I never remove my rusty cloak
through frost and aridity, or
temperate temperaments.
I dip my fingers into the water
now darkened, and stay comfortable
below zero.
In the moonlight my opaque eyes
Look into the sparkling pool
And do not sparkle back.
For if not from my eyes,
From where would the water have pilfered its luster?
Not a soul anywhere around,
But these hands quiver
In fear of being seen, but long to be heard.
What was once a puddle of salt now
Has a tide, and the chill of the oasis
Ripples across its surface—
Thousands of tears with the most fragile skin.
Looking down and I see
The water has stolen all that was
What could have been…
I offer my respects to its accumulation
Over time. I regret to say
I can never abandon this vulture-cultured haven.
And who is there to pull this spirit away?
Even the odd passerby may never know
The indifference between this
And digging a hole in the damp earth
To which some claim to return.
(Source: brazilwonders, via pinkseachele)
Pearls of Light by Within Temptation
“Carried away by the traculence of my world
I got lost in the search for enlightenment
The blue rain covered my roots
And I forgot where I came from.”
Mesmerized
How I wish I was you.
I must look hideous
With my forehead pressed up
Against cold glass.
I want a backbone
But I don’t.
I just want to glide indefinitely through viscous space,
Circle around in the navy and aquamarine.
My eyes are sunken now,
And I can see my winding, shipwrecked soul
Breathe through the reflection
In your own.
You have me locked into your stare,
Your beady black bay blues.
Consuming me I feel
An innate envy of the way you move.
Each flick a slice through my soul.
My lips are here now,
Kissing the boundaries between us;
I feel more and more like a stranger.
I want this fortified wall to disappear.
I want you to tear me to shreds.
You are so wild, savage,
Yet so blithe, beautiful.
Your existence is finesse.
Oh garsh! I am so jealous!
I was born the ugliest of creatures.
I want to coast endlessly like you,
Feel my body convulse with the current,
Without a rigid bone to ache.
You are dangerous yet profound,
Full of intensity like I am,
With nirvana spreading through your cartilage,
As each one of your strokes sear the azure dark.
I never hated my bodily captivity as I do now.
Never has a person seen you in a crowd
And declared less than all of you to be beauty.
How I wish I was you.
(Source: shark-ray, via marineanimals)
Even the most selfish of humans are narcissistic. Experienced ears used to listening to the woes of others are naturally sensitive to the whispers of the wind, with the sad part being the translation ends right there…at the sound and not the meaning. It’s misfortunate that the wind’s voice has been referenced and acknowledged so much that it has been demoted to redundancy. It’s a wonder that the wind still tries to assert itself through our words, perpetually failing to do so. For so long it has been waiting to get its message across, and all we ever do is get caught up in the beauty of its feathery voice. Never have I read the words of a poet altruistic enough to scribble the breeze’s story. Never have I seen writing in which the artist did not use a breeze’s timbre to tell their personal story when the draft clearly wanted its own elegy to be heard.
None of us have really known loneliness well enough to understand the language of the air. Even if there isn’t a person out there who could understand our souls, there have always been more than many to understand our dialect. This is the most basic of connections we take for granted that the wind has never known. It tries hard, for it would never try speaking to us if it never knew there was something it was missing out on. Sometimes I think it is elated to be in the mere company of some blissful human soul, other times I feel it is depressed and lonely, and so it wails as morose creatures scream and sob deep into the darkness. But, no tears are ever shed for the wind…
But why does the gale believe it is lacking? How can any such entity as beautiful as the breeze feel dissatisfied with its peaceful lack of body? It’s perpetual freedom from obligation, its boundless ability to snake in between the sporks of pine needles in the evergreen wood, past the snow-glossed mountains, above the winding valleys, through the reeds of a person’s hair. I wish I could go through all these spaces. I wish I was viscous enough to do that. Why wind, tell me why you are not satisfied? Are you upset that mankind always personified you as a romantic whisperer, yet never made you a living thing because you lacked a heartbeat?
Why do you carry the sorrows of all other souls along with you as you race down this path, perhaps towards another attentive set of ears awaiting your invigorating embrace? Why do you carry these things with you, like you carry the taste of the mountains and the tangs of the pine forest?
As I let the wind hug me sometimes, I try to make sense of its sweet gibberish. I try to think of what the wind would look like if we made it human, but as I am caught up in the sound, I revert to not knowing and refuse to wonder. I drink in deep and try to fathom what it is saying, but I was born a mere creature void of this abstraction, and so no Rosetta Stone ever arrives.
And the whole irony is that although we all seem stranded in this state of never knowing what’s wrong, we know of the existence of the wind’s woe, which we try to decipher earnestly despite failing every time. Strange that the wind, in its infinite quest to be heard, felt and understood has touched so many people with awareness enough to be put into subjective words because it is a lonely spirit. Forever alone, it says, and people seem to understand, but they can never know why.
And this makes me feel there is no reason for the breeze’s sadness except the fact that nobody will ever know what the reason is. Perhaps that is how it is meant to be, since its sadness brings all saturnine souls under the same sorrowful hood. Still, I mourn the concept that something must remain sad for always if people in their sadness can link to each other this way.
Phantoms by To Mera
“The morning wakes me
Eerie silence - blood drops leave my hands
Only my conscience’s heard
Wondering where to run from myself.
Fragile moments
Come to life inside my head
And turn into
An army of…an army of
Unspeakable fears…
Reality is now
A dream and I am
All by myself against them.
Could I…Could I ever win or
Will I just become
One of them?…”
- March 7
- , 2012
“I promise.”
Those were the two words that stopped me from ever drinking coffee again. Since I was somehow gifted with an elephantine database, I can remember how exceptionally hyper I was as a five-year-old and the specific events that characterized me as so. But then again, weren’t we all buzzy as children?
My father was a good man as he is now, but back then he was a smoker. Even at that age I liked the color black, but not when a pair of lungs wore it, and my own two sacks of air would always choke up in defiance whenever that poisonous smoke invaded my scrunched up nostrils. I always thought of burnt tobacco as a vile and disgusting thing until I saw it in art and literature, which I admire and call my passionate pursuits. I found that writers and artists could, as they did to so many other things, make smoking look admirable. It was a small acknowledgement, although my opinion about it never changed.
My dad is not an artist or writer. He’s a doctor. He’s so far away from being capable of making smoking look esteemed that it actually backfires and conveys a bad image. I’m certainly not talking about the tobacco – if anything its reputation is gilded by my father’s old addiction. No, I mean my dad’s image.
Even now I can imagine him walking into the clinic with the scent of cigarettes mingled in with his otherwise profession attire. Not only would the scent be overbearing, but the hypocrisy would be too. Here was a man advocating the health of other people while smoking his own life away. There was something wrong with that image, but I was too young to comprehend back then. I hated the smell of cigarettes and I knew from what people told me that it was a killer, but I didn’t care, because I loved my dad and loved spending time with him. I would ignore the cigarette he lit as he pushed my swing in the park, or the one he stubbed into the ground when he helped me ride my first bike without training wheels, or the way he reeked of it during the countless hugs he gave me in a day. I ignored all that, because it was worth it – I was “daddy’s little girl”, and we understood each other for whatever reason.
As we all know, tobacco may be strong, but it has always hidden under the banner of being a “mild drug”. Its crony in society has long since been caffeine, the activant that remains mild in almost all forms until it hits coffee, which I used to indulge in as a five-year-old. I remember being as desperate as my father, wanting caffeine at the same time each day when an old babysitter of mine used to give it to me. That babysitter was fired in an outrage once my parents found out. It only baffles me now how a young girl’s addiction made everyone angry, especially my dad who was, and still is, a sensitive man. (I can only imagine the issue was even more aggravating for him because it concerned his beloved daughter.) But in all his anger, he couldn’t ignore everyone else’s outrage at him for being a smoker, a person who had given in to peer pressure in his youth. Both of us were simple souls, lured into bad behaviors by other people.
On a Friday in the July of 1999, my mother sent me out into the yard one day where my dad was smoking, so that I could tell him to stop his behavior for the umpteenth time. She was a smart woman, my mom, who herself had tried telling him to quit an infinite amount of times because her hypersensitive olfactory nerves could never bear the smell. She knew who he would listen to most of all, but I didn’t expect him to listen that day. It seems strange now because…he did. He listened to me.
Still, I had to wager his obedience, and he made me ditch the coffee in return. I agreed, and the consequences, all two of them, were difficult for both of us. The first one, the withdrawal, I knew I would have to face; the second one I never saw coming. I never thought the understanding between my father and I would disappear with the smell of cigarettes on his clothes. Perhaps it is because he is a doctor and not a writer, but I can’t be completely sure. It doesn’t matter, because now we hardly speak because we can’t sustain a civilized conversation. I ride my bike alone now, I swing in the park alone now, and I never hug him anymore because he never listens now.
But, ever since that Friday afternoon years ago, neither one of us has broken our promise. We have somehow still remained loyal to our word. Never again have my buds embraced the warm, charged feeling of fresh coffee, but my nasal cavities never flare at the odor of smoke in my house unless it’s the smoke evaporating from an incense stick/warm candle lit by my mother.
Ever since then, my moral code has prevented me from ever breaking any promise I make. Why? Well, I guess the truth is that it never actually really is about morals. With each promise made, I am somehow reminded that there was a time in my life when my dad and I understood each other. For the love of me, my elephantine memory that remembers all these things doesn’t recall when, how, or why that time passed, and so I keep making promises because for a split second when a promise is made, I can feel like that period of time when things were good between us never did pass.
Stony’s mother had gone by starvation and my youngest brother had almost gone by exhaust. We knew from our experiences that suicide was not a noble exercise of individual freedom, but rather a murder of loved one’s souls. Stony and I couldn’t abide Socrates and hemlock, spies and cyanide, or world-weary cancer patients and ‘accidental’ overdoses of barbiturates. Kevorkian was guilty, Stony and I had agreed, sitting on the carpet of my father’s house, watching the trial in stocking feet. We thought he should be punished with everything short of death.
Stony and I became friends as soon as he came to town, which was two weeks after his mom went to sleep curled up on the ottoman and didn’t ever wake up. When she killed herself, she killed thirteen-year-old Stony, too. He looked like somebody had sucked the juice and pulp outta him and spit the pit and the skin out. His cheeks were always gaunt no matter how fat or thin he got, as if his mother starved his baby fat away when she was starving herself, and it never got better. He was a husk, a peeled thing.
Stony recognized the same husked look in me. This mutual recognition is our oldest evidence that suicide really is murder, that it obliterates all surrounding bodies’ will to live. When you see someone who’s loved a suicide, you can tell they’ve been existentially robbed. It’s in how they appear but also how slowly they move. They’re permanently stunned. A shovel of dull confusion keeps rising from their loved one’s grave and whacking them on the face.
In the lunchroom, in eighth grade, on his first day at Roehm Middle School, Stony approached me and asked if I was a survivor.
I said that in the annals of human history no one was.
That’s not what he meant, Stony said. He meant, was I a survivor in the Obituary sense? Had someone predeceased me?
That’s a funnily honest word, predeceased, I said. It’s so forthright about how we’re all destined to be deceased, and how life’s just a semantic quibble over who got there first. I said my brother Brad had tried to predecease me but he’d gotten caught.
At this, Stony teared up and took me out of the luchroom, into an old corridor stuffed with broken desks and empty lockers. All of a sudden he tried to tell me the story of his mom, tried to say it hastily, to flush it out of him, but the telling took all day. We sat in the cold, squeaky recesses of the broken desks, inhaling dust and mop water, whispering and pinching away tears until our dads drove up in the dark and honked their horns outside. As soon as I got home that night, I realized Stony was already calling.
A suicidal parent gives their child many accursed gifts. The first is the biological penchant for depression. The child wrestles their own waves of melancholia, existential dread, mortal terror, oceanic loneliness, and burning, flaying psychic pain for all their years. The child also inherits their suicidal parent’s hopelessness, with added interest. They begin the race against depression with losing odds and half the clock run out. The child of a suicide cannot even pretend to believe they’ll make it. Their parent’s quitting seems like a spoiler alert: Things don’t get better. A regular depressive can pretend otherwise, can torture themselves with hope. Until.
If suicide mars your past, you fear it like cancer. Like Alzheimer’s. It’s coming for sure; it’s not a matter of choice.
I told this to Stony once, in the back yard that first summer. It was night, July 3rd, and we were huddled under a quilt watching premature fireworks being set off by teenagers a few blocks away. I said I felt like my fuse was lit.
Stony expanded on this. It’s not just the family of suicides. There is a well-documented copycat effect following every suicide. Schools are already working on methods of quarantine when a student offs himself, Stony said, and many organizations now apply epidemic theories to self-harm and self-death. When someone offs themself, the suicide rate in the immediate community and surrounding social and professional circles undergo a significant jump that persists for six months. When a famous person kills himself, people emulate it in droves for a year, and there’s a spike every year on the anniversary of the event.
And it’s all so wrong, I said. If only they knew how it felt to be made a survivor.
Watching a firework lift off, Stony said: yeah. I kinda want to try it though.
I slapped him, hard, and the firework fell.
It was an illegal specialty called Plane Drops Parachute. When you light it, a little paper plane shoots off into the sky, engulfs itself in an orb of blue smoke, and releases a tiny army man with a plastic parachute than unfolds and delivers him liltingly back to the earth. I watched the plastic army man sail to the ground.
Stony was holding his reddened cheek. Don’t you want to? He asked.
Of course, I told him. But it’s murder. It would entirely kill my dad.
Stony moved toward me under the quilt. His body, hot and supple, was radiating against mine. If you killed yourself, he said, it would entirely kill me too.
Well and likewise, I said. And who knows how strong the combined suicide epidemic would be.
It’d all be our fault, Stony said.
The blood would be on our hands already, anyway, I joked.
Thus our reverse-suicide pact began. Committing suicide was the single most morally abhorrent act we knew; neither one of us could allow our best and only friend to enforce such ugliness on those they loved. Worse, we each knew our own suicides would truly-and-literally kill the other. So long as the other was alive, we could not intentionally die, because it would absolutely kill the other person, after which they’d kill themself. We would stay alive, both of us, through a detente of love.
We swore on it with the commingling of blood.
Time battered against us, and as young adults we both learned that biology had indeed doomed us to live in the shells of inherited depression. Hereditary gloom descended on Stony by age sixteen, and crept into my mind’s portents by twenty. We could feel death’s cold fingers tracing outlines on our backs.
We kept it at bay through school, through graduation, through unemployment and moving back home, through emotionally catastrophic moves to new cities. We kept it at bay through loves and breakups and abortions. We kept it at bay through layoffs and interviews and work meetings lacquered with pleasantries and artifice. We kept it at bay through nightly phone calls, emails spanning thousands of words, cryptic frightening texts that prompted Hotline check-ins, intermittent visits to Boston (where he lived) and LA (where I lived) and Cleveland (where we grew up), always coalescing in sleepless nights of violent sobs and ill-advised mutual masturbation. We kept it at bay when he got divorced and I lost custody of my oldest. We kept it at bay when he was almost homeless for a while. We kept it at bay when my brother finally succeeded in his own offing. We kept it at bay, kept it at bay, kept it just there close enough to see but too far to scrape, even when I retired and found there was still nothing worth living for.
Each day I opened up the cupboard, flung open the window, peered down into the well and tried to divine something beautiful, some new feeling, a gust of joy. Each day there was nothing inside or outside of these vessels, their doors and holes just opening into blankness.
When you force yourself to live for a long enough time, you even lose the will to tantrum about it. You feel that the juice is sucked from you, that you’re just a wrinkled husk and a dripping pit, and you want to sob over it, but your spirit’s too lazy to manage the realest of feelings. Stony used to tell me about this hopefully. As you get older, he said, you experience emotions less intensely. It’s a blessing.
Right before I died, I asked him, what was the point of this life?
He said, to keep me alive.
Were you in agony? I asked. Did I keep you from doing something you wanted?
He told me I did.
Why was this a good thing? Why was it a good thing that I tortured myself every night, banging my head against the bricks just a bit too lightly for it to kill me, sobbing in the streets, draining bottles of red wine into my belly and making stupid craft boards from the corks? Why was it worth it that I lived, and had children, and married, and worked seventy-hour weeks and toiled in a garden until my knees gave out and I developed a brain bleed? Why was it a good thing that I staved off my lust for a bottle of aspirin and let nature catch me before my depression did? Why, most of all, was it good that I endured eighty-two years just to ensure that he would live out his days in the hell of the melancholic as well?
Why, I repeated. Why was it good that I kept you from solace?
Because, he said, you lived.
I told him this was infuriatingly recursive. I asked him what he’d do when the brain bleed finally got me. I cut him off before he answered. I begged him to find somebody to take my place when I was gone.
Didn’t you know? He said. If you hold out to the end, I have to, too. The game isn’t off when you die.
But why? I said. It was perverse, but I wanted him to join me. It was less perverse, but I wanted him to find his peace.
My kids, he said. I would never do that to them.
Do you ever wonder if they’re…? I said.
Like us? I know they are. Your kids, too. That gloomy, faraway look. Not as bad as us, but they have it. I can’t give in; it’ll kill them. And they can’t give in; it’ll kill me. I think we might just all be in this thing because to give up is ghastly. We thought we invented the solution, Eunice, but we didn’t. My kids are in on the pact. And yours. And your husband. And my Nellie. And my sister. And your cousin. And your grandkids. We’re all in this. We’re all just living so we don’t devastate anybody.
I persisted in asking: Stony, then why is it worth it?
Because the only time we truly get to hold somebody, he said, is when we’re holding them away from the cliffs.
I am too open-minded, that’s the problem. My mind is so prone to thinking about the potential consequences and possibilities that what happens is that there ends up being none. Things never go as I expect because I expect too much, never feel ready to take action, and so never do, and the opportunity passes and I never see it go. I just sit there in that moment as it sneaks away behind my back and robs me of courage, which it soon returns later through express mail without showing its face ever again.
I hate failing because it kills me, and I never try and it kills me. I am tired of overused clichés, and yet I remain stuck in between a rock and a hard place. It is this sensation as well as the events that often lead up to it that aggravates me every day, because no matter what, I cannot get away from this preposition: “what if”. Everywhere I look, I see the shadow of “what if”, and I always see it clearest when I look in two specific directions: forwards and backwards. I could be walking on any path, but it will always be hanging there, grinning at me and welcoming me with open arms if I am looking forwards. Or, it could be smiling at me as I look over my shoulder, reminding me that it is always following me everywhere I go. It’s like the strange combination of the ghost of the past and the ghost of the future.
I bet a lot of people would look down on me for not taking the complete blame, but I don’t think I’m the only one responsible. I blame my youth, I blame my upbringing which always taught me to wait for the right moment (a mere mirage), I blame my low self esteem which I undoubtedly earned for myself, but most of all, I blame the fact that I am living, and not the opposite.
Strange, because in realizing that I consider myself living and not dying, I also found that thriving inside some deep part of my pessimistic world, there is this very strange kind of optimist. Because, if considered carefully, each day spent amongst the living is a day that brings us all closer to death. I am, technically, dying, but in a very chronic way. I still have a limited time on this earth, and so does everyone else.
I am certainly a strange individual, because this thought gives me hope. I’m just going to die. That’s it. There’s no other ending to this story except death, and that thought fills me up with so much courage.
Some people fear death more than anything else, but I fear, more than anything else, uncertainty. I live each day writhing in the scare of what may happen. I am always afraid of this feeling, and yet I shouldn’t be because I feel it all the time. Imagine all your nightmares haunting you twenty-four/seven. And yet, I wonder why I can’t sleep!
But that’s ok now because death is never uncertain. At the end, it will give me a giant hug, a payoff for anything that I endure. Up until now, I have been so foolish, but in my interminable gullibility, I have become a master of sorts at self deception. Let’s see if I can do it again…willingly.
Life till now has certainly been a waste. For all that time, I wondered how the disappearing sands of life could affect me, a young soul with so much ahead of me. What a waste it was to have some of those things lying in wait for me pass by because I was never courageous enough to seize any opportunities! Now I know, I am on my way to death, and I’ll have you know, I always wanted to die young. I cannot let anything go to waste, from now on. That’s it – this has become crucial now!
I will live, from now on, believing as if I were to die soon. I will take every chance I’ve got, because honestly, I have nothing to lose if it’s all scrap in the end.
(Source: leilockheart, via suicidally-b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l)
