Dysfunction

Truth

I looked outside as I made my way to the bed, staring out my window I saw the thousand little light bulbs in a dozen office buildings that stood dead and frozen but shining with the promise of a new day full of movement and action. But all of that could wait until the morning, the night was cold and the wind was blowing as I stared out the open window, at everything and nothing, with all my attention drawn to the quiet voice that was coming out of my phone.

    "All I can tell you is that I just feel really bad." - the voice said... I had heard his voice a million times in so many places and circumstances, but not in this tone. Never in this tone.
    "The days are heavy on me and there's not a moment when you're not in my thoughts, this has hit me very hard, and I don't know what I can do, I don't know what to do." He said, softly, quietly, slowly, full of detachment from everything he would consider real.

I took a big breath, the cold air felt like ice filling my lungs, slowing time ever so slightly and making me feel like shards of glass were ripping through twenty nine years of conformity, layered on top of each other, thickening my skin. Now I felt naked and bare, and all I could feel was the pain that all those words carried, the weight that I had slowly been able to lift since I can remember, and how it must feel to have all of it thrown on your back in just a moment. I was in pain, but it wasn't just his.

   "That is no way to... there has to be a way, a path to follow... I'm confused and in pain and in the thickness of it, I just can't think" - the voice was fading, it seemed as lost as he was, and I felt powerless and powerful, powerless to this outcome, powerful because I knew, in my heart, exactly what I had to say, and said it.

Standing there, facing a big shiny city thousands of miles from the place that saw me grow up, I talked to him for twenty minutes. My voice felt strong and resolved, my demeanor was concerned but decidedly and lovingly happy. The words came out, as if rehearsed, in a melody of metaphors and thoughts, and stories of things that happened long ago, true fables of me as a child and him as a teacher, a knight, a king, a stranger.

And then I was done.

   "I don't know if I will ever feel right again"  he said. My heart was heavy but as I closed the window I saw my reflection smiling slightly back at me as he finished his thought, "Please don't be distant, you know there's nobody in this world that will ever love you as much as we do".

I was quite sure by then that the smile on my face was anything but slight but my eyes were now closed and everything inside me was open, like a wound and like a flower, smiling and crying, all at the same time. Suddenly everything made sense.

   "I want you to think about something else too" I said, now laying down and staring at the clouds and the night sky "I could never expect you to understand in a day what took me twenty years to know. I can't promise you that you will feel better tomorrow. I can only tell you what I know: that I love you and that you love me, and that this bring us closer, not apart. I want you to know that I'm well, and happy, happy that I just met you, right here and now, and that one day you'll look back to this as the day you began to know me, and yourself."

My dad sobbed, I had never seen heard him cry, and now there he was, far away and crying to me on the phone, in that quiet and reserved way in which he conducted himself his whole life. He was in pain, but it wasn't just mine. My teacher was disappointed and confused. My knight was wounded and hurt. My king was in tears. But deep down I knew for a fact that behind all of them a stranger was gone, and my father now stood in his place, smiling back at me.

After

Definition, finiteness, immortality, direction, honor, legacy... I spend my days carving my name into stone, in hopes of someone, something, meaning beyond the limits of my flesh; life beyond ashes and dust. And time passes, my will undisturbed, my mind clear on the objective at hand, the importance of the years your eyes will never see, the times that will come to pass after your flesh decays but your mind transforms everything and everyone around it, satisfying that thirst for more than what is given to us, more than we can or should expect. Life transforms you and you in turn transform the lives around you, your time is spent in the times you live, the times you touch and speak, the times you define by your own existence. Transcendence is given the moment you first open your eyes or feel the touch of your surroundings, transcendence is part of your role in a world full of disconnected meaning, transcendence is absolute, and finally minute, in the way that you are small to a world full of beings trying to carve their names onto the same stone, spending their days etching lines over lines until the stone turns to dust, as they will, as you will, as I will.

Dissolution

In a delicate balance nothing is certain, it's in that certainty that some find despair and others find hope.

Gone

I woke up to the smell of clay, the touch of silk and the sight of you. I smiled one last time, slipped out to the cold and kissed you goodbye. Escaping from that place so safe, I walked in the rain, leaving all I knew behind. I sometimes wonder what you thought the second you woke up to the smell of clay, the touch of silk, and opened your eyes to a half empty bed, and so many thoughts that we would since that day call memories.

Wrong

Reason can fill me with some sense of understanding for the concept of why force can bring change. Words can lead me to believe maybe it's me who has been rigid in my seemingly blind quest for finding peace viable and necessary. History can be made to seem like things today couldn't be any other way. The common gutless alternative can make me think that it is the only one. But it is when I see a street painted in red, dripping with death, absorbing hate, that I can't help but feel deep inside that all that I still believe in is right, and all that is being done is a growing stone ready to fall over all of our heads, destroying principle, reason and intention with the arrogant weight of a few words.

[hat tip: Lewil]

Glimpse

The senses are the holes in the dam, on the other side of Reality, where we stand.

Ahead

Life grows around you, surrounds you with a million tendrils, a thousand flowers and a common sense of belonging. Flowing through the hours of a day that has outgrown itself, I stand here, at the edge of this story, calm and peaceful, thinking about all those bits of human nature that we can't escape, or want to. Cycles and spirals keep flashing on my mind, an expected result of a week that's brought so many things to an end, an epilogue to stories written long ago.

The night comes and goes, with echoes of laughs and talks in words both spoken and not. Links between souls deepened by force of smile and language. And it is here, at this edge, that I look beyond and see that line, far away, where sky meets earth. And I see time, and space, and all the possibilities, all the triumphs to be had, all the mistakes likely to be made and all that's coming, leaving you with a sense of wonder  and a sense of hope as certain as the promise of an empty house, a lonely bed, and that smile traced on my mouth by a thousand thoughts of all of those who make my life worthwhile.

Rapture

Today I had the strange feeling that this city was all mine. After waking up to an empty apartment, I cleaned myself up and ate some leftovers from last night. Being fully awake takes me an extraordinary amount of time lately, I have all these rituals of things I have to do before I go off to the outside, some of them don't really make sense but they keep me entertained. Perhaps every day I just want to go out less than before.

My favorite song had just started playing when I realized I had to go if I wished to catch the next bus. These are my mornings, divided in little half hour windows when I can take a bus or have to wait for the next one. As I'm launching myself to the asphalt world, I keep wondering how much time in my life I've spent going from A to B, on a bus, a car, plane, train, walking... Wondering how much time you've used to take showers or laid motionless and awake waiting to get up. Thinking of all the hours you spend getting the "things" that surround your life, washing your clothes, going to get those light bulbs and the toilet paper, talking to clerks and employees and customer service representatives.... Please hold... Hold your life, our next available agent will be will you shortly.

Snapping out of my train wreck of thought, I was halfway to the bus stop, jaywalking so I could get there in time. I realized something seemed a little off. There were no cars to dodge, I was simply walking across Denny, which is always a bitch to cross. Didn't think much of it, so I kept going my usual way, through an alley and a parking lot. From the looks of it, I was barely going to make it. My mind wandered off...

Does it seem like we are always thinking of ourselves as if we were in a movie or a deodorant commercial? I mean, life can be pretty boring, with all the driving, and the countless hours of doing the things that you're supposed to do in order to be part of these "modern" times, such as paying your phone bill, cleaning your all-clad pots and pans or whitening your teeth in only 30 days. Then when you are walking in that last minute errand to get more trash bags, do you usually see yourself walking, headphones blasting, leather cuff on the right arm, as if you were being shot frame by frame in a jittery camera effect by a hotshot director, as a deep voice starts saying in your head "This is the Fabulous Life of ...", only for that thought to be hijacked by the realization that you forgot to feed your cat.

Nobody to be seen anywhere. I'm running that last block, making sure I make it there on time, and it suddenly makes sense, there's nobody on the street, not a single soul. It's hot today. It's that time of day when the warmth reflecting from the cement sidewalk feels sticky and uncomfortable. There are no clouds in the sky, just a big bright sun, a huge city around me, and not one person around me. As I sit down on the bus stop bench, I try to remember when was the last time I was the only one taking this bus at this stop, and I can't think of it. Just the fact that I was actually sitting down and waiting makes me nervous, had it been a little early? had I missed it? I don't like missed opportunities.

Maybe the bus wasn't early, maybe it hadn't come, and maybe it would never come again. In some cosmic fuckup, maybe I was there, in this big city inside this world, and I was left alone. Maybe everybody had been evacuated to another dimension, and I had been left behind for observation. Maybe everyone got so terribly bored that their heart stopped in protest, right in the middle of breakfast, and everybody's bodies were motionless and dead, next to a box of cheerios and a half empty bottle of Tropicana Orange Juice, now with more pulp.

I let go a sigh of relief, my bus is there. To add to this twilight zone effect, someone decided to paint the whole bus white, with some lettering explaining how this new kind of hybrid vehicle is about to save the world and make us sustainable again. I feel like I'm walking into a hospital room with wheels. I look at the driver somewhat craving human interaction. I say good morning and he doesn't say a thing. He keeps staring out into nothing, with his hand covering the little coin slot, but I know I'm supposed to pay as I leave, one of those pieces of useless and strange knowledge that makes you feel closer to this huge organism that we call a city.

There's not a single person on this bus.

I sit down in the very back and put my feet up on the front seat as if I was half my age, it feels strangely comfortable, like sleeping in the fetal position. And off we go, the bus gets on the highway.

Maybe, I think to myself, people didn't all die. Maybe this morning was the breaking point. Finally it came to us all, the thought that maybe we're living a show, trying to fit our lives into these abstract representations of things we need, we want, we have to have in order to live to our fullest potential, in order to follow a life that is marketable and appealing to all focus groups. Maybe today everyone stayed home and called their friends over, and they are now sitting on the floor, talking to each other, laughing, making memories, sharing stories, feelings, bonding, getting to know what it is that makes them special to everyone else, loving and making love, arguing and reaching compromises, building relationships based on truth and emotion, building a chain made of gold, from one person to the next, the biggest piece of bling for a world previously full of shit.

Then I realize it's an hour later than I thought. Everyone is probably having lunch.

Spaces

So many memories I feel I'm leaving behind, encased in those four walls that sheltered me for the last four years of my life. Every step in that empty space echoes back with voices I'd almost forgotten, of the best and worst times I have had so far. We define the space around us but it, in turn, shapes our lives, day by day, becoming part of who we are and how we feel.

No more boxes, nothing is left behind, and it looks as if I was never here. The impact is within, for I think I will carry these memories forever, as long as I breathe. This empty apartment awaits the next set of characters that will in turn be transformed, through time, around these walls that I can't help but touch as I leave, saying goodbye.

Love

The beauty around me lives in the permanent, in the indivisible. My life
has a tendency to revolve around fear. With this dread it can seem like
the minutes are wasted, always trying to conform or ascribe to a certain
set of constraints. In the contact with others I've found solace and
happiness but always in a form that I never anticipated. Very few bonds
are permanent, but once established they transcend distance, time and
all those ugly human traits that seem to flow like tar along with our
blood and seem so difficult to shed in the light of true human
interaction. The fear I speak of comes from that question that beats
relentlessly outwards from inside our skin from the moment we come into
our senses, the question of love. This question has no form or context,
and seems to flow naturally from the deepest part of us, like some
insatiable primordial thirst.

The force of this question is so strong, so natural, so intertwined with
the very fabric of what makes us human that it usually is easily
misrepresented and misunderstood. How can we answer a question we can't
even pose? It takes a long time to be able to question ourselves in such
a way that we are able to find fulfillment. But just being able to
understand this incredible force within us should provide us with such
fulfillment as to make our lives of inquiry worthwhile.

And here's where the fear is born, from impatience and from the
anticipation that we may be doing everything the wrong way. Being
insecure is not a weakness, it forces us to reexamine our conclusions,
our motives and our driving forces; it drives us to an answer. I keep
trying to keep the fear at bay, find a way to prevent it from being born
out of that insecurity.

It may seem like some kind of cosmic irony that the search for the
nature of our longing is probably the loneliest kind of search. It must
be done outside the context of what seems the norms of modern society,
outside of the usual rules of interaction, outside of what most people
call the romantic world, it must be done where one is truly alone,
within.

I don't believe a couple complements each other, I believe they share,
they teach, they understand and they transcend the fact that they are a
couple and from their union something even more important evolves. I
believe few people ever achieve this. I hope someday I will.