Sunday, December 27, 2015

Lessons That Came Too Late - Part 1

"A nature that does not sue for happiness, often receives it in large measure"

Monday, November 23, 2015

Listen Without Prejudice.

Given enough time, everything decays into rage. It courses through the veins, thicker than blood. It burns brighter than most fires you and I have known. It lives. 

Burning out is a gift, a blown fuse being the final line of defense before the carnage. The limit of human capacity for enduring pain protects not itself, but the source. 

But there are those who don't burn out. Those misguided into striving for invincibility, can only come burning and blazing, or not come at all. They forget how to half-live, they know not how to half-love. Run enough pain through them, and they become live wires; obliterating everything they touch, knowing neither peace nor loss. The current, it's possible, would never stop.

Saturday, September 12, 2015


"In a fine country, in a sunny country,
Among the hills I knew,
I built a house for the wren that lives in the orchard,
And a house for you.

The house I built for the wren had a round entrance,
Neat and very small;
But the house I built for you had a great doorway,
For a lady proud and tall.

You came from a country where the shrubby sweet lavender
Lives the mild winter through;
The lavender died each winter in the garden
Of the house I built for you.

You were troubled and came to me because the farmer
Called the autumn "the fall";
You thought that a country where the lavender died in the winter
Was not a country at all.

The wrens return each year to the house in the orchard;
They have lived, they have seen the world, they know what's best
For a wren and his wife; in the handsome house I gave them
They build their twiggy nest.

But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home
To a leaky castle across the sea,-
To lie awake in linen smelling of lavender
And hear the nightingale, and long for me."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay
"There are things I have wanted so much and for so long, I would only consent to have them if I could keep wanting them."

Top of the list of things I would have said eventually, had they not already been said in a manner so faultless.

The sky is no man's land.


Monday, September 7, 2015

Fulcrum

One doesn't play with fire, without expecting to get burnt. 

In doing so, the objective of the game is not to avoid damage. The whole point of the exercise, is to balance ones' instinct for survival against the predilection for self-destruction, and discover which one wins. The war, after all, is always internal.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

On identity and the passage of time.

Cut to 10 years later, and the goth kid in me:
1. has the most corporate of corporate day jobs.
2. wears dark lace under button-up pastel shirts and business suits.
3. grins at her painted-black toenails when things get too... insipid.
4. reads Poe and prowls derelict, banyan-lined streets post-midnight.
5. lights a candle to stare at contemplatively, every time it rains.
6. definitely listens to The Cure secretly, between presentations and when no one is looking.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

This Is Not A Pipe.

It is when people come to a point where they think they know you, they stop noticing you. When that moment is reached, you could simply keep feeding their illusions and self-serving need to believe that they understand and are in control of much more than reality would have it be. 

It becomes so terribly easy to step behind a curtain of their own making, cast mere shadows on the cloth, and let mere assumptions vivify the act right into real life. The audience will love it so dearly, so completely (for narcissistic love of one's own creation is convenient enough), that every contradictory truth in the field of vision becomes immaterial. 

Surely, evolution has done the world a great disservice. 

Breaking silences and gentler things.

I often wake up wanting nothing more than to strip the world bare. 

Pull little parts off with my own hands, crumble them like clay, observe the texture of every slice, the cross-section of every joint, and somehow come closer to making sense of all these events that are entirely unlikely but painfully predictable, all at the same time. Instead of just watching them unfold before me, just as I imagined them a thousand hours, weeks, or years ago. Just as I could never really believe they would. It's the ultimate existential conflict. Subjective optimism is up against objective reality. The crazy, stupid things we do to keep the little flame of hope alive. 

I'd like to crumble every bit under the tips of my fingers, smudge them with the friction of the ridges that make up my fingerprints, and re-engineer reality to be little less obvious. To be a little more kind.
"If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,--
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay