Pierced through the heart, but never killed...

The people around me all seem infected with a vivaciousness that isn't common, and there are more smiles on their faces than I've ever seen at once. And yet as I watch them, I feel more intensely than ever the knowledge that I'm not one of them. I imagine myself years from now, maybe at my hundredth birthday, looking all the way back to my thirty second. How will I possibly be happy, remembering the light in my mother's eyes? The way my father stands on edge of the courtyard, smiling in that vague, absent way of his? The scene shifts and blues in my imagination. As if brushed away by some invisible broom, these people whom I've known my entire life disappear. The courtyard is empty, bare, covered in decaying leaves. I imagine my home town deserted, with everyone dead and gone and only me left in the shadows. Forever.

I can hold my own hand...

I can't believe I somehow ended up back in school. And I keep pretending like this is normal, as it all comes crashing down on me - how hard this will actually be. I feel like it would be easier to die than to write the first word on an empty screen. And everyone keeps saying how I'll be fine, how I should stop worrying. How I supposedly always do well. And deep down I hated hearing that. I hated them for being so blindly confident in me. Every. Single. Time. Because just once, I wanted someone to acknowledge how hard it all really was. The crying and the dying and the headaches and the heartaches. To say it out loud so that I could hear it. Just once. And then I'd just get on with it. But I'd know that they knew that it wasn't fine at all and that it probably never would be. But we'd just get on with it. Like we always do.

Tell it to my soul...

I thought you should know...

I was lost,

you found a way to bring me back.

Needed forgiveness,

you always gave me that.

I'm a witness of your love,

because you don't be giving up,

and it's crazy,

how you saved me.

That's my high...

He opened his eyes; how could he keep them shut when he could not sleep? The same darkness brooded over him; the same unfathomable black eternity which his thoughts strove against and could not understand. He made the most despairing efforts to find a word black enough to characterize this darkness; a word so horribly black that it would darken his lips if he named it. Lord! And so he is carried back in thought to the sea and the dark monsters that lay in wait for him. They would draw him to them, and clutch him tightly and bear him away by land and sea, through dark realms that no soul has seen. He feels himself on board, drawn through waters, hovering in clouds, sinking. Sinking.

The worst of it is when my mind fools me and I continue to descend deeper into the muck and mire that I've created. And in the very plunge itself I ignorantly declare that in reality I am rising. And until desperation has crippled me sufficiently to confess the lie that I am lifting myself out of this mess, and until the panic of utter hopelessness has driven me to completely surrender all of the pathetic contrivances that I've fashioned that have put me there, I will never realize that the universe has readied solid ground that stands but a single step away.

No way it was our last night...

Hate it when you cry...

The most beautiful relationships in the world are the ones that can stand as rivals on the battlefield of love, yet they can still see each other's pain. They can set down their swords for only just a moment to acknowledge the beauty of the warrior that stands before them - the passion, the fearlessness and the relentless fire that never gives up. It is in this moment that we learn that it is not others that see the worth of the hearts torn by battle in our honor; it is the us who have suffered for so long. Two souls that can see clearly the worth of the other, even while they grow weary from their wounds is the only kind of beauty that matters. For if there wasn't two worthy opponents there would be no war in love.

Bet you'll see far...

Honestly ... my life has been quite boring so far. Maybe that's why I'm prone to conjure up fantasies with a relentless note of incipient hysteria. Scenarios with the invitation to panic, the ungrounded schemes with the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that I could have something really unique to write about. Quite deranged actually. I dare not imagine what anyone would think of me if they knew. I know that in reality I could never handle a disaster, but all I ever do is imagine such things. That, I could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of my life: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralysing, preemptive paranoia.

I'll be your remedy...

Please forgive every word I said...

Before the boat had hit the water,

the whale's tail came up and caught him.

All hands to the side, harpooned and fought him,

when she dived down low.

Soon may the Wellerman come,

to bring us sugar and tea and rum,

one day, when the tonguing is done

we'll take our leave and go.

Started to cry but then remembered...

Things were once again taking a new form. Ascending before his very eyes. Slowing down was no longer an option for him. He was amid his latest evolution into something greater, perhaps this time too much for his own good. Yet one thing always remained the same with each iteration. He saved a little bit of love in his heart, just in case she would, somehow, in any way really, come back home to him.

If you love home - actually, even if you don't - there is nothing quite as cozy, as comfortable, as delightful, as that first few days back after a long getaway. In those moments, even the things that would irritate you - like the annoying hustle of morning city traffic or that incessant squeaking sound the ventilation system makes from time to time - seem instead reminders of your own permanence, of how life, your life, will always graciously allow you to step back inside of it, no matter how far you have gone away from it or how long you have left it.

My head is an animal...

Sometimes life abruptly opens up in ways so vast that it engulfs all of our constructs and theories and beliefs in the swiftness of that single moment. At times such as these, life does nothing less than demand a brutally exacting reconstruction of everything that we've expended the raw essence of our lives constructing. If truth be told, life is so remarkably rich that we will always owe life a debt that we have no means to pay. With that being the case, maybe the biggest thing that we owe life is an apology for the assumption that life owes us something that we have yet to be given.

Soon we'll take our leave and go...

Saying things only we understand...

No remorse, no regret,

let's forgive every word we said.

I have found that there is a special kind of magic in disappearing for almost a month and going back to the bare basics. It has a tonic strength, even in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world and society and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and abandoned. It's just you and me, so far from home we might as well be on another planet. Here our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm for us, and we suddenly realize that we have been renouncing all that is greatest and best, in our pursuit of some phantom. So let us "waste" even more time in each other, and perhaps find all that we've forgotten. 

As far as I've heard, the fight's still on...

A dream that can't be sold...

I can buy myself flowers,

write my name in the sand.

Talk to myself for hours,

say things you don't understand.

I can take myself dancing,

I can hold my own hand.