From The Blue

From the blue
In my buckling frame,
Wayward soul of happenstance,
You found soild foot
On my emptying threshold.

Hollowed out,
From weather and wear,
Plaster and paint chipping, I
Haven't much
But time and the space between.

Yet something familiar
In your stranger-ness caught
Me between mirrors. Mesmerized,
You remind me
Of someone I used to know.

Sit a spell,
Unhand your load.
I know the road you've come along.
The cobbles that catch
Your feet caught mine, once upon a time.

By the fire we can burn
Together the secrets
We can no longer carry alone.
Letting the crackling flames
Catch this moment in its glowing embers.

And while we rest
Together, the quiet
Will take us into the dark and deep,
Where we'll map it out
In crimson hues of lighter things.

With hands held tight
And bodies pressed close.
We'll make sense of the senseless,
Break apart the quiet,
And feel out the numb.

Taken up in this
Maze of ghostly trails,
Though strangers still, we're lost the same.
Pages turn, histories burn,
And our crossing paths merge into one.

Lucky One

I am a lucky one.

Growing up my mother's only pressure was to try my best and follow my heart.

My father bled total admiration, for both sides of my being, no matter the destruction from their constant spinning.

No number of blessings could amount to the splendor of my siblings, to whom I owe salvation.

In the face of the worst emotional battles, I have an army of friends, golden and true, ready and willing.

And in this, at times, the world drops from under my feet, with no regard for my luckiness. I slip away, irrevocably, uncontrollably, into fatalistic despair. Many comrades in the fight for sanity, clarity, or desperate relief commonly fall prey to the open arms of hallucinogens and fire water, intimate escapes and empty pleasures... anything else. Tortured by an imperfect science.

It is, as you say, a crutch -- but only in terms decidedly personal, something about which outsiders can only speculate, and judge uninformed. We don't blame you. This too we carry. The twisted plummet of our suffering is made dire by the invisibility of our foes. How we wish you could see it, the terror in our eyes. Shamefully we envy the physically ailed. Oh, to wear visible the heaviest of pains. But behold, we stand present, next to you, as imposters, lost in a disfigured reality. Slowly dying from a faceless sickness.

And I am a lucky one. I have fought with every fiber. But it is not due to strength that I have not yet faltered to the understandable crutch of chemical abuses, everyone has their vices, after all. Instead, we walk an edge. And no one can know, definitively, who will be blown astray, until the winds of reason turn cold. Sanity is a fragile thing. All the kings horses and men are encouraging but they haven't a cure.

As such, we are left, with a frustrating invisibility, always questioning...

And I am a lucky one.

franglishly wanton

Vous êtes mon bonheur mais vous ne saurez jamais ceci parce que vos murs m'empêchent d'entrer trop bon. mais en dépit de ceci, je t'aime, et je continuerai à vous aimer, comme l'imbécile je suis. il est meilleur, je pense, d'être malade d'amour et un imbécile que seul et d'avoir la dignité. Ma vie était moins avant que vous ayez été dans lui, mon amour. Je rêverai d'un autre monde et d'une heure différente où j'étais assez fort, et braverai assez, pour démolir vos murs. Pardonnez-moi si je laisser vont de vous, parce que je ne peux pas me pardonner.

Sides

when it happens i call it relapse but it's not
i call it that because it feels more like a fluke
when really all the time in between is the exception

as the cycle goes
it knocks me off my feet, sucking the wind out of my sails
i fall i roll up into a ball then i get up again, each time less reassuringly and
yet
somehow i get up everytime
but faithfully followed by the ole hazy head and a rude shot in the arm of reality
i'm sick. and it's permanent. it's my code, my mode, my life.
unavoidable. undeniable. true.

when the medicine works I forget, I float on the lil cloud of hope
and flutter from dawn to dawn
living the dream of functionality
until
until the sickness gets me
and it always gets me
it settles in my chest, it shakes in my veins
just skin deep, waiting. it's always waiting.
for that one -- peek -- of vulnerability

and it cuts just as deeply as the first time.

and I drown just as deeply as the first time.

and I lose the ground just as terrifyingly as the first time.

and I think of the permanent cure just as terrifyingly as the first time.

then it flies me up to the fan and chops me into bits

...spend the week putting myself back together again

i come back into the world, everyone's still moving around in today
and i'm in the dust of yesterday, trekking through the aftermath trying to get to tomorrow
because tomorrow
tomorrow is new, un-fucked, and possible.

tomorrow could be better
but i don't lie anymore

tomorrow could be better
but it'll still find me.
and kick me when I'm down.
knowing that. knowing it's waiting. off in the distance of days, weeks, hopefully months, preferably eternity...

weighs on me.

and i fear.

that one day i will.

up and give in.

but tomorrow.

tomorrow is new and un-fucked.

and I cannot give up on the chance.

that tomorrow could be better.

sometimes that's all I have.
and sometimes that's enough.

sometimes I forget. I forget, and I'm happy.

Maybe that's the cure.

----------

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8OOWcsFj0U

In the Game

"I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?" - Haruki Murakami

-----

Settling into a time-out from studying in the oven of my car, crusting under the sun of the med school parking lot, a man of humble means strolled up to my window. He kept a conscious distance, assuring me of his harmlessness. That was thoughtful of him, my mind mumbled. He was hungry, and I, hanging out of my car, with my face stuffed into a sandwich, was an open window of possibility. I offered him the rest of my crumbling, slobbered-on lunch, admitting to my meager offer. Understandably, he declined, but not wanting a world of hunger roaming the streets while I sat there, plump and satisfied, I emptied the contents of my coin drawer into his dusty palms.

"How much are one of those?" jesturing to my sub.
"Hmm, maybe five dollars?"
"Well shoot, I only got 48 cents."
"I'm sorry, dude. S'all I got on me."
"That's ok, baby girl. Thanks for keeping me in the game."

------

I wonder sometimes, about those quiet kids, the ones who keep themselves all tucked in and covered up. I wonder how the time shifts over them in their complacent solitude. Whose path remains uncrossed by them? How many hearts are left distanced by the unknown of their passing? Who will know them before the end, to carry their memory past mortality?

Though I cannot expect the world to be one solely of extroverts, but for me I cannot bear the thought of drifting through this world without being found out, dissected, digested, destroyed, and rebuilt by the crashing waves of people, culture, community.

If we're all playing this game together, I care to know my teammates. I care to see into the depths of you, compare navels as they say. I want to know you so that I may too be known.

And likewise,

if you don't know me, how will I remember you?

----

"If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets." - Haruki Murakami

Beyond This

While tossing together a meager morning meal before running off to hide in the depths of my med school's study rooms, I had a light chat about death with some housemates. Not your average pick-me-up sunrise greeting, I know, but the context was in reflection of our future practices. One remarked he did not believe he would want to spend his life facing death every day, that he wanted a more -- uplifting routine. We then shared our thoughts on death and I kept mulling it over, tipping into the afternoon, then finally settled that I'd look to my good friend NPR for some perspective...

Ages ago I discovered NPR's "This I Believe" series and found the following essay entry under the 'death' catalog. It was like reading an essay from myself, in the future, to my daughter... an most certain, impending conversation lingering on the timeline, waiting for me to catch up to it.

Being one that desires to be cremated and my ashes buried in the damp well of a newly planted tree, this essay struck a particularly personal chord.

For your viewing pleasure:

There Is More To Life Than My Life

Jamaica Ritcher - Turner, Australia

As heard on NPR’s Day to Day, April 24, 2006

"My daughter Maia is two, and has just asked about our cat. Our cat is dead. Maia knows this. What she’s wondering is where he’s gone and what has happened to him, now that he no longer meows beneath her kitchen chair, impatient for the drips off her spoon.

This is the moment I realize: I need to know what I believe.

My parents were straightforward in admitting they didn’t know what happens when we die. As a child, I probably lost a solid year of sleep pondering that enormous mystery: bone-still under the covers I lay awake picturing my future of eternal nothingness and wracked by the tragedy of no more Me. The subject still haunts me. I’d like Maia’s attitude to be slightly healthier. This is what I bring to composing an answer to her question about the cat.

After a weighty pause I tell my daughter that Martin (the cat) is out in the field. I tell her that when animals, including people, die, they are usually put into the ground and that their bodies become the grasses, flowers and trees. I pass my hand over Maia’s blonde curls, gently touch a rosy cheek and check her reaction. She appears untroubled. She seems thrilled by the thought of one day becoming a flower.

I am stunned. In this exchange, I actually realize what I believe, as if so many fragments from my life — camping trips and nature walks, pangs of sympathy, awe toward the crashing sea and towering skyscraper, love, science class, motherhood — have suddenly converged into one, unified conviction: not that I’m destined for plant fertilizer, but that there is more to life than my life. I am not the lonely human, plunked down on earth to aimlessly wander. I am a part of that earth and not going anywhere — just like the spider up in the corner, the dust on the sill and the cat I buried in the backyard. I watch Maia mull things over while she munches her Cheerios. I feel an unfamiliar calm. I feel connected. I am humbled and, what’s more, happy. Life, death, both are all around me, within my every breath.

Later, I reach for my daughter’s hand and we muddy our shoes with a springtime walk. Together, we see new leaves glowing against the sun, green hillsides shimmering with the breeze, the bright purple bursts of lupine. And it’s okay if there is nothing beyond this, because there is this: life, everlasting, in the bloom of every flower."