Rude awakening

There is a desire to live through a narrative, so strong if there is a will there is a way, no matter the price. Poking at old wounds with sticks, spoons, even when nerve connections have long since resigned.

You are forced to say certain things as a victim of circumstance, as a prisoner of the limits of our language(s). We are not old enough, wise enough, to know (of) better. I stare at pictures of old men. I attempt to rationalize the emotional. I attempt to rationalize a reality outside my own. I attempt.

I attempt and glasses shatter. More glasses shatter. Groceries for the first time in weeks. Crying over buying a cucumber. I pause for longer and longer to pick apart the meanings of single thoughts. Crying for buying a cucumber. Crying because of how that cucumber somehow represents loneliness. Crying over not being able to buy food. Over. Above; the end?

You say things I need to hear more than things I want to. What you say is not what I want to hear. What you say is a professional kitchen the morning after hundreds of jubilant customers and no one doing the dishes and I am in disbelief. I am incredulous. You are professional. I am not paid but I clean up anyway.

what

I want to have so many kids and have everyone dress up as indians and act politically incorrect with my little clan of precious white children (picture dancing in a circle around an imaginary fire), spend all my money on building the most amazing kitchen and bar in a home where everything is self-built like the speaker system that goes through the entire house. Especially the colossal speakers in the bathroom walls that will blast music from a personally compiled mix/list/archive of exclusively delicious tunes. There will be a shamefully large and extensive home library full of literary works only in their original languages and I will suffer from the inner conflict of wanting to invite people over for glorious dinners and cocktail parties where I prepare the food and drink, perhaps with the aid of trusty friends who respect my property at least as much as I respect it (because let's face it, plenty of people do not respect their own property so it is pointless to wish for someone to care for another's possessions as much as they care for their own). I will suffer because that is the human condition? Or I will suffer, because people always touch things and writing big signs in a dozen languages will do little to prevent fingerprints on my earthly possessions, and no matter how much I try to teach people how to treat a book they will always turn the pages wrong and rip something. I will picture having a soul with long sharp claws, resembling rusty rakes that it uses on itself in despair whenever someone acts as if it's a good idea to turn the page of a book anywhere else than the outer corners.

You think I am crazy and sometimes that might not be too far off.

I want to have my own restaurant with genuinely fresh-baked goods, none of that frozen bullshit you order in large quantities and stick in the oven to pretend it's amazing to customers who are probably not like me and wouldn't care anyway. But I'll know. It might be delicious and warm and soft, but I will know in several languages and I will force myself to stop thinking about these atrocities, because how the hell does this coffee machine work anyway and why do we not have the equipment, resources and skills to decorate coffee drinks exquisitely? I will have this skill.

I will have a collection of string instruments, regardless of whether or not I ever learn to play them. I will have this, even if it is only in writing and even in the writing my house is inexplicably drenched in gasoline and lit on fire as I walk away because that is how tired I am right now.

I will have had a house built with my own hands and I don't yet know who burned it down and if it was insurance fraud. I guess what I am saying is that I will have insurance? It will be a pretty expensive insurance, too. Did I really list all this?

I wish I wanted to say I'll have a license to fly planes, but perhaps I am not even that motivated or ambitious in my dreams. Maybe it will be enough to stand in line and travel with commoners on the bus-equivalents of airplanes, because they'll still get you from A to B even if it is slow and the food is shit or there is none and oh my god is this another delayed flight why did I pick the early flight? Why didn't I ever condition myself to be more desiring of a good car? An expensive car, or maybe a rich man with an expensive car they'd risk their life over sooner than our clan of little pretend indians that I am refusing to capitalize despite spell check telling me it's wrong. Spell check must not be familiar with the type of indian I am describing. Not that I should expect it to, as these indians have not yet come into existence and it is very doubtful anyway. A lot like your existence that has somehow crossed paths with the absurdity of mine.

I miss you

All I miss is the idea of you, a fabricated illusion that can only last if a constant distance is kept between us. I am okay with this. It is a lie that I'm not sure always constitutes as a lie, if I am aware that it is not a correct representation of you; simultaneously knowing there really isn't a correct one of anybody. There might be more accurate perceptions than others, but I wouldn't really know how to define, measure or compare them or scrutinize the sides that are in lacking.

All I know is I would rather not let you have too much control over these ideas and I cannot expect anyone to want to live up to expectations this unrealistic, but I can keep them in a box locked away. This will not prevent their shattering, but it will prolong the inevitable rude awakening.

Dear diary,

I'd have so much more to tell you, if I didn't dedicate so much of my time to telling my stories to scattered souls around the globe in a desperate attempt to keep secrets.

I'd have so much more love to share,

to love,

if I didn't desperately strive to swallow my tears of happiness, joy and affection at other people caring by forwarding my pleas of help, making me food when the employees' canteen has closed, when it is 3 am and,

Legs stretched out, crisscross, zigzag
where did the words go you drenched me in at dusk?
Blankets and pillows
a fortress made for whispers in the dark.

Rattling the cage we've built
rocking our boat to see if it will sink.
Doors won't open, close
this isn't the first time I've locked myself outside.

The rays of the sun heat up the glazed balcony through stained windows and holes between them; pull of a string hanging from the ceiling releases them in file to be pulled back and feel a cozy breeze on the skin being heated by what has enabled life. There. Now, the sound of dragging a couple old plastic chairs covered in dust, traces of dried up dirty water and pillows. The ground is rough and uneven beneath bare feet.

Butt goes in one seat, legs follow suit rising towards the sky gently landing in the other. Book in hand, facing the light, placing her glasses on her bare leg she begins to read.

Even with her hair tied back in a pony tail, she can catch traces of the sweet scent it's left on her back and shoulders. So warm. It feels quiet. Everything is still safe for the occasional buzzing of some insect or another.

It is these conversations, words that make any of this worthwhile. It is that you are here, now. It is how you are here now. It is your scent in the morning, your tired arms lazy but firm; you a graveyard to bury myself into the way my face burrows into the blankets covering your chest. The way light dances on your tired eyelids through lacy windows, the way it always must have and I am only seeing it for the first time.

It is so much beauty, imagined, to exist in one moment that everything liquefies anew. Instead of a tidal wave pushing through every dam and inhibition to ravenously consume, it trickles in from the outside, salty rain eroding the fabric of being. Tired and desperate, it is no longer sure or if it's willing to discover anything that might eventually, most probably, reveal itself. It is, quite possible, at this stage, that it is only interested in quietly vanishing from existence like the smoke that every so often gets waved out of the way once a candle goes out.