I hope this finds you.

I caught myself fantasizing about my own death again today. To be more precise, the fantasy was not so much an indulgence of bloodletting; that never held much appeal for me. No, this one was a reoccurring image of my funeral. “Untimely” and “tragic” are the words most frequently used in substitution for complete sentences in these dreams, wrapped in a sigh and trailed with implied ellipses’. It’s more or less the same concept each time I indulge. In the entrance there sits a wide table draped in cloth bearing scrapbooks with pictures compiled by friends, my journals opened to a particular entry that seems to foreshadow (somewhat inauspiciously) my malapropos demise. A curtain lifted on the boy whom everyone knew as the jester. It would be more tired and cliché if it were not so real, so present. Someone comments that my work should be published posthumously, with complete sincerity in their tone. My shameless desire to be noticed, even in death. The rest is simply the usual spectacle, crying, bowed heads, perhaps even some rain and a bottle of whiskey shared amongst my close friends as they remember shared stories.

It’s a vulgar way to entertain oneself. But it is indicative of human nature; to gauge ones worth based on the level of pain we inflict on others, like some sort of bully for the bereaved. Certainly a practice performed by lovers as they quarrel, each one knowing the effect of their sharp tongues during combat. The wounds we give to each other as we fight to be heard, understood, or just simply to be pleased and satiated.

Years ago I lived in this sort of daily trench mentality. The constant bickering and baiting that are precursors to a full blown fight, the kind that spark from some small annoyance, the minutia of relations, and escalates in both scope and volume. The kind of cyclical argument that becomes nothing more than the fetish of last words and debased oratory. I remember the moment of elation, when struck with a curse so painful she would give up in tears. “I am sick” the phrase caught in between my teeth and my tongue, “but she still cares”. Reactions are an answer to a question you hadn’t thought to ask. And the day came when there were no tears, no stricken look of pain, just indifference. Men can take sadness, anger, jealousy and even apathy, but not indifference.

I woke one night from a dream, my mind still holding onto the presence of some emotion and my eyes still seeing the faint outline of a place I’ve never been. There was urgency and desperation in my hands as they looked for pen and paper. I needed to remember something in the morning, that’s the only thought I could recall from that night, until I found a piece of paper between my mattress and the wall months later. It read:

“I awake to realize that I have not lost a kingdom through the night. There had not been one to begin with. Just bricks and mortar in an outline, under tarps and wet from the ground beneath. The grass along the edges shown like a measurement of the days it had not been tended to. No one came to marvel, to trade or rest within the walls. Just accidental glances from the road beside. And never once did a glance hold such little weight as those cast upon my labor.”

That’s the pain worse than death they say, a life looked upon with indifference. I suppose that’s why I dream of an exodus from this world, a chance to leave this world with the excuse that it wasn’t my time yet, a simple fix to replace this tourniquet that I call my aspirations.

Please don’t take this is as a performance in self deprecation, I already own tomes filled with that sort of morbidly introspective dribble. I write this as an archeologist, uncovering fossilized remains of intent and motive, piecing together the spine that I lost somewhere along the way. Or consider these ponderings as a textual catharsis, even simpler, an outlet wildly aimed at discovery. We can learn so much from the deconstruction of dreams, those dreamt in day and night alike. They are the symptom of some ailment looked over years ago. Be it some dross memory such as a child’s Christmas without presents, or the stain on the psyche of Christmas without a father, a pang infinitely more delicate. Delicate is certainly the condition that we find these rotten foundations, these cornerstones we’ve built our psychosis around. You and everyone else you know tiptoes around them, trying not breathe too heavily. As if even mere respiration could be invasive.

The hardest tumors to remove are the cancerous regions of our hearts that the world calls virtue. Some contrive notion of hope or love, neither idea being fully explained or defined, they have become a place holder for the empty spots we are born with. But they do little to keep the wind out, they grab hold and leech off of the few remaining functional organs we have left. Hope: somewhere the devil has minions carving collars that say hope, the prettiest four letter word, and certainly the most vulgar. And yet, like the parasite that it is, hope grows, filling us with the notion of itself and swearing that all medicine tastes bad going down.

What is there to hope in when we find the very origins expression to be as hollow as the outcome? Some say, hope in yourself, in the human spirit, in the unrelenting struggle for completion and quest for self worth. It’s nothing more than a paradoxical search for the cure of the human condition, born out of a need for purpose. All the while missing that the need for purpose is in itself a plank of the disease we have sought to stem. And as we stare ourselves in the face our blood coagulates on the floor unseen, as we wonder why we are faint.

Was the human mind constructed to be so frustratingly heliocentric? Why are we so convinced of our position as the center of concerns, so unequivocally prone to finding in end in ourselves? And yet we are still torn by the unsatisfying consummation of our answers, of ourselves. When you are sick of yourself, not even the tough pills you swallow can make the rhetoric seem real. Neither the mantra of the mystics, nor the existential prose of a madman can mask the glaring reality of your unsettled soul. When time doesn’t heal wounds but instead pulls the cut wider, why do we always go back to ourselves, our own strength? We have become insufficient devices for our own needs and desires.

The truly strange thing is; nobody seems to be immune from this absurdity. As if we were struck in the head as a result of our blindness only to wake up in our beds the next day, completely unaware of yesterdays consequences, so bewildered by the throbbing of our skulls we look immediately for a way to stop the suffering, we hope that today will be better. We hope that magically one day our hearts will generate enough love to be self sustaining. We hope that our minds will overclock their computation while we sleep so we don’t have think while were hurting. We hope there is no God, because if there is, he is surely laughing at us.