Sleep

Sleep,
It's tough
isn't it?
I want to sleep.  I need to sleep if I'm to get up early.
If I'm to be a good person, I need to sleep.
Otherwise, I'll sleep in and
I won't get the things done I need to.
If I don't get the things I need to done then I'll never move forward.
If I don't move forward I'll never meet any success.
Without Success Everything will fall apart.
Without anything I'll fall apart.
Without myself I'll not
know what to be.
Without knowing what to be
everything I'll say will be a lie.
Eventually everybody will notice everything I say is a lie.
When they notice they will cease to listen to anything I say.
When they stop listening to me completely I'll be alone.
When I'm alone I'll have to
change.
Again, I'll have to change who I am.
I'll have to reconfigure all the different parts of myself.
I'll have to piece them back together into a different shape.
When that shape comes together I'll have to make sure there are no spare parts.
When that shape comes together will people believe it?
If they don't I'll have to start from scratch again.
Will I be the same person I've always been?
Will people see that person as the same person as the person I knew before?
Can everything I've been be the same
as everything I desire to be?

I am certain that I began my life lying.
This makes me call into question everything that I've done up to this point.
I remember as a very small child, feeling sad and alone, attempting to call upon my great grandparent's guidance.  I remember asking them wether or not I could live my life as a female while I was born as a male.  I remember them coming to me.  Pulling out of the ether.  I remember, vividly seeing them.  I remember seeing my great grandfather as a shapeless white form.  He stared at me, two empty spots for eyes.  This memory was in my first house.  Where my parent lived before we moved, when I was in first grade.  I remember looking into the emptiness of the eyes of the ghost I had summoned.  I remember them staring at me.  I had blocked up the two windows that were above my bed.  I had sealed up the door to my room.  I wished for no light from the external world.  The white formless great grandfather, long dead, stared back into me.  I had wanted it there for guidance.  I had desired to call it for answers.  When it arrived I was terrified.  Just empty eyes staring back.
It offered me no guidance.  It offered no council.
I felt nothing but terror as I stared back at it.  It lingered so long.  It stayed there unmoving for the rest of the night.  It had no answers for me.  It wouldn't speak with me.
For years after that I would try to block out all light in my room.  I tried to block out the light as if that were what had called that specter into existence.  As if that would make it come again.  I blocked out the light to make the things that I now saw disappear.  I now saw horrible things.  I now saw disfigured bodies.  I saw them linger.  I saw them stay in my room.  I couldn't chase them away.  I needed to let them stay.  I needed to give them a place to stay.  I saw people who were so completely disfigured that it made me queasy.  I could feel my stomach turn as I looked at them.  As I lay there in the absolute darkness I had procured for myself.  A darkness which they borrowed from me.  I saw them in all their horror and they always stared back at me.  They looked back into my eyes but out of respect they never moved forward.  When I saw them they stopped.  They wanted to be seen.  Not because they were disfigured but because no matter how you look you want to be seen.  No matter how good or bad things have been you want someone to know.  You want to be seen.  So, for years they came to me, to be seen.  I could not forget them, as a courtesy.  And as a courtesy to me they never moved closer.
I remember the one I saw most often.  He would come closer than the others dared to.  He would stand about two arms lengths away.  His body was always turned to the side but his face was always turned toward me.  The left side of his face, my right, was smeared away.  Behind him an ever changing cohort of destroyed people.  One of his eyebrows was gone.  His hair was pealed back on the disfigured side.  I was never sure but it seemed he was a burn victim.  And though only half his face had burned away he had not survived.  He is, to this day, why I'm afraid of getting burnt.  I worried at times that someone had ignited his hair and that was why he was missing half of his face.   His cheek on one side burnt away with everything else.  It left his half of his teeth so visible.  The muscle damaged and remaining only in strings.  When everything went, half his face went with it.  But if his face had been burnt by his hair lighting on fire it was not what killed him.  His chest was caved in on one side.  It left less than two lungs in his body.  Whatever it was, it left only half a heart.
And even now I write this in homage to him.  To remember him forever, in return for him never moving closer.  I feel a terror.  I see the movement of a shadow out of the corner of my eye.

Only when I was in college would I learn about how blocking out all light to the eye can cause it to hallucinate.  I would read about the Ganzfeld Effect.  A curious truth, whereby a human can block out all inconsistent information to the eye and induce hallucinations.  I would remember all the painstaking measures I would take to block out all light into my room, in hope that I would not have to gaze upon their disfigured shapes.  How I wished not to see or disrespect them.
Blocking out all the light and never being able to sleep.
Staring out into darkness for hours.
Causing the very thing I feared most about sleeplessness.

Walk Away

Walk away…

You don’t have to announce yourself.  Walk away as if nobody will notice. 

You walk away hoping nobody will notice.

What you need is a moment alone. 

Find a quite place and cry.

Pray nobody comes and sees you and cry.

How did you get here?  You feel so confused.  As you sit with your knees pressed to your face.  As you lay with your eyes in the pillow,

you ask yourself “How did I get here?” 

When the day began you didn’t feel exceptionally good but you didn’t think today was a lost cause.

When you were around people you noticed that it seemed as if you and everyone around you were having different conversations.  Everything they said to you getting meaner and meaner

and everything you said just trying to recover self.

They will wonder why you were being so cruel to them but you will not understand what they mean. 

Maybe you’re so wrapped up in the jabs between you and the others that you don’t even realize how aggressive you feel until

Someone says something that just cuts through.

You feel cut deep and betrayed.

You can’t hear the cruel things coming out of your mouth as your mind reels.  When you talk it over with them the next day they ask you why?  They were so excited to see you.  To spend time with you and you were horrible.  They hadn’t expected it.  Of course you resent them for behaving the way they did but as you explain they just become more frustrated with you.

At night, you will feel regret.

Your heart will swell.

You’ll know you have something beautiful to say to them.

Something full of love.

Something full of regret.

They’ll never hear it and you’ll never remember it.

Something to show them.

A wordless faceless emotion that they’ll never get to meet.

When you wake

it will just be something to distant to even take seriously.

When it comes again you’ll wish they could just plug into your soul and hear your sound.

In that moment of regret and love you’ll understand what you did wrong. 

Still unexplainable though it will hang in your mind, your throat, and your heart

waiting for you to find a way.

It feels like an exercise in futility.

It feels like a waste.

You wonder if it is vain.

I believe it is important.

I believe in remembering that feeling.

So in the moment of pure spite. 

The moment that generates the regret

The sadness of rejection that feels undeserved, though it is not

You must walk away.

Find a quite place and cry.

Sneak away if you can.

You won’t ever truly escape notice

but don’t make a scene

and as you cry alone and full of regret

you might come close

might glimpse

that feeling of love

that feeling of caring

and you might ,

after the crying,

make up for how worthlessly cruel you are

sometimes.

Letting go

First, let it go.  This is the first piece of advice and something you will never truly learn.  You were correct but it didn’t matter because you acted all wrong.  You remembered the facts perfectly and the thing that they said was odd and didn’t make any sense but let it go.  Nobody cares except you and the person you’re arguing with.  You seem like an asshole.  More so because you’re right.  Worse for your mind if you’re not but worse for your friends if you are.  Let it go.  You don’t really care.  What you care about is people.  People are special, your opinions are… lacking.  You need them and they don’t need you.  Let it go.

            Firstly, objective truths are never as objective as you’d hoped.  they always end up wrong anyways.  Approximations are never objectively correct though they try for objective truths.  Let’s take Newtonian Physics.  You might be the type to have adamantly defended them against people.  Against people who believe that the center of the universe is god and god wants things to fall down and so God, not gravity, GOD causes things to fall.  Seems insane to you.  And you, while explaining Newtonian Physics, become excited.  Your voice rises in pitch.  You become louder and louder.  All this happens without your awareness but the person you’re speaking to notices and is… frightened… intimidated, if you’re lucky, and you don’t notice.  Then suddenly and without warning,  they turn away.  They pull away.  An immeasurable distance forms between you

 and them.

You feel so completely Alone.

Almost offended

certainly afraid

you’ve been here before.

Do you really hate them?

Certainly, in that moment you do. 

For me, I’ve found, that I will

always forever

immutable gap.

Apologize.  You may not have been wrong but

You behaved poorly

You behaved like a child

Now, you’re even more adamant about defending yourself.

Protecting with logic.

Armor of Objectivity

Let it go.  It doesn’t matter.  You will not change the way they think about things.  If you want to change people’s opinions go into Art or Research.  That is the only way.  Either change a society that dictates truth or change the masses minds.  Either way your conversation can change nothing.  If that person specifically needs changing then let it go.  If you must change their minds. 

AND ONLY IF YOU MUST.

you can do it through caring and love.

You must bridge the immutable gap and connect.

You must connect to them and love them completely. 

You must know what it is that led them to their decision and why.

You must feel the way they feel.

Exactly the way they feel

Accept why they’ve done what they’ve done and

and I’ve no idea but you’ll be a different person for it.

Probably a better person for it, though I offer no promises.

Right, You’ve tried.  You wanted to love them but they didn’t love you.  It left you feeling alone.  You wanted to connect to them.  As perfectly as you could.  You felt your chest pull forward and you watched them pull away.  What did you do wrong then?  Nothing.  That is the sad bitter truth of reality.  I guess if you’re hung up on that I’d recommend reading about Soren Keikegaard’s Life.  He was, arguably ( possibly in my opinion) , the founder of existentialism.  He wanted desperately to be true to himself and Christianity but his belief was that one needed to take a “Leap of Faith” to believe in God.  That there was no objective way to decipher god’s existence and therefore one must make a leap of faith to believe in god.  Despite this he believed in god.  Despite being exiled from the church he believed in god.  And despite being rejected by the love of his life, who married someone in better economic standing( for better or worse),  he choose to continue to love her and believe in god.  Not because it would benefit him but because he believed outside of himself that it would be…

I guess it is at this point that I should say I’m an atheist and I can’t really say why he decided to believe what he did or do what he did.

For me, it has value because I don’t really believe in anything.  I try to find any value I can in anything. 

I remember how, as a child, I was told that people who live there life this way are destroyed.

In high school I discovered Sartre.  Sartre got me through the chaos of highschool.  By middle school I had given up on the religion that was being taught by the Lutheran Minister who “confirmed” me(in the Christian faith).  I still felt I needed to learn more.  Needed to believe in something.

My parents told me about people who “followed Sartre’s teaching”.  These supposed Existentialists who, always, ended up sad and alone.  Had they seen these people’s lives.  80 or 60 or even 30 years of experience they pretended to have seen every moment of.

Like the other day when my father told me my aunts were just terrified of death because they’re atheists and how they’re just getting their just desserts for making fun of old people for dying when they were young.

And then when I mentioned it to my mother and she told me how he was really referring to his parents.  She knew this because earlier that day they had a conversation about how his parents had made fun of people who were getting old and how his parents had not believed in god but then they died afraid and alone. 

Like we all do.

This all connecting to his grandparents, my great grandparents, who had converted to Christianity.  You see, my father has always believed in his grandparents and since they believed in Christianity, he would believe in their god. 

But it wasn’t their god.  More precisely it wasn’t their gods because they could never stop themselves from believing in what we now call “Norse Mythology”

Valhalla and all. 

And I only know this from the information that I’ve compiled from all the million stories I’ve heard of them.

Even my grandparents, his parents,

specifically his father could never truly let it go.

A story about a severed thumb for another time.

Context is an everexpandingbastard.

Well, who’s the father?

it’d take a lifetime to explain.

SO,

let it go.

People will tell you that you were in the right when you explain it

but let it go.

Don’t explain it.

Apologize.

or if you’d rather, spend the rest of your life obsessing over it and explaining it and defining it and exploring it.  There’s nothing wrong with devoting your life to the pursuit of understanding.

If it isn’t worth that

Let it go

and

you probably should apologize.