I Can’t Explain The Joy I Feel. And Isn’t That So Wonderful Isn’t That So Perfect To Have A Problem

D. Alan Holmes, Enlightenment // Signet Amenti // @cryptonature // Alan Wilsom Watts // Evan M. Cohen, "Oceans" // Nikita Gill // @pauladoodles // Julian Gough, "Minecraft End Poem" // Sleeping At Last—Saturn

Why can’t you let me have anything? Why can’t you let me have anything? I ask the mirror.

The girl in it is too busy weeping to answer.

I want so badly to be great but I don’t know how.

That was when I met him. My undoing. He was like a father to me, but I was not like a daughter to him. He knew this. He knew what I saw when I looked into his eyes, and he did not look into mine, drawn into the gaps between my blouse’s buttons like black holes for morality. I was always to blame for his touches. I had always thought of myself as a girl, as a person, but really, I was a place. A place for innocence to die.

I feel the grating fingernails of progress on my tender skin, and wonder how it lead us here. To desolation, destruction. We were supposed to be better, stronger, kinder. But instead we are are weaker, crueler and so poignantly and horribly worse.

How disappointing that evolution does not promise improvement, only difference.

In twilight hours, when her day’s thoughts drift heavenly with the receding tide, and fears and doubts rescind, she thinks of her. Her head wet from the sea dampening her pant legs, resting in her lap as a black pearl. She runs her fingers through her short black hair and wonders how it rises underwater, if she could ever see it for herself without drowning. Salt and iron prick her nose. The siren opens her eyes and the moment she looks at her with a tenderness so palpable, her image disappears. Her lap lay empty. The sailor girl’s mind too shy to peer at even the idea of her so flagrantly. She hears the creaking of the floor boards, and inhales the lantern oil burning, and is brought back to dry reality. Skin itching for the sand in the ocean shallow.

Remembering him is like getting to know a shard of glass. I push my finger tip down gingerly into his jagged profile and draw tears; he is not whole anymore. He will never be whole again. I could sip tea at my window sill and watch the clouds roll on, but I prefer to live on the edges of his memory. I prefer to dwell in my scrapbooks and peak into his diaries, peeling back the brokenness of disappearance into the smoothness of understanding. Floating in the ether I am pricked again by the knowledge that no matter how deeply I learn of his soul, I cannot unplunge him from the river styx. And I am content to keep hurting, I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing. I am content in that.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

What a pretty little lie we peddle children as loves are ended by mouth, laws are written on paper, and wars are declared in ink.

Depression is driving a car dry, no oil, no gas, just habit. Nothing slows, people die, jobs disappear, experiences pass. Everything is a miraculous colorful blur that illicits no feeling in you. You remember that it used to and this pricks your fingers with drops of sadness. It grinds you down, your body grows weary. What doesn’t kill you right away doesn’t make you stronger, it just takes it’s time. And that’s all you have, sitting in your hands like a steering wheel stuck straight, propelling you ever forward. Never caring to ask if you’re ready, if it hurts. Depression is driving a car dry because that’s all you know how to do. To keep going even though you’ve nothing left.

In the blue hour, we find each other. Our voices are the only that exist.