Nucleus

I don't want to be the center of my own reality. Looking out for number one, you'll never be happy. It gives you too much time to reflect on yourself, what can be improved, what must be altered. We are all tailors meticulously working, working, working to create the perfect, most flawless garment on earth. Take it in here, let it out there, shorten the hem. Re-stitch the ripped, the torn, the worn. But who are we to consider ourselves the perfect, most flawless beings to don this garment of ours. We will never reach perfection, and yet even with this knowledge we continue to disappoint ourselves with wasted efforts. 

Whether there is a God or not, I cannot say, but I sure as hell hope something's out there. And I don't mean aliens. The idea of a city, a nation, a planet believing in nothing but their own flesh and blood, their own selfish consuming ideology, makes me want to cry. I'm not religious, and I never have been. I don't sit with my ass numb on a hard wooden bench every Sunday, praising a man who, with all the power of God behind him, allowed himself to be demoralized, hammered on a cross and left there to die. Deluding myself with holy water drawn from a sink. 

Or maybe that's just me being ignorant.

But I want to believe in something. A Holy Tea Bag. A Holy Kleenex Box. I don't care. Just as long as I don't believe in just me, just me living and dying. A whole nation of people, living and dying. Constantly concentrating on holding yourself back from something instead of working towards building something. Picking themselves apart until they're whittled down to nothing. It's when we become this nothing that we begin to hate ourselves, for lack of anything else to hate. We all fight some sort of addiction to escape this hopelessness. Your life becomes centered around the effort of NOT doing something. Your life becomes a battle against yourself.

I tried to describe to my mother the sadness I feel, the frustration at merely living in the reality that we are forced into. Our birth is both a blessing and a curse. We spend our lives looking to the future until we find ourselves at the end of the road, looking at the past. Wishing we had spent it differently. We die in self-induced regret. Our free will is as free as a trained monkey. We are programmed to want what we want. Nothing is ever new. I tried to tell my mother that my childhood, this generation could not be more of a polar opposite to hers. She spoke in whispers of a world of kneeling on hard corn, of children polishing shoes, of night terrors involving drunken fathers. I thought of a world of middle class workers working their five to nines, coming home to a dysfunctional, two story home where the mother reads diet books and the kids rooms are empty. With the newly renovated kitchen, the shiny new tiles and the couch dented from the husband's sleeping body every night. Everything is one big show. My mother told me that I had no idea what suffering was. Even in her time, with abusive drunken fathers, with wars and racism and beatings at school, I can say that our world today, my world, is far, far more fucked up than ever before. The drunken fathers were just trying to escape something of their own. The wars were fought by men who still gave a shit about their country. Schools laid rulers on the knuckles of children because they refused to give up on them. I wanted to tell her all this, but the words wouldn't come. A cigarette is just another portal to escape. Our lungs will never become as polluted as our minds. I have a feeling she wouldn't understand anyway. 

"Our generation has had no Great War, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives."

My thoughts have awakened in ways I never thought possible.

There are, quite literally, no oxfords in this town. 

No meat for the bread.

She swung back and forth on the computer chair for what seemed like a very long time, thinking what on earth to write about. She felt the creative energy, the yearning for some elaborate description, straining for release but there was no outlet. For the first time, her imagination had failed her. This was a turning point.

Maybe if she wrote in the third person, she thought, it would birth some idea. If she played Text Twist on the computer, some word could spark inspiration. Her mind was a dry oasis of blandness. How unfair it was that during waking hours, when the brain is supposedly most stimulated, she could not conjure a single tool to aid in her writing. The more she forced it, the more awful the product of her efforts:

"If stars were flies, the sky would be the most majestic of spiderwebs."

And such garbage. 

How does the night bring about such originality of thought? Those nights during which, tossing and turning, she strained to attract sleep, when the most lucid of thoughts occurred. Which led her to think, is there something about that half-conscious state of mind that helps us tap into unexplored areas of our minds? We only use ten percent of our brains. What if there was a way to access beyond that, something more? That statistic made her analyze the true confines of our limited imaginations. 

No wonder all she could produce was a half-hearted comparison of stars and flies. 

Misery, she concluded, was the best inspiration. Proof was inked into history's highest respected literature. A lack of misery was bad news for a prospective writer. She found that she didn't care much for this observation, however, because having recovered from a very deep, very recent bout of misery, she had no intention nor any desire to revisit it. 

So what to do? 

She took a bath. And read a book. Marvelled at the intricate plots, the beautiful linguistics, the literary devices. She was jealous.

Tattoo removal is expensive.

Since fucking when am I sixteen, with black hair, a driver's license and cigarette smoke in my jacket.

I feel cheated. Time is the most deceptive of con artists, and therefore the deadliest. Whispers convincing comforts in your ear, "You've got all the time in the world," it coos. Programs your brain from the outside to believe that if you mess up this time, there's always another chance, you always have more time. Once you have this mindset locked in, it owns you completely, you just don't realize it. It takes advantage of your confidence in it, because "time doesn't lie". It crawls into your head and now it can truly start fucking with you. Things change faster than you think. You don't reckon time properly. 

I grabbed my keys off the hook that hangs by the mirror and tried to reach the door before I was spotted, but the mirror had seen me and was calling me back. I saw myself as I see myself everyday, squinting in the magnifying mirror scouting for imperfections, smothering them under mounds of makeup as if it makes them any less present. The plain jane face, the hideous bulbous nose that European ancestry was so kind to bless me with, eyelids straining under the weight of painted lashes. But this time, with one hand on the doorknob and the other fingering the hard, smooth outline of the lighter in my left pocket, I saw myself differently. I didn't see flaws or beauty or even hair, eyes, a nose, a mouth. I saw unhappiness. I peeled my face off, tossed it on the floor and revealed my ugly unhappiness, naked to the world. I thought to myself, I don't want to wake up in ten years and have to peel my face off every day. When did this tremendous unhappiness settle into my skin so deeply? I tell myself I want a tattoo but, hah, i've had one all along. It's everywhere, the world's largest tattoo. For not only does it ink every inch of my skin but it covers my muscles, my organs, my bones. 

Dear God, I hope a fucking change comes soon, I said. And so it happened. Time's dishonest, sneaky nature has served me well I now see, because I couldn't have made the change knowing it was happening. It was unconscious, natural. I'm thankful for this because forcible change never lasts long.

Outside, the click of fuel against flint, a hand shelters the flame, ignites. Smoke pervades my mouth, throat, lungs. Inhale deeper still and savour the toxins. I pick my poison of the day. Wind permeates my skin, chills my bones and clears my head. Snow bites at my heels and toes like wild dogs. 

And every day I miss you less. You should know that you will always be in my heart, but even that, my heart, most maimed organ and in being this, also the strongest, will be moving on to greater things soon. 

Lost friend, lover of times past, I love you and I will always love you, but I will not wait. I can't.

This is okay, I think. People are moving and I am still. My socks are soggy and starting to freeze. A strand of hair clings to my lip. 

I'm okay.

Slip

My heart is in your hands,

I don't need to shake your hand to know you have a firm grip.

Down the rabbit hole

in another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was going to get out again. There were doors all 'round the hall, but they were all locked, and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.

I am back with scars to show.

Press two fingers to my neck, show me a pulse

Tell me my signs are vital

I'm over this,

but the black circles under my eyes betray me.

Crack my ribs and I'll crack a smile (I promise),

fix what's broken, cut away the dead, amputate the sick, the sad, my mind.

This gangrene is spreading faster than you will ever know.

And it's all you, you're the goosebumps on my flesh, the shivers that rack my body in the night. You're the hair that comes out by handfuls in the shower, you're the lingering chill in my room, in my bed that used to know your warmth. You break my bones, you sleep in my marrow.

I lean my head against the rattling glass window of the west-bound bus, my teeth shiver in their gums. Sometimes if I hold my breath, I can hear the gangrene consuming, destroying me.

This I know, my heart will be the last to go.