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.

I feel

I wake up some days and feel life bursting out of me. It's like an explosion of colour that has more than the seven of a rainbow and colour the world in shade I want to see. Actually it isn't a morning feeling, it's an anytime feeling. I feel as much sadness as I do happiness but it's a strange world we live in where sadness is celebrated and happiness is frowned upon.

So I can't skip down a street singing my lungs out until my throat is sore and I can't see a colleague on my way to get print outs and hug him and say, "My God, I'm thankful, so thankful that you are healthy and happy and back again. I love you I do!" I can't say it without being seen as so much other than just genuinely happy to have a second chance at making somebody feel the joy they make me feel.

Some days I want to make a gob ball of everything I feel. I think it would feel like the spit gobs we made as children, gross bits of chewed up paper all stuck together with spit and drippy but strangely, oh so strangely alive. I would throw it with a big smile and an open heart to my friends and family and strangers who make me think the sun shines because of them, those days I'm even glad for them to think it shines out of their bottoms because heck, maybe they know more than I do. They would be covered in that spray of emotion and know, just know, that the world for me would suck without them.

I can hear my room-mate sing in the next room. She's a bit crazy. She sees all of my inexplicable highs and my frightening lows and only occasionally makes mention of it. She and this friend of ours put up with my bawling like a baby while blowing out the candles on my birthday cake and laughing hysterically 10 minutes later taking the most ridiculous selfies. I hug them and scream in their years and tickle them as though they really do owe me some debt that they will pay off this lifetime. They bear the weight of all my happiness and misery and they still don't know just how much I want to run down a semi-crowded street singing as though I were in a musical. It's true, sometimes I do.

I swear it bursts out of me some days. All my happiness does. But you see the problem is this- I accept being human because I like feeling despite the numbness I have begged for since August. I like feeling every feeling. It kills me to bottle it up but I feel many kinds of dead without feeling the threat of violence in my anger the failure of exhaustion in my sadness or the buoyant exuberance in my happiness. I feel it all as surely as I feel the raindrops or  smell the clawing stench of an open drain and as surely as my sight sees the children to whom that filth is home.

It is real- every emotion. And yet, it's a funny world I live in- there is only so much emotion us mortals are allowed to admit to.  

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.
--

I'm listening to Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone

Some days

Some days I wake up convinced I will be fine.

I'm woken up by the ring of my alarm instead of another dream of you. I'm chained to no memories- not good nor bad. My clothes- washed over and over again since you last saw them, bare no smell of you on this morning. I don't feel the phantom of your touch every time I feel the wind on my skin nor hear your sigh in every rustle of leaves.

I know for certain on days like this that I will be fine; that it will get better. I have reason to believe that with time I will find every shard of my crushed soul and glue it together transforming into somebody more breathtaking and complete than you ever knew.

On days like these I'm told there's a skip in my step and a tune to my laugh.Nobody asks about the colour of my eyes or why I won't smile. They ask instead of my childhood- whether I climbed trees and pulled pranks. I laugh in response, my love for the universe bursting out of every pore of my being- gratitude for the many gifts I have received that I haven't earned, the many opportunities that seemed gift wrapped with my name on the label. The world is perfect under the bandage I've plastered on and I feel the mile deep gashes in my soul begin the slow process of healing.

Just as I settle into my peace, a corner of my mind unlocks- I see an image of the inevitable future. A future I want with all my heart for you to have of happiness, success, joy and most of all, of peace. I see that future without me and that isn't what reminds me I will never heal, it is seeing somebody else in every dream we shared. And so I begin again, from the very bottom, tying again to forget, not hope, not believe and to stop praying to Gods who won't listen anyway.
---

I'm listening to Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd

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.

Fear

I wonder what it is like to live in fear, to bind yourself  to that devil and make it you. How do you cope with every day knowing no decision you make fearlessly is even worthy of discussion? How do you cope with being so scared of your own thoughts that you won;t say them out loud?

I want to pity you. 

I want to teach you to be brave. I want you to love every thought of yours like I do. To be brave for the person you are. To encourage your honesty. To teach you the exhilaration in fighting a battle you believe in. The independence in believing in your decisions.

I loaned you my wings to fly but you lost them in your paralyzing fear. Now I don’t fly either and you’re sorry.

You sacrificed me to your fears and in my mind I’m now dead. In yours my throat is slit a million times with every apology you don’t mean. 

I want to wish you unhappiness but I can’t. I don’t know what is more foolish, your fear of everything or my all consuming love for a weakling. Your fears have shattered my world as much as my bravery has alienated me from everybody. I spent my whole life waiting and now I don't have wings. 

I wish I could live without hope, it would be less painful if I didn't hope you would gather your courage and find my wings.