I'm...

And...

I'm going to be honest, more honest than I've been thus far; though I've already been as transparent as I feel is possible given our distanced relationship—separated by airways and waterways and electromagnetic waves and all the other things that come between me and you. Yet we are connected by something we can call the internet, though I sense there is something more that brought you to read this now.

I almost didn't write again this week. It has been like that for some time now, despite having many thousands of words waiting to be reframed and presented on this page to you. There is always a combination of things that influence that, I don't wish to list them all. I likely don't fully know the reasons why, just like I don't understand where sadness comes from or why tonight I felt I needed to cry and welcomed the black melancholy raindrops making their own micro puddles inside of little puddles on the cobblestone, tossing perfect expanding droplet rings, soaking onto the toetops of my torn shoes. Water has a way of making perfect shapes, and these made each a little vase with crownlike edges in a cascade of moments. Droplets expanded radially initially from a center, forming walls of a glasslike cylinder, then so quickly, as if immediately, collecting into a rim created and destroyed, but still somehow eternal with my bouncing focus jumping to new puddles. And so I saw one in many and layer filtered it all into representations in my mind of a single droplet’s journey, a journey unnecessarily long in my mind. The droplets would be destroyed while creating those projections, but imprinted in me are the twinkling beads of refraction tugging themselves from the rim, briefly leaving a narrowing trail of connection which breaks imperceptibly for them to find new puddles. Without that refraction those droplets would be as black as the sky and unexplainably cold and disturbing with nothing to explain their significance. And my feelings were with them. At least with rain I can explain why I feel so dejected, and blame natural occurrences for feeling so disconnected from a reality. A reality that is me, but feels so far away.

Nights cannot be as dark as the indescribable corners of my consciousness, where all these observations go to be catalogued, or not, in the catacombs of everything I’ve ever seen or felt. And this life would be impossibly lengthy without a trail of occurrences to say there were beginnings and endings, and simultaneously it would be as fast as the event horizon, and I would lose the ability to discern a slice of a moment, all piled into each other and distorted in the concentration of black. For this time, the puddles were infinite and I dragged infinitely with them down endless roads. I became the puddles, wishing to be a droplet, and it all felt like forever.

I could believe for a moment that a dark street with a darker sky could remind me all was not lost, because I could say there was something darker than my thoughts and feelings, and there were still shimmers of vibrancy in the darkest of things. But even this darkness I could see and compare it to something. In the consciousness there is no comparing, and the blackest of places are a pure empty. Not even the void can explain what occurs there.

The dim reflections of the street lights and cars crashing through vertical lines that streak it all flickered in my soppy eyes… those eyes that wonder if the darkness of a moonless night infecting a splashing puddle—or the colors, or water’s ability to translucently reflect, or my eyes flipping and bouncing all the is and isn’t light, or the great translator in my head that I so despise sometimes—is what makes those puddles so obviously beautiful and free. But they are free without me or my distorted views, they are free because not even the most powerful mind can capture what a raindrop sees and a raindrop knows there isn’t a need to capture anything because it will soon be a cloud again and all the stomping from feverish humans and their brief attempt to bottle things is just another wonky journey that always leads home. I envy those raindrops that can be dark and happy, or neutral, not needing emotions, and feel at home everywhere. Because I am not now, and will likely not be soon, nor can I remember more than a handful of days when I truly felt at home… anywhere.

And just like handfuls of anything, those memories seem to be slipping away too.

I am enveloped in the disconnection of a distant city with everyone rushing around. In a bustling city of pouring rain I can cry wherever and allow all the emotion to erupt immediately from someplace that doesn't feel like me. The brick lined, narrowing corridors of stormy disdain protect me from prying eyes upon my weakness, and I can excuse the wetness on my cheeks without words, and I can sniffle and hunch over and grimace and break apart as I walk, and nobody will even care to notice. I can shrink between any crack or crevice of walls that seem to lean inward protectively, but somehow still allow everything to be soaked in sadness. My existential shrieks are garbled unintelligible non-sounds drowning in the calming shhh of rain on roofs.

And I can turn down any road or pass through any corridor as portals to a scene that seems the same. I can pretend for that brief eternity that I am nothing… nowhere, a caressing invisibility, a place inside of myself that doesn’t know the soggy barrier between my out and in, a place where I can finally be free to be a messy blur of demarcations. I embrace it, as it does me, a chilling rush of sensational perceptability. That feeling is more than perception. I attempt to explain it here. No place feels like it is right. This must be felt from the inside of lonely moments that cannot be shared. And I can't capture any of it, but it feels as though I could for these moments, as a puddle.

And the whole world and science and psychology and all of the brightest and best pontificators could come up with reasons why I feel these ways, but they will never know what happened in those moments, or when it is the right time to share some things. And let others sit and wait for different days.

I hesitate to share especially this because I truly do not want pity. Pity is an evil drug, nobody really wants it. It is shallow care, a consolation prize for the things we were really working for. It is a selfish thing to pity because it is a meager type of care—unimaginative and weak—just enough to feel like you've done enough when really you haven't even come close to touch the soreness of someone's crushing heart. And it inspires complacency or an even lower view of the self, now having more eyes upon your failure. And worse, to pity one's self—if I could lift myself from that pit I would. But for some time I've been living there, afraid to do anything.

It is not that I don't wish to write, most days I wish I could write all day and sit and sip a milky drink and warm my feet by some sort of heat and look up every once in a time and reminisce of the details I didn't miss and became so beautifully imprinted in my mind. And I wish I could return to those worlds always and not need to do all the things which everyone says will keep me sane, but don't, and just give me more time to waste towards society's machine—one in which I'm trapped forever because in some ways I need it to ease the ache with a flameless fire and attempt to fill the never satiated void that grows in my belly as I feed it more than I can eat. These days my flame is less than embers and I can feel my passion wane again, and I see the return of necessity and all the things which I so hate about this life that I did not create. But all are lowly pouts of a world that gave me the chance to choose the things I hate. For most it is hard to even know if they hate these things, or if someone else chose what everyone should hate.

Most of this grinding that we are all convinced to do is a distraction from the more human things that we forgot so many generations ago, and cannot be reminded now because they are so far and of lives we can't possibly believe left little blueprints in our fundamental fleshy cells waiting for us to pay enough attention.

So again I descend into my little melodrama, where I'm reminded of a time that I can barely remember, when I walked away from arts and sitting in the woods and swimming until my hands were wrinkled older than my soul. I'm forced to remind myself of a so very recent time when I decided to walk away from my dreams of flight, potentially forever, for the chance that I could maybe see if I walked away too early from something brighter, as some last chance to honor that little me that didn't know what he was about to sacrifice.

To see all of that slip away again is another loss to a me that long enough ago could be a different me entirely, but I still can see his little face, and the brightness fading from it as the world sorted him into a proper place.

All this during a time of unrest and violence in the world that we often forget is closer than it feels. But it all feels so close to me and I wish for just the slightest nudge to go join the commotion, but in some ways know that nudge will never come. Because not all of us have that type of fight to face in our tiny time on Earth. But I imagine it, confronted with hopelessness, where at least I could shout my despondent reasoning and overcome and label myself courageous. And I could point fingers around at "enemies" and rise up against some definite foe. But I know that's not for me, and I was given this, whatever this life is, to do with it what I see in gifted visions. And I chase after those dreams upon some hope that it means something, something that isn't more emptiness.

But I still have that craving that hopes something comes and forces me to reckon with forces that cannot be ignored.

And the whole world feels so heavy today and I wonder if returning to a life of rigid distractions and number counting is worth my pathetic effort, or anyones', or why we make this whole machine run if it just makes everyone fight each other. And I will always wonder if being capable of such "useful" things is really all that worth having when the gift is lost on the lost and a lonely road extends in all directions.

So I remind myself of tiny phrases from men better than me who sat with pen on page and considered what they might say to make more of more of us. And I replay those little words as if they were truth and not just musings with no answer. Because I have so very few answers to all my expanding questions of how I should live today.

I am so uneducated of it all because I choose each day to attempt to explore what it is to be this human and to find some way to connect with others. Especially in a busy place of millions, we've lost what it means to be with one another.

I'm afraid to say any of this at all at the risk that all those hooey pseudo-experts are right, and logging these thoughts in repetition is what makes them feel so real. But I remember that these whispers were always there, and all of my pretending never made them any quieter. If anything the distractions made it all so much louder, after the busy avoidance settled and I was forced to sleep. I remember the many night I lay awake wide eyed but so tired, having spent every tendon in movement so the body could not stand any longer. Those nights I hoped for dreamless sleep, so in that gap I could escape this life.

Now I face head on the confusion in that place, every night knowing I will believe it's real and I will wake wondering which me is me and what I could do today to forget for a second and be someone I didn't have to regret, tomorrow.

So let this be the start of a series I'll call: I'm afraid of writing.

And let this be a warning that I am writing without much reason or premeditation, and it may make little sense, but it is some extra sense that I have, one beyond the five we cannot as easily ignore. This extra one I cannot either, and so it comes out like this, and will be for now a final attempt to find what there is to sense before I have to go back to pretending to be a me again.