imperfections to wait while I take a hammer to my life. I know beautiful people, broken, mysterious, beautiful people and I know what I let them do to me. After years I have given up trying to change my preference. I can't help but be fascinated by every deformity; discoloration is my oxygen.

And so I wait for confirmation, to be told the jagged ends won't cut bone- not mine, I wait to set out the pieces until I have a hypothesis I'm fairly certain of. I hold myself back because the only way to inspect the perfect symphony of this pristine imperfection is to take a hammer to it and see what happens. My most dangerous imperfection is self destruction with a wide minefield of every person who matters. The battle scarred but surviving are the keepers.  But here's the thing about people who take their time with people, a little secret we're ashamed of. People who wait for people hold the could-bes dear, we don;t know how to give up while doors are slammed in our faces.

Calculations and possibilities are laid out from one constellation all the way back, the hopes mulled and debated and paced out until an unshakable truth presents itself- to continue enjoying the space or dive, head first, life in hand trusting unconditionally in the power of that hope questionably. And this is when the jagged broken ends emerge and do exactly the opposite of all those calculation. You see, they're beautiful. Radiantly beautiful, the kind that is blinding and brilliant and magnetic and so we race in a white darkness into the harshest of the impervious jagged ends being cut in a heartbeat like paper ribbons; at once amusing and exasperating in our giddy obtuseness.

And so, like unwanted paper ribbons we fall away as waves crash, slowly to gather again, quicker this time because of a knowledge learnt over and over again from many years, shutting out the questions and berating our weakness to hope.
Until the next parcel arrives and this dance begins all over again.

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? 

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

Sadness

When my heart is cracked and bleeding, a rainbow forms in the sky. You look at it and smile not knowing the pain that painted the sky.
When I cry, big drops of rain quench the thirsty, baked red mud and little children run out from under tin shades to dance with smiles.

I will be happy again and the sun will shine again. It will happen but not soon.

Of parks, bubbles and the life you deny yourself

There should be a word for it, somebody should make it up, the word to use when you can sell sorrow for companionship.

We live in an ugly world. What we see around us- the greed, the selfishness, the need to protect nobody but oneself- doesn't help cover the aesthetic flaws of the broken pavements with hungry crying children on it. We are so numb to every human suffering we see that, now, one feels worse for the dead rat being torn apart by a hungry crow than an old woman too old to lie on a bed, crying into her own naked shoulder begging for a morsel to eat.

We grow less patient and more numb with every day living the busy lives we do. We feel protected by the bubble we build locking out anybody who doesn't seem right. There is a sadistic joy in differentiating between the us and them; the them can be anybody- that boy who won't take the nail paint off his little finger, the woman on the train who can't contain her excitement about a new day. But that bubble gets empty. The people you surround yourself with echo the hollowness you build into your life and so you reach out, you let one hand slip out of the bubble and your wandering nervous hand has many takers. The ears in that hand are filled suddenly by those stories you chose to ignore, those wails you tuned out of.

Everybody has a sad story and suddenly everybody wants to tell you what it is. You pat yourself on the back for building a life free of such suffering and yet you watch doing nothing while that somebody will tell you of the horrors he suffers. You will watch every gesture he makes, listen to every changing tone in his voice, you analyse, critically, the truth of his story- the value it will bring to your next drinking session. You let your cold heart thaw and take in his suffering putting the colour back in your cheeks while beginning to realise that to this man, his suffering is his ticket into your bubble; a space you know you will not share with anybody who is not an echo of you.

You hand slips back into the bubble. Some disinfectant and a walk into a park with children who can count out money but can't do arithmetic drains out that story you heard, there is a babble of discontent that is so loud, it drowns out any truth you learnt. You laugh at the prospect of a person as broken as him finding his way into your everyday until you realise just how broken you are. You realise you traded your pain with him. You suffered his agonies as much as he suffered yours and your bubble is not safe anymore, fragile and easily shattered by the tears you fill it with.
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I'm listening to Jee Le Zaraa