As the Deer

There is some unnamed function of grief that swiftly severs that inorganic cable between head and heart. Whereas before you may have been able to experience a mild annoyance or setback, and your mind would have quickly relayed to your heart that “all is well, this is nothing compared to the entirety of your life.” Or inversely your mind would tell you “this person has had enough chances, you should leave” only for your heart to respond with a message of grace. Greif however, has a perfunctory ability to confuse and obfuscate that correspondence in a way that is cataclysmically concussive to the psyche in a way that renders you ineffectual in dealing with death and loss.

I keep telling myself that they are in Heaven, they are at rest, there is no greater a conclusion to this story than these last pages. But what am I, what are we to do with the aftermath of their absence? Why should we after all the head knowledge and imperative truths have set in, feel so desperately lonely? The less than satisfactory answer is that I have no answer, that I know no comforting response. Of course the Word of God addresses the afterlife, the pain and grief. Yet we are still left with the sorrow. Even the Psalmist confesses that his heart is in no place to worship after a constant onslaught of attack. (Psalm 42)

And the traditions we have fashioned do little to spare us the pain. Funerals feel less like a celebration and more like an AA meeting without a group leader. An insane smattering of people that have only one thing in common; they have no idea what to do with themselves or each other. I’m not sure what’s worse, the forced regurgitation of tired cliché statements (that for all intents and purposes are well intention and aimed at catharsis) or the recounting of individual recollections relating to the deceased that start with “I will never forget the time…” The problem is that we will forget the ‘time.’ We don’t want to admit it, but in time the nuance and eventually the very authenticity of each of our memories will fall apart. This is why we state unequivocally that we won’t forget, knowing full well that we will.

It becomes apparent that our coping mechanisms are akin to shielding ourselves against tornados with our bare hands. There is something in our nature that tells us to avoid heartache with the feeblest methods imaginable. It's the same mechanism that instructs us to stem that urge to reconsider life at its core after tragedy. You know that urge, the one that puts your goals, aspirations and fears on a scale on the opposite end of loss and tells you that the imbalance you see is just an impartial illusion created by an overwhelming happening. I have been staring this reaction in the face for a couple days and I think it's safe to say that it should be denounced at all costs if we want any sort of meaningful denouement to this shit show of a dissonant movement.

What if we, if I, were to accept every measure of this "tragedy" and allowed it to envelope us entirely? What if we didn't dodge the heaviest portion of the blow and instead let the impact of it land square on the chin? Would we wake after a spell to find ourselves less burdened, less encumbered with the trivialities of this existence? Is there hope that such a beating could end up being revelatory instead of vanquishing? I'm beginning to think that the devices we have implemented to avoid suffering are ineffectual tools in assuaging pain, in fact I believe that they cause more of the very thing the further we get from the their death.

It helps to list our limitations. We cannot reverse the damage that has been done. Even at out most powerful (and most selfish) we cannot will them to live here with us again. We are unable to numb ourselves forever to the pang of this, nor are we commanding enough to instruct our souls to be completely unfeeling. So how then should we, being so seemingly powerless react?

Maybe there is no magic to this, no cure all procedure for walking through this unscathed. Perhaps the mind and heart are both correct in their unconnected states and pronouncements. This did happen for a divine reason and we don't have to like it, at all. If there is a God (and there definitely is a God) then maybe he is not lying when he says that our ways are not his ways, which to be honest is a comforting thought. Maybe this grief, which feels so much like fear, is a way for us to peer for a just a moment through this fogged glass called existence.

 Only a few in the history of mankind have been so blessed, or cursed, to look past the veil and see the clockwork of creation. Did they see them? I like to think sometimes that all time has already occurred and that if we were so able to glimpse it we would see ourselves, and everyone we know both completely alive and completely expired standing at the edge of eternity, and there is no pain, famine, war or heartache amidst us. But that is just a thought and I cannot see it. What I can see is this world, in this linear time. And what I can feel is pain, sadness and loneliness, hour after hour, day by excruciating day. But it's getting easier, and the "I'll never forgets" are fading gracefully into "I can't waits" as I allow the scale to be imbalanced, as I allow the weight of everything effect everything.

This is all to say one thing: I hate this, but I'm ok, we are ok. The Gospel wouldn't be so full of reassurances if we weren't in need of reassuring. It wouldn't be so full of promises of a later glory if this life wasn't do devoid of comfort, and He wouldn't be so present if we weren't so hopelessly lonely. If you are reading this, and any of it made sense to you, do yourself a favor; stop shielding yourself from discomfort and pain. Show the world that we have been created not to withstand but to grow. And each time we grow we are afforded that beautifully humbling perspective that only comes to creatures who are not who they once where.

The Hunt

Last night I dreamt you cut your hair, your short cropped head hidden beneath a hood and a shadow where you stood. I followed an undone yarn with flecks of auburn and gold only to look up to see you in a meadow. I suppose this is where I started. It took me a moment to remember that I had been afraid of losing my way back. My hand is still holding tightly to the cord, such a fear of letting go. I turn back to see it falling apart and blow away. Now small rings of yellow curls clutched in my palm are my only souvenir of who you were when I left.

It’s been a year of long hunts, the constant scent on the air and trails gone cold. I’ve staked no claims, found no fortune. I am tired of looking for prey and shelter. My body is groaning for a respite. The incessant searches and failed conquests took more than they gave, and yet somehow so did I. I stood for hours in the shallows by the aching river only to release everything I had caught. I fell asleep to fire and an empty stomach. I grew lean, learned to speak myself sane from time to time and tried to forget about the cord that I had lain to lead me back.

Now that I’m back I seem feral among the people and the small town. However declawed and broken of instinct I become there is still that sudden impulse of flight (even though not acted upon) that I have become accustomed. So what am I doing here dressed as a man, groomed and tamed beyond my own sights recognition? Why do you before all others, troubled and dismayed in many ways, appear in my dreams? How do you awaken such tired longing even after I have left the wilderness? How does your presence cause loneliness that far surpasses my old nights spent on watch along the edge of the territory? I was never more alone than when you are near, never more attune to danger than when you are not.

So I retreat back to the edge, where the wood and city limits meet to gaze out at the buildings from the safety and comfort of the shade. So why do you now appear before me with your hair gone as if in mourning? Why come to my camp if I cannot sit beside you just simply to share the time. How many times will your eyes widen and your steps move backward as I raise my hand to touch you? How is it that no traps have been set, no bait set for lure, and still you eye me cautiously? What hunter roamed these woods before I came to rest, so that you should be as skittish as a fawn set in sights? What famine or plague came over the terrain to leave you an orphan, a last of your kind?

Perhaps we met each other at the wrong time. I have lost all fear of paths diverging while you venture to the fork and turn back, only to glance at me from the trail as If I am a pleasant picture that would be ruined with you in the frame. I think I’ll stay here for awhile. I think I’ll tend the ground to learn patience. I think I’ll build a home that is more than a roof so I can have a door to prop open and lights to keep on. I think I’ll worry less and keep an eye out for travelers. I think I’ll pray more and ask my Father to send ravens to bring me food. I think I’ll forget about glances from the road beside and slowly ventured advances. I think I’ll write more so I can look back at where I was without a cord that falls apart. I think I’ll put that bit of hair I found between the cover and pages of the book I wrote so that I can remember that I like it here.

Chapter 1 (Familiar Bedfellows)

It’s odd how our memories live with us. At times, intrusive and meddlesome. Showing up like an illegitimate child on your doorstep, demanding to be recognized and threatening to shake your carefully manicured life into maelstrom. And other times they are the warm spot on the mattress beside you, their ghost being so present and intimate just hours before. Whether ubiquitous or at arm’s length they are strange instruments, their tone and clamor shifting and converging with our waking and subconscious lives alike. It is as if they crept into our souls and established an unauthorized symbiotic relationship, an oligarchy of recycled reactions, an aftermath of acts of commission and omission.

I used to think that my reflections were a perishable commodity. And if I did not exhume them often they would crumble somewhere in the recesses of my mind, condemned structures left to overgrowth and the elements. How I wish that was the case. The reality is much more demanding. Memories never fade, die, or expire; they evolve, consumed but never digested. If I were to look at this life and the thing we call time as a linear structure I should have nothing to fear from memories or the past, but as it turns out life isn’t so neat, not so structured and rigid.

Our past and our recollections of the past collude with one another, not content to be left wandering about the synapses, dodging signals and static. I have often made promises and solemn oaths to both myself and the Lord that certain actions, having proved abysmal, should never be repeated. Those oaths then clung to the memories they were affiliated and left a red mark across the face of them like a quarantine sign. The years of dormancy give us assurance, give us hope that the plague behind those doors locked in chains is a settled affair. Seldom do we learn that there are no locked doors, no steel chains or settled affairs inside the catacombs of our minds. All things dormant, all things repressed will one day throw off their chains, open the flood gates and come rushing back to the tips of our fingers and tongues.

How often my mask has been ripped aside, my clandestine talk revealed. Pardon if I switch to first person, this is where my thoughts cease to be entirely universal and become slightly shrouded with a unique set of persons and situations. Truly the heart of my mistakes and memories are as plain and quotidian as any other. I tend to (in the past and sometimes still) excuse my actions, when placed beside the history of missteps and misdeeds as sui generis, a childish attempt to find mercy amid scrutiny. Circumstance is simply the father of excuse, an illusion that our trespasses are special and therefore require a new set of standards and repercussions. The minuscule is not an exception, it’s the bacteria growing gangrenous on the limb we’ve dubbed ‘excuse’.

So I will put aside excuse, using explanation in substitution. I rather like explanation, it has method to its form and application, whereas excuse muddies the waters of who, what where and why with drama, like so much of my generation, infinitely arrested in pre-pubescent pardon of their own actions. At least with explanation the guise of objectivity is established, albeit loosely. There can be some semblance of rational thought and character deconstruction, but only to the point where it stings too deeply I suppose. Even in self evaluation I find myself in a quagmire of sorts. I have to insist regularly that a man of strength is one who is able and willing to tackle his weaknesses, both out in the open and seclusion. But even coming to that realization requires a paradigm shift of assertions.

The belief that I can intimately know the breadth of my flaws all at once and act as watchmen, sole enforcer or unbiased judge of my mind; is mindless. To assert that I can aptly apply strength and see with clarity each set of contiguous abstentions and indulgences all in tandem is to remove the role of God from my internal conflict altogether. This precursor to destruction must be removed, a prideful cyst in need of biopsy. What I find instead is something simpler, much more humbling than me cherry picking my flaws to expose to the sunlight. I need not the pretense of objectivity, I need an actual working model, one that can only be found in another.

We as people don’t seem to cherish the role of informer inherently. Reproach and repercussion are as instinctually vile as they are essential, and I cannot live rightly without them. I cannot live left to my own devices, or it may be more apt to say that I do not wish to live alone with only these shape shifters we call memories. They are certainly familiar bedfellows, and although I have come to know them intimately they lend no new joy, just subtle revelations that I have led a life of mistakes and collisions.

I say collisions, not accidents. An accident happens when it’s raining out, and maybe you shouldn't have been driving, and perhaps you might have paid better attention to the nervous and brake prone driver directly in front of you but you can be forgiven for all that. A more appropriate term may be wreck, it may not carry with it a moral weight natively but to me it tends to ring out carnage, twisted metal, two dead 1 wounded, wood crosses and wreathes slowly growing faint and waterlogged in a ditch like a spectacle for everyone to see. There are some memories we retell with a preface that asserts over and over that the following story was and is indeed an accident. Then there are others that are far too glaring to even attempt such a show, they are better locked up and hopefully forgotten, but we all know better. This story is about those memories, pale from being kept from the sun, hungry and desperate to be let out.

So I suppose that this is the preface, where I beg for understanding and sympathy in my retelling. I tend to appeal to a higher sense, asking not that your stomach move you to damn me, but I fear that the head may oft prove less forgiving than your senses. I guess I should ask for whatever reaction or repulsion that is the least bleak, the more gracious condemnation and perhaps invite you to use whatever mechanism in us that translates madness and tragedy into laughter and comedy. Some may find the contents vulgar, grossly particular or maybe just entirely superfluous. And they may be right, they may all be present. But I am tired of these secrets that have been locked away, as if in a wooden box, their little dark hands fighting and twisting out of the grates, clutching and grasping at the air.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that a humble man is often the one who talks too much, proud men watch themselves too closely. Afraid to venture a thought lest it be wrong and they appear foolish, their delicate façade tarnished, and if they do speak it is seldom in questions or confessions. I will not shout to make my point, nor will I plead for you to bend backwards to look through the glass that I use to view this life. But if in reading you feel somehow connected, strangely amused or that you see what I see, then you will know that you and I both are being vindicated. Every time a written sin reaches up through your heart to your understanding we are both a little less alone. We are both a little less human.

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.

An open letter to that shadow.

I saw you last night, your face skewed and pushed into the foreground, as the entirety of the world my mind had made swept in to take you out of sight. And no running or shouting out could undo the kidnapping of your form. No intensity of remembrance can bring back the moment before, it’s a missing cell from an otherwise flawless retelling. Do you elude me? Or am I pushing you away?

You’ve missed some of the best years of my life while you were having your own. Did you know that I’ve seen the world from a thousand angles and that I’ve seen it all alone? I leave my camera at home. I can’t bear to remember the empty frames.

I stood outside in the rain last night. A few heavy drops slipped through the leaves and branches and found their way to my shoulders.

Underneath the pitter of rain and branches being knocked together, there was no sound past my breathing. It was the first time in as far as I can remember that all thought and movement stopped inside me. As if someone had tripped over the cord that kept me plugged into the outlet on the wall behind the bookshelf. That brief moment where a light dims but is not yet out. Where you can see the last few units of energy burning out, leaving a ghost of an image where it once was bright. I felt my heart slowing and the blood beginning to pool at the bottoms of my feet and the tips of my fingers. Hands heavy and shoulders sagging lower with each exhale of warm air. My eyes blurred out of focus and I lost all sight of the rain.

I saw myself from a distance, grass growing up around my ankles and my countenance set in stone, the traffic light changing in the distance. Every neural pathway cold and taught, as the remaining jolts of charged impulses hovered at the hub of their destination.

It all snaps back violently just as the last function that makes a person alive teeters, taunting my battered systems with its white flag. The world slows as I rush back to life. My lungs filled with the moisture and lowered temperature of the air around me. I am flooded with pictures of a boy coming up for air with the look of salvation written on his face, the sound of doors groaning on their ancient hinges and endless blank pages at the end of a book.

Now I see you. Or I see the missing cell, having been brought in cupped hands and careful steps to a place of safety. I place it on a pillow on the floor and lock the door. Just as I knelt down to look closer I saw you fade back again, a drop of water near an open flame.

So, I invented my own time. I let it slow and stretch as a rubber band shot at a little brother. This whole hour, second, day or whatever it was came together to reveal itself as an existential joke. Well, there I was, rushing through the air, my speed and intensity coming into contact with external forces, each moment slowing my flight exponentially. Landing softly, the fear of impact is quelled. You just smiled about the whole ordeal as you uncovered your face, blushing as you shook off the embarrassing instincts of preservation.

Didn’t you know I never aimed to hurt you? Beyond thought or inspiration, past tears and longing, haven’t you known that all I have ever wanted was to make you forget about the world for a moment and laugh? I hope you keep showing up, it brings me back to life, even if just for the moment.

Lunacy and Libations

Well darling I’m torn between lunacy and libations, a perfect pair, a duo for the blue haired history makers. The men who dwell on consequence and contentious intentions, who postulate and pontificate within the boundaries assigned to them by their predecessors. It’s a story within a story, removed of contractions and words that end with L and Y. A scholar’s way of cleaning up the dirtiness of others lives. But oh what a mess we have left for them dear. Oh how they’ll work to pick apart the pieces of our erratic behavior, and what a chore for them to bend backwards to see through the lens that we used to view this life. To them we’re a generational sickness, brought on by external devices. To us we’re a chorus chant that can’t stop ringing in your ears. We’re the words of rebellion, the sounds of metal hitting lead, the feeling of two souls set apart from the status and a need for more…so much more than the world has to offer.

Do you feel me now? We have been on such separate wave lengths for days. But I see you through the static and the snow. Is this the legacy we are meant to leave? A path of broken glass and signs of forced entry, the hallmarks of our unrest, the calling card we made up on the way. We’ll spend our days in the hills, battling the world and its elements, proving to ourselves that we were made to be weathered and worn. The nights will cloak our movements as we learn how our bodies speak to each other.

I’m OK with this daily bread and the dew on the leaves. I’m content with the fibers and sinews that the ground can grow. And I’m happy with the path that our labor takes. Our hands to the soil, the soil to the sky and the satisfaction of an honest harvest is all that we need. No one need see our shelter, or give guidance to the way we breathe. We have left them all behind, to their ruinous behavior, given them over to the play by play cancer they never could control. Ours will be the dictates of the potter, theirs, the science and dice of death.

Oh what a picture we can create then we close our eyes. Can we use our daydreams as a ruler, a cornerstone upon which we set the foundations of our bed? Can we create a map to overlay our unseen trajectory, one that brings you closer, brings you continuously closer to me? One day, we won’t be able to see were I begin and you end. Our words will be remembered as a single thought, and our life, a defining action. If I’m the fingers, you are the glove. A pair that was always meant to work as one.

Dream 4, part 1

A preponderance of upward glances was a hint that I was young. Hands on handles of briefcases, kneecaps and belt buckles bolstered into my field of vision as a mainstay. Serving as a reinforced reminder of my self imposed age and height acting as an impediment. An impediment to hinder my course to some unknown destination I was drawn to.

Brass colored plastic door knob at the end of the hall. Dodging the waist down image of passerbys (or passengers for that matter) to either the entrance or an exit. Creaks and groans of a hinge tapped into blueprints of senses stolen from my sub conscience. Conscientious control of fear and caution aren't prerequisites for moving forward, they are competitors. Caution always loses when your sleeping. Curiosity is no longer an itch but an impulse and feeds on fearful feelings.

Walls comprised of bookshelves form an edifice, bent into a spiral, set with stairs that lead me downward. I can hear you in my head, the words leap out my ears to crash against the bookshelves and spill across the pages. The sense that I am lost is so present that any illusion to the contrary becomes a contradiction of the only thing thats constant, that trapped inside myself is a concept in collision with external constraints.