Staircase

You're a shell of yourself.  I'm choking on my words.  I scribble out the words in my car before they leave me completely.  This is no safe task, I assure you, I'm aware, but they are all too accurate to let slip into the nothingness.  Words fade.  I'm the type of girl who needs to hear your name twice to know it.  Napkins to be scribbled upon.  Rarely have I tried to grab those fading thoughts, as it is almost a crime to forget.  So I'm using my muscles to understand, shaking dust off my brain to hear what is really rolling around in my brain, the loose marbles of passing thought, clattering around until they fall out the back of this rolling table top.

Walking down the possibilities.  Blisters will encroach upon your feet, surely.  Truly, clearly will things be laid out before you.  This clarity is really a fleeting dream.  Reality sets in, cold, and hard, and a fog bank, and hard to see other sides of things.  One set of eyes is what we have to see our reality, yet, we forget our other senses begging for a chance to hear the grand notes whisk the mind away from a piano's soothing melodies.  We forget that our mouths can taste things, and that our hands can touch things, knowing the surface of what is around us.  We neglect our nose, smelling the sensations, connecting us solidly to memories, like the smell of your mother's perfume, or the scent of the air before and after it rains.  To miss the smell of summer skin, sunscreen, and late night campfires.  Reality in muddled senses.  We forget to walk with our feet, and we crawl our way through without experiencing what we've been given, what we are, our uniqueness, and our common threads that tie us together.

Forgetting to walk seems to be a trend.  Walk me down the possibilities.

You're a shell of yourself.

I'm choking on my words.

I'm choking on my tears.

I'm choking on my fears.

You're a shell of yourself.

Where have you been?

Blame

I would like to point out that bubble tea is amazing.  I would like to point out that I love egg rolls from the egg roll cafe, especially the crab ragoon, and the spinach and feta.  Eat your heart out.

I feel oppressed by nothing more than my own thoughts, more often than not the past few weeks.  They come in and push down and crunch too many things inside of my head and I have trouble keeping focus.  I have trouble finding where to go next, or what to do next.  I have trouble walking around and thinking clearly.  I am clearly not clear.  I am lost within a mind that is filled with doors that lead me to places I don't always want to go.  The doors open merely by word association most days.  I am lost in word association within most conversations.  I am taunted by past events, past days.  I am laughed at by my own mocking self within the mirror.

I'm trying to figure out what to do after I know whether I am into Berklee or not.  Go back to Ohio, go to Michigan, stay in Massachusetts, move into the city...so many different areas alone taking attention.

I'm bored and boring without a job, even though I'm overwhelmed with my own thoughts.  You think too much, Emily.

Emily turn your brain off.

That will be the title of a book.  Who would read it?  The dust would read my book on the shelves.

When things fall apart, they have the potential to become something else.  They do become something else entirely.  Something broken that becomes another shape and form that can potentially be a beautiful thing.

Do I go or do I stay.  Reason for coming at all: learning to forgive someone I did not completely recognize that I needed to forgive.  Forgive.  Now to choose it daily.  How do we do that?  How do you do that?  Do people deserve your forgiveness, whatever the crime?  No one deserves forgiveness.  I suppose that is the point, even though we want to forgive and don't want to forgive equally.  The choice is plain, to live with pent up hostility, pent up anger, or to live without those things, to move on, to breathe again.

Maybe we just forget how to breathe.  I forget more than I'd like.  I forget a lot of things.

Like doing my laundry, or picking up the rooms, or cleaning dishes.  I am at fault as much as I want to blame.

I forget that big nugget.

The Specifics

The vein, the vine, the root

The lightning in hot pursuit.

Burning, the flame, the lantern

Straining, the light, the pattern.

The earth, its quakes, its moans

The ice, its breaks, its groans

In birth pains, or death bearing,

The pattern on the sleeve worth wearing.

Flood of the necessary

The root more important than mentioned.

The pattern worth repeating,

Throughout the pattern of existence.

Worth wearing through the fabric of all time,

Woven into the depths of our being,

Our essence, our seeing,

Specifically, there was no mistake.

Grapefruit Jams

"Everybody knows that you break your neck to keep your chin up." -Copeland, Chin Up

It's another beautiful day, even though it is cold.  The sky is grey as most things are turning out to be.  All of it just seems to be this vast work of art, and I cannot get my mind around it all, and the mystery is that I never will.  No matter how hard I think on all these things, or how long, I never get my mind around it.  We're made to miss something.  Be it in the fabric of our thought process, or in the fabric of our lives, missing someone, or missing something, missing the idea, or missing the formula.  We end up missing one thing or another, but in truth, missing many things altogether.

In this fabric of our conscious and subconscious, we'll always be missing someone.  This is our state.  We are merely stuck in one place in time and space, yet our mind goes elsewhere, knowing we are not in that other place with this other person or that other person.  We are here, missing all the people we do not even know yet that we will come across in our future, however long that will be.  We don't always feel this weight of the people we've yet to meet, and yet to miss, but we will find them in our time, and miss them just as much.

Maybe we just take for granted everything we've ever had.  Maybe we aren't taking anything for granted, but are so overwhelmed with what we do have, we don't feel good enough to live with what we've been given.  

Maybe my life was never meant to be about me.  Maybe your life was never meant to be about you.

Maybe our lives were meant to be bigger than this bubble that surrounds us with our own thoughts about ourselves, and we're really meant ot get outside that bubble and love on others around us.

Maybe there is more to love than we think.  maybe our ideas of love are broken as we've been broken continually around every corner.  But maybe, this shattered vision of love is something we can throw out with the trash because it was never really love to begin with.  Maybe we can get outside ourselves and love others, and its really what we've ben looking for.  I don't know.  Maybe we're content, not looking for a single thing and our lives are already full and complete and we need no one else inside it because we are like a stone, strong and cold, and collecting dust, and sneezing because we have dust allergies and soon we will swell up like a balloon and because we needed no one else, there IS no one else to take us to the emergency room, and there we will lie, colder than we were before with no one to find us...cold.

At any rate, we can still love, and stop being selfish brats about our existence.

Grapefruit makes the day better, too.

Unless you're allergic to grapefruit....

Reality Check

I'm no better than anyone else.

We are all the same.

In 1984, we'd find that this is the lower classes chant and phrase.

Regina tells us, "People are just people"

And they are just like you,

And we all are just people,

No better, no worse,

Yet we rank and judge and curse,

Our neighbors flesh,

The riotous breed

To conquer, we must conquer something,

To be someone,

To merely be.

But we conquer everything else,

Because the hardest task is ourselves,

To conquer and to know our hearts

That we've ripped out

Dust collected on the shelves.

You are not better than me,

But I need to remind myself,

I'm not better than you.

We always find a reason,

To claim kingship of what everyone else can do,

And to make ourselves better in some way,

We play these games.

But reality, stop nagging me,

Check to see if we're still flesh,

Still blood, still bone,

Still beating, still warm,

Still thinking, still breathing,

Still dreaming,

Always dreaming, crafting,

Being selfish, giving,

We are still people,

In need of love...

An abused word, as we are abused.

Pulse.

 I seem to not understand how all these things come together.

Timing worries me, yet I'm not worried.

The words move and I move,

And I stand still, standing strong,

Yet, strength is not mine,

As I cannot stand still in my own strength,

Scattered, traveling from word to word.

Never quite fully here,

Always in some way, somewhere else.

Scattered like the shattered glass,

Of mirrors shattered long ago,

From hating the eyes staring back,

Never knowing whose they were.

And I fall into my thoughts and disappear,

And I am disappearing for awhile,

To my heart to see what's going on,

Because from this distance, I'm unknowing

And as so much is happening and moving and being dug up,

I'm fighting the crowds of voices to hear the quiet

Beating inside my chest,

Beneath the ground, undead,

Only put away awhile

Dust collected, coughing, sneezing,

Opening the boxes of unrested thought.

Thoughts just pulsing, volume turned down,

Now the mute bond is breaking,

And there is some sorting to do.

There is some honesty to be had.

So I will step in front of the mirror,

And we will have a long talk,

The long avoided,

Long put off,

The conversation,

And my nerves are raw,

I hear my pulse in the deep of my throat

And I wonder if the eyes looking back at me,

Are as nervous as I am.

Disappearing

We take a drag on the cigarettes we hold,

Silently noting what we share and what we don't as moments pass that I would not trade.

Its like I want you to know everything about me.

I want to be selfish with our time.

I want you to know everything.

As much as I've hidden about myself

As much as I've not known,

As much as I've wanted to blurt out everything about me,

I want to be selfish in the time we've only begun to have.

I want to be selfish and take the time until I've had enough.

I've been a user.

A selfish breed because I've wanted.

And at some points I've wanted in vain.

I've made myself to expect nothing.

I expected nothing.

And now I don't know what to do,

Don't know how to get a hold of myself.

As you puff on your cigarette,

Puffing away your thoughts like pieces of trash on the floor,

Only to be thrown away later.

Too clouded to think past the next few hours,

Maybe even the next few moments,

All the while, aching while I'm away

Because I want to steal you away and know everything about you.

The lack of your presence has ben too long.

Even in the distance, I understand a few things,

It blows my mind, and I see your eyes,

And I know too many thoughts,

Wondering about the ones I don't know.

Another long drag, and another flood of memories.

Our present and past seem to swirl all too fast.

The smoke filling my lungs was the only constant,

And in some ways, the disappearing smoke still is.

In the lack of knowing myself, I am sad I changed my hair color

Because I want you to know the real me.

Not any type of projection.

The scariest part is that in far too many ways, you know me 

better than I do.