An Extension of My Reticence

There are coins gathered upon a dresser which houses, or hides, so many of my memories. Perhaps that's what make a house a home though...the ability to hide truth behind predetermined definition. We build walls for the sake of concealment, adorning modern tombs like mummified wombs, trading sanity for rent as we struggle to recreate the classics we were reared beneath. But the classics have all but burned away and we've been left to sift through the ashes for flakes of gold which initially turned a last name to a legacy. A legacy which circulates through the anxious hands now holding these circular forms of capitalist circulation with a bit more intent. I move my identifying senses along the embossed edges of manufactured nature, recalling the week when speech lost spilled into the space occupying the absence of a year so defined by the distance that space continues to represent. 

 

It feels so different now. Not so much in response to the design of well-worn currency, but rather the current depletion that at the time appeared to be what drove us North. We chased the promise of condensed constellations through hours where they cease to truly be transmitted. How odd the duality of decompression, and how shared points amid diverging timelines can possess such polar imagery. Reminding us how innate existences don't always experience universal resurrection. Now I'm brought back to the battle between defining freedom and actually feeling liberated. The difference which has some swallowing scripted solitude while others solitarily swallow anything to keep them from physically feeling alone. I'm not sure where I reside in that equation anymore. I'm inhaling steam, confusing aspiration for the inspiration which keeps my feet about the current we only ever have the chance to admire or admonish in a past or future tense. That tense only extending my reticence...my negligence...my absence from scene unfurling like flags which we revere primarily as a result of fear and not genuine adoration.  I have so much to say. So much still destined to be ignored and overplayed all the same.

 

While I loathe losing track of self-dictated paths, it pales in comparison to the terror which represents feeling forced. I'll forever be a being that would prefer washing himself in pulsing silence than to attempt keeping pace with an insincere race to realization. Because I could, with ease, fill pages with lines of love free from objective interference, but we know that word possesses slight feeling of its own, and I have directions to digest. Destinations will certainly fill our lungs with the swell of streams mistaken for rivers, but destinations are merely markers where our motion meandered momentarily, and we have much more grandeur ideas in mind to fulfill. We're in love with infinity. We're seduced by endlessness. We are infatuated by the mere thought of endlessness, for we recognize ourselves as anything but. We sit where the waves come to settle, feet forever crashing, pointed towards infinity as the moon breaks its existence in line with ours. We stand with backs facing organized definition, dreaming of a scene that require little of either. I must admit though that I'm uncertain if it's that I long to feel rearranged or if that rearrangement is utilized for the sake of opposite outcomes.

 

We lean into promises of longevity when we feel like we are losing grip on our realities. If we fall short in the present we will simply correct it further down the line, and if that connection fails to reach fulfillment we'll be none the wiser. It's as if some forms exist only because we have yet to prove them wrong on a level of blind absolution often required by such believers. I find myself envying those kneeling in the absence of supposed security. They bring the cup to their lips, and even if it doesn't fill them they tell themselves they are full. I find allure in such a level of conviction even when I fail to find such a level of commitment. Because perhaps I've never really envied the belief system as much as the confidence the system instills. Let's be honest, I've never needed a savior on the level to which I needed something to convince me I have the ability to save. 

 

Now I hear them speaking into adolescent ears that these beings are in better places. They fail to inform, however, that those beings are forever breathing within you and regardless of where beliefs, shared or otherwise, place them along this disjointed timeline, they fail to dissipate. Transcriptions are easy to present, but commuting to the scripts is where the body begins breaking down. Bodies are only bodies, and this I know, but the warmth of an embrace is so quickly exchanged with chills, as is this season doesn't innately provide an excess of such promises already. I was never much for the snow, but a year of record warmth was replaced by flurries as I stood on the back porch letting the news spill into my head through a hole in my pocket, and it hasn't slowed down all week. The new year pulled in, pulling down the veil, and dreams of being pulled from here have become buried beneath the ice. Comfort is not a destination. Not that it cannot result in such a way, rather destination based comfort is still reliant upon a particular perspective to bring it to life, and if I cannot find a means to cultivate that perspective in a personal sense, location insignificant, than I'll be cursed to a life of running. 

 

Believe me I've already attempted such escapes and they all led to an emptiness I'm still struggling to define within the lines of parchment seen by only artificial illumination. How odd yet intriguing to contemplate they was that so much genuine, pure, discovery has come to be unearthed beneath feigned forms of luminescence. It's as though the warmth which fails to fall from the source of light, which fails to fill this room, is left to become represented by the words reared beneath its synthetic stare. 

 

I still get chills free from the weather's intervention, watching the yearly ornamental presentation dancing in the atmosphere beyond the confines of rebirth. This sea has begun to fill my lungs with salt as I choose dehydration again and again. It's not lost on me, the irony of drying out atop an expanse of ions I can't grasp in spite of their ability to consistently carry me.  I still sit on the shoreline attempting to define the dividing line between sands and tides. I'm losing track of the division's definition. I'm losing the definition of self as I spill into the ocean from the height of detached travel. I long for transition. I long to feel the rush of the middle moments without relying on completion to experience closure. I see no need to insist our understanding can only arrive at the end of a beginning or the beginning of the end. Allow me to seduce the space between. Allow me to represent that space, the distance you chase and flee from all the same. We open the window to take in the aviated call of morning, but while the birds fill a single cell, the soundtrack of a forest fire rages across the opposing side of a singular structure. We paint such beauty while daydreaming of destruction. Pulling teeth from timeless smiles, igniting the remaining oxygen within flooded rooms. We chase ourselves to the coasts under the hope of finding a location to hold all our previous lows. We harbor these lows like felons through high pressure fronts. 

 

We needn't rely on decompression to understand fulfillment. We needn't rely on constantly being fulfilled to feel alive. It's ok to find yourself engulfed in idle moments, and I must learn to better embrace that idea. Because it's so easy to make an observation, it's far more difficult to find a means of enacting that perspective into something more objectively tangible. The winter forces us to feel idle though, and the worst virus this world can curate could never drag me into the depths which result from months of involuntary indolence. 

 

These days home has become haunted ground. These days I dream of my demise with a fervor I fear. So many people are much more deserving of the happiness that rests along my uneven collar bones, but I continually confuse the comfort of embrace with welcome suffocation. I wish I could apply the radiance I fail proving to those more deserving. I'll give you my remaining breaths because you'll put it to greater use than I could hope to address. I'm a closed door. Closed not to keep other from observing my isolating but instead to keep my emptiness from spilling into the existence of others. I accept the absence as my role, I shouldn't in the process allow others to also become lost in the ether which is my mind. 

 

So here I am spilling tears onto the lines detailing the deaths which fell from the hands of this country's most prolific serial killers. Though I do not cry for the victims' outcome. I'm lost amid attempts to place myself within a role. Can one simultaneously become a killer and savior within a single action? Can I keep smiling through nights filled with imagery of teeth bent back from their place in my gums. Can the blood add some much needed color to chapped cheeks without calling attention to my downfall? Because I long for the space to showcase my self-destruction without in turn destroying myself.

 

Now of course my motivation to align your inspiration has turned into focusing on my own lacking aspects. This year pulled my voice beneath the waves and the ice trapped any hopes for escape. I watch the promise of liberation drift from view as I am pulled into the slumberous depths of the backwaters. We brought in the new year with out, and I thought I'd be able to accept it after all that 2019 left in its wake, but that was foolish, and now I fulfill the role of the fool. We walked into the silence of an apartment no longer connected to the comfort of home. This is a relapsed refuge. This is another scar on my hometown, another reminder of where memories will no longer pulse along to a rhythm I understand, a melody designed for me no longer produces any discernable sound. We're skipping beats as the peaks lining a once untamed West begin to mimic the flatlands where I'm from. We watched machines level lives and I just hope your final sounds wasn't tied to that atrophied melody. 

 

I apologize for my absenteeism in recent days. I could have picked up the phone but that never spelled comfort for me...though I'm not finding that comfort currently anyways so now it feels more like wasted time. I'm sure you don't see it as such, but I wish I could see you once more, to hear you speak the same stories of you as a young lover. The vibrancy of new beginnings still reverberates so many decades removed from actuality, and the look you had when reciting those times, as if you we're right back in it, fails to escape me. Oh what I'd give to be awash in the rise of introductions instead of the seeming closure of what helped create all that led to my existence and keeps placing ink into the paperwork. This would not have been without you, and I'm making sure I don't let definitions become depleted within the present removal. 

 

I’ve lost the void and am slowly losing track of my steps through cascading hallways. This apartment is an avalanche and I keep pulling moisture into my lungs, however that is no longer providing the fluidity I grasp for. As we age the parties keep crashing in on us, and one day these swollen waves will refuse to return us to the safety of coastlines. There’s something admirable about discovering rigid comfort among a delineation constantly stricken with some form of fluctuation. It’s never been about discovering immovable ground where one can plant themselves, rather we must learn, as independently interconnected individuals, to expand in ways which allow an ease of implementation even when we find ourselves momentarily uprooted. Of course such a showcase can lead to exposing our sensitivities in major ways, though I see no negative in a desire to define vastness. 

 

From a childhood confining oceans inside of lakes named for states I’ve never stepped into, to the nights where the isolation of a stagnant sky mirrors our position on the ground. I chase those nights of underexposed seclusion where the moon refracts off the late January ice, bringing life to the fields stripped of their meaning months ago. Now I’m beginning to recognize my relation to those spaces I loathed for so many years. Why it took so long to bear witness to this is beyond me. As something which wrecked me simply through existing should be the closest understanding I have of myself. I broke my arms in hopes of mimicking wings, but a lack of touch has turned me entirely flightless. It’s getting harder to conceal myself as motivation begins to feel medicated. I already have been prescribed more than would be required to cut my breath off, but I was never so brave. So I shake the bottles but the withheld substance held within fails to create a melody worth following, so again I must fall victim to the silence.