It is cold outside and I am still not a child. Standing in my socks on the concrete under the moon still means nothing to me. Old words have dried up like puddles in the street. I am alone.
Give me a minute there, just a minute now - it will come back to me...
It was my old war wound, something I left in the van. Every time I smile in the mirror something feels wrong. There's a life everybody's supposed to be living, but I know I will never be up to it. I'm explained by worlds you've never seen.
Politeness means turning away from the truth. I make bad company.
Yes, that's my name there on that contract. I sign my name everywhere: I'll love you and you and you. But my personality is necessarily fraudulent; didn't you hear this man feels nothing blanketed by the night sky and glaring moon, not even standing in his socks on the concrete?
Look deeply at life and you will stop reading the news; it is too painful how much is left out. Everything is left out. You're not there now, and neither are the journalists. Men's hearts are burning, low like candles or high like the heavens. In the moments before they sleep.
Lasso their eyes, you'll never have it. There's no deeper pain than feeling you own a human; deeper than that pain will always be the realization you don't. Especially when they go missing.
I didn't set out to conquer, I swear! My armor was plastic, I was ready to be slain. Oh: is that the feeling I have now?
Just a minute there, just a minute now - it will come back to me...
Certainty cracks, hobgoblins swarm; if you didn't know life could be unbearable, you don't even know why you're alive. It's not something analytical: even though you've analyzed yourself into a deep sleep. Be warm in the comfort of your nonexistence.
We rebuild, like children rulers whose parents lost it all gambling. It musn't be destroyed; I've deduced the success of my life logically. I could never come up empty. I've sworn it on the failure of everyone else.
There is no model, no metaphor, no map for an unlived life; it is a deprivation, a lost signal, a death with no story. Why are you waiting for the people around you to be rude? Their depravity isn' there; and it isn't elsewhere. Like every missed arrival, it is nowhere. You'll never know them like you've never known yourself; when you woke you didn't find your heart was bleeding, because your whole world was red. You'll never find that anyone is unknown because you've never seen a life fail.
They do...
Just a minute there, just a minute now - it will come back to me...
Don't you know - Merry Christmas! I'm alive for the last time tonight! I went outside and had a wonderful time. It was cold and I was dead. I danced, I repeated conversations in my head, I was everywhere you were not - an alley months ago, a wheat field in a previous life I lived. God bless America, a fiction we feast on for sanity. I'm not alive, and you couldn't invite me somewhere I could be. I'm all dressed up and I'll go anywhere you want me to, but the future refurnished is never the past undone.
Never make a list of people you think will be in your life forever, because some day you might find it.
Words in books, harlequins in theatres, food and friends and a table and life! It's a miracle! We lovingly drown in the sympathy we have for our own lives, children that will never make it when it counts.
We live in a world of objects - words, faces, TVs - but we have no idea where they came from. The deepest the world can go is friendship.
There are hidden preconditions for every man's madness, which might make you wonder what they are for most people, completely overlooking the fact that mostly everyone's have already been met.
There are people until they turn sixteen and they find out about money.
Just a minute there, just a minute now - it will come back to me...
Make plans for your future self - your past self seems to have been against you. And there's no controlling him now.
What do I care for people to mourn at my funeral for, if I was a dead man while I lived? And what if they are dead too? Who are we mourning for - through the way we lived, none of us decided to show up for the funeral.
You've given up your dreams and are now living for simple pleasures.
(A dream? Something like - to win the gold medal? To live in a beautiful house? To be a world-famous something-or-other? No. Deep in your life you dreamt that you would love, and be loved by others. The sense of love you get and give are now vague and slowly lived - but later, you think, it will make sense, it will seem deep, it will seem true, like the thing I always wanted. You hope it will. You actually have no idea. In fact, in your clearer moments, that possibility seems to have been forsaken long ago. Someone loved you, you thought, but then something happened and now they don't anymore. The feeling that gave you has never left, and now deep in your heart you actually don't believe anymore.)
Just a minute there, just a minute now...
I was a rich man once. I bathed in animal feathers and drank waters that fell from the planets. I stood atop fortresses and fell deep into laughter that gave the people I know the same infections, and we all knew we would make it alright. Loving was done on a volunteer basis, since we didn't need another one. I woke up and the day had no task list. People carried you here and there, between a sail boat and a cardboard box.
Take away a few keys from the piano and even Beethoven's 5th would sound like trash.
No one to blame now, no one even left now who knows there was a crime. There's a lost sense in explaining to someone what money is, when all they do is trade goods directly. The nonplussed looks get old. I get old. Just give them what they want. Give the people what they want. You don't think that's what they actually want, but it takes too long to explain. And you don't even know if they like the taste of food.
The chess pieces of your failure, I cannot help but think, are different than mine. But I can hope the feeling is the same. I can hope that being a human hurts you as much as it hurts me. I don't hope it, but I also do: there's something in it, a moment of feeling where you smell the permanent failure, that says 'live me' like you've never heard before. It's a beautiful elegy over the tomb of the damned. I come here and listen to it often.
I'll never be able to write in complex sentences or convince another person of a sports team to root for or improve my handwriting style or plan for things in advance or impress someone with musical knowledge or run a marathon or show my parents the life I've lived or write in Chinese or be in outer space or be the Pope or turn my flesh into spirit or give good fashion advice or ski or love a girl deeply or play major league baseball or tie a complex knot or fix a car or take back all my gloominess or laugh while oblivious of what it means for a life to fail. I may be able to make a room of people laugh, but I've done that before. There are things that I want that the history of the world precludes. Mostly it is access into your love.
it will come back to me...
You'll never shout to the heavens and get an answer. Whatever you hear will be in your thoughts, the place you cannot help but be. Did that voice come from my brain or from him? You'll go to your grave not knowing, hoping you bet on the right one.
You didn't know when you decided to give yourself to others, just how many ready and willing takers there would be.
She shot up in her bed in middle age and screamed 'I will never get what I dreamed!'
'Did God not promise us something that is not here? We wandered so far to get to this room.'
'How do you know I promised you this?'
'Did we not feel it in our hearts? Would you not tell us if it were otherwise?'
'How do you know it was me?'
'Would you not tell us clearly? Did you not promise that? That we would never grope for you and not find you?'
Advertising doesn't affect me, because no one is selling the past undone.
The story between us and many people in our hearts would be expressed by us standing before them and screaming 'WHY DID YOU NOT LOVE ME?'
No depression is truly complete without moments of joy interspersed throughout it.
I told myself to wish not for a life where people said 'I love you' but for a life where they actually loved me; now I am not so sure I chose wisely.
Our perceptions are not truly alone without the company they dimly sense around them. We cannot feel a failed soul unless we think 'Yes, I have selves in me that used to rise in these moments.' Now we stand in a wordless spotlight, the whole audience waiting for us to say nothing. I look at the person across from me, and see the space in-between, the vague land where our friendship lies; did not gardens used to grow here? Did they not sprout through words? Why am I on this wordless beacon, whispers from the past reminding me what the future used to be like?
Why do people think life is not a perpetual closing down? Who would describe their life as the blossoming of a beautiful flower, into a field of flowers that similarly blossomed? Why pretend? What comes of it? Who does not perceive that the more people we meet, the less we think possible, the smaller our hopes have become? Even our spouse one day ceases to surprise us. The moon is no longer in the sky. To live is to lose the possibility. But perhaps the only thing worse is to lose our sight of this loss.
The pain you get from my silence is not as bad as the pain I get from being mute. You infer I have not spoken from a lack of sound; I feel the ache directly.
Everything people say to you has one of three meanings. One is 'I have not been loved', the second is 'I get my love from someone else', the last is 'Please love me!'
People in their teens imagine life in their thirties, with a house and a job, and think 'Then I will really be living life'; people in their forties think back to their teen years and sigh 'Ah, that was life!'; people in their twenties think of being old and think 'Then I finally will see what life really is!'; when will we realize, stopping in our tracks on the sidewalk as the mailman walks past us: 'This. This is it. Life.'
Three Mondays ago I was given a book as a hardcover to write on. I flipped open the book and read a sentence. I liked the sentence. I asked to borrow the book; permission was granted. I finished it in Cup O Joe last Tuesday and realized I had misunderstood someone the entire time I had known them. I started crying.
Later someone came and said 'What could be sadder than two people trying to love each other, but because of the way each views the world and what love is, each thinks that the other hates them?'
What's this, a joke? Perpetuated by new relationships that never gain the tools to cut you back down to what you really desire out of the world? Tonight the sky above our fire had a cloud that took up half the sky that looked like a trumpeting elephant. Millions of people died in slavery in South America during the colonial period. I've forgotten most of the things I've said today. You were saying something about culture, m'dear. I've become a private individual to insulate myself from failure, and have thus guaranteed it. No one tells you that in chasing the greatest happiness you may instead fall into the worst sadness. It is both the best and worst truth that each person is entirely irreplaceable.
I buried my principles in the bottom of a chest and put it away in an attic. When I was an old man I got tired of my abstract paintings and decided to throw them into storage. In doing so I came across my old chest and felt joy and glee as I admired the objects and trinkets of my youth, but when I got to the principles at the bottom I took them out and set them sadly on the dusty planks in a room filled with sunlight. They had not been the right principles, I realized. My wife found me later and asked my what was wrong. 'Nothing,' I said.
I dreamed we were on a beach next to a large shiny rock when the rains came. I started running but she said 'no!' and I realized she was right; the world was flooding fast, filling up like a bathtub. A hole was in the ground twenty feet away where she went to hide. I followed her down onto a ledge that we huddled on, and that was when the waters came. They rushed down, straight down like an upside down geyser, pulsing into the earth, and though it was loud and violent and only a few feet away, we were safe.
It reminded me of a time I visited a very old woman at a cottage in the middle of the sea.
I am glad you know such love. Me, myself, I cannot see it. Warmth is the elusive fire we forever chase, a future that forever recedes before us for reasons other than being shot dead in a pool. I am glad you have already found it, for no one ever has. I myself have become nothing on accident, and have assigned myself noble reasons for the feat. I think I'll take the next six months off living. I am sadly estranged from everything, and I know I must go away before coming back. Please wait for me. Please.
Drown your sorrows in naked bodies; it will never feel like a true knowledge, the thing you long for.
The future I imagined in my childhood has been ruled out. I'll go my whole life feeling like I'm someone else. But why care about someone else's salvation?
Be careful: do not thank God for your friends, for if they leave, what does that mean of him?
Just a minute there, just a minute now...
I still spend some nights on the floor.
I'll go back though, I'll go back to the garden. The garden of words we used to tend together. Words are always messy when two people are involved anyway. Better to keep things simple. Gardening wasn't meant to be messy, I'll say to myself.
The garden where if the moon strikes you at just the right time, you will be bound for heaven.
How long can you go not knowing what your failures break down to? Feeling like you're playing chess with a higher power? As a mystery to all others? When will you go back? Go back in order to go forwards? Will you have the courage to remember? Don't you know there are those forgiving you a thousand times for your failing sensitivities? They will wait for you. Won't you wait with them, for yourself? Child, why are you crying? Come to the stream, there is plenty to drink. Why will you not come? There are plenty of souls for everyone.
I waited up all night and when I got back to the bed I was dead tired. When there didn't seem to be anyone in the bed I rushed toward it and tore the sheets apart, but there no one was there. She had gone.
'Plenty of souls for everyone,' the radio says.
But I turned off the radio hours ago, and I'm still slumped on the floor by that bed. Paralyzed.
it will come back to me...
So breathe...
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