Tag Archives: alone

I Am In A Room

8 Feb

I Am In A Room

I sit in a room that is silent.

Yes, there are cringes and twinges of floorboards

and pipe songs and even the echo of someone upstairs,

but the cosmos is always ringing a little.

It is silent.

…

My mind makes its war in the room –

plastering memories along the molding of the floor

and hanging dead hopes from the high ceilings

and using the walls to buttress itself as it catapolts

its knives and leers and cocky little smiles,

knowing that I on the couch could have done better.

There is no noise in the room;

I am breaking.

…

The ground is a minefield.

I cannot move from this spot for fear I shall explode

one of its tricky little pitfalls,

and trip the explosion it’s loaded in my brain

with the fire of one toe placed wrongly.

It’s not a dance.

It’s not a limp.

I do not move.

I am silent.

…

I breathe.

The one defiance against death,

this slow, meaningless rise and fall

that is the only assertion that I still am

within this tired, still un-noise.

I make no sounds.

But I make change with the room.

A dollar-fifty oxygen,

a 23-year exhale.

Or something like that.

The math’s never really made sense

and I am too quiet to ask.

Maybe I am being shortchanged.

I really don’t know.

…

I am in a room.

And the room and I are silent.

The cosmos is ringing.

But this room has no door.

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Scroll

2 Nov

Scroll

Scroll.

Scroll past the horrors

and the laughing

and the tawdry chaos that is

the two entwined

in our click-click world.

Scroll past the flinches

and the caught launching

and the revved-up pain

of past insult

in those little typed letters

thrown atcha on the screen.

Scroll.

Scroll past the reminders

and the forgotten

and the once-favorited yesterdays

that are too stale now to trend

or teach you anything new.

What was that again?

Scroll.

Keep scrolling.

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Loneliness Hits

30 Sep

Loneliness is a rough sort of rolled-up burning-down summary of life to take a hit of. It’s the kind of hit that leaves you not just coughing so badly you wind up in tears, but somehow proves a bruise-leaver too, on more than just your throat. Loneliness hits that way.

Loneliness is the worst of drags that I cannot seem to ever figure out how to choke down and tolerate. I guess my ears get a little weird, when I’ve sucked down loneliness. I go deaf for a bit, so I can’t even hear the noises of the ones around me. All I can hear is the inside of my brain, and that’s only filled with the noises of people who aren’t any longer here.

It’s a bad trip, loneliness.

The psychiatrists and psychologists, they say it will pass. That we’ll find me an antidote, and I will stop choking on the very air around me as this unending ember of a stick of loneliness dangles from my fingers, unable to be removed. This next set of pills, they say. This next glass of water. This next deep breath.

I’ve taken many a deep breath in my life; loneliness is an insidious pollution, and the smog count grows ever higher. That’s the rub – you breathe in to breathe out what you breathed in, but if there’s no change in air quality, your red blood cells only learn all the more to consent to carry what your heady environment has stuck upon life’s circulation.

Even tears can’t flush it out.

Maybe one day a little white circle will clear all this away.

Maybe one day a fire will burn hot enough to immolate this slow-killing haze.

Maybe one day I will have exchanged all my oxygen for this grey composition, and then I will no longer notice any discrepancy in hue, and I will not remember what it was like before, and I will no longer fight to hold off this desperate coloration, because at least now, in this grey prison, I have something with which to be one.

Or maybe these are all just ramblings, too long a drag off the loneliness stick. I’m starting not to remember much. Oh look, bruises…

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Flash Fiction: The Wind is a Liar

25 May

The wind is a liar, an elusive suitor who will murmur sweet nothings as he passes by but remains safely intangible for you to ever manage to grasp. He may have you all he wants, but you can never have him. Not really.

All you’ll ever have are the murmurs. A small gust of discontent blowing in the back of your consciousness, left there by some too-strong beat of your heart or flutter of your mind. You let him in. That was the only way to trap him. To catch that one breath, leave it blowing about somewhere in your memory.

It’s the only way to hold onto him.

The sweet caress of a moment’s breeze will say that he loves you. But the wind can never really hold you. The suggestion of an embrace is nothing but a cruel trickery of the senses.

Because should you ever turn to embrace your lover back, you will find there were never any arms about you in the first place.

You will swear they were there.

But that was never true, dear one.

Perhaps you will be one of the few that insist.

And then, oh pretty lover, the wind will have made a liar out of you, too.

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Slumber

17 May

A poem from the memory of grade school birthday parties,

and a current sleep pattern that’s never quite matched up with the other twentysomethings’.

 

Slumber

I am always the one in silence.
I am the first one asleep,
and the first one awake.
I sit in empty rooms with sleeping bodies
while the morning breathes quietly.
Hugging my knees,
perhaps reading a book,
and waiting for the life around me
to remember that it exists.
That I exist, too.
Slumber parties
were always a particular kind
of torture chamber.

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Work-From-Home

18 Apr

Oh dear Poe and Dickinson, I don’t know how you did it.

Work-From-Home

I am going crazy
sitting inside this house.
They call it freelance
but I call it shut-in,
this endless typing of nonsense
onto a dead screen like it’s a friend
because it’s the only thing I’ve got
to talk to,
all day,
all the time.
I will tell you my stories,
dear static of electrons and gigabytes.
I will tell you all these things
inside my head,
poured endlessly
into the wasteland of a blank word document.
That’s all you are, after all –
a parched desert that we try to fill
with the thirst of our souls for someone else,
anyone else.
And so we write stories.
The only breathing
is the rustle of the blinds in a breeze
because I left the window open again,
a forgetful reminder that there’s a world outside.
But I can’t write out there.
Too much glare across the screen
and my fingers lost the quickness of pen
in favor of jabbing at keys in frustration.
Quick, spiteful precise stabs,
anything to flood my message across that empty line.
Lines and lines and lines,
meaningless lines we try to make say something
about our loneliness
but not about our loneliness,
about something else that would be greater
than just telling the world the story
of sitting for the slow-drip torture of seconds
as our life wastes away
down the drain,
a straight shot from the faucet
because all we have are the too-hard chairs
that become our companions
and remind us constantly of the discomfort we sit with.
There’s too much bitterness on my tongue
for me to keep drinking coffee.
We try to say something other
than the sounds of a silent house and road work outside,
because that’s not a good enough story
for a mind crazed by sitting endlessly on the inside,
calling it freelance
but dying from shut-in.

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A Slightly Crazed Lump of Blog Anthropomorphizing

30 Dec

Also called, “What do blogs do when they’re alone?”

I wonder what a blog does when nobody’s viewing it. Does it get lonely? Does it run amok and mix up all its characters and throw letters across posts and then jump back into place as soon as somebody clicks on one of its links? Do its posts talk to each other? That would be weird for the blog, wouldn’t it? Bit like schizophrenia… Well, maybe not, if there aren’t any guest posts. If it’s all the same writer, all the same voice, then I suppose that’s more of a busy brain than a disordered one. Those poor blogs with guest authors though… can you imagine it? Suddenly their page views dribble down to zero, and they expect a nice, quiet moment full of single-minded introspection, and then HOLY FUCK WHERE THE FUCK DID THAT VOICE COME FROM??? And some guest author just keeps babbling on, while the poor home blog starts having a break down – Why don’t you sound like me? How are you talking to me? You say you’re a different person? But you’re here, in my blog! How can you not be me? And then some other guest author tries to step in and explain and HOLY FUCK THERE’S ANOTHER VOICE INSIDE ME OH SWEET JESUS I’M GOING CRAZY!

… Or maybe blogs are better at sorting that kind of thing out than I’m giving them credit for. Maybe it’s more like a love affair or something. You know, some guest author’s post making eyes at the top bits and bottom bits of the home author’s posts around it. Lots of winking going on and whatnot. Or maybe the blog has an orgy! All those authors milling around, linking to each other, getting hot and steamy about their topics all on one blog…

Eh. Perhaps I’ll just leave unviewed blogs to their privacy.

In any case, keep clicking! Who knows what you might come across, if you happen to be the lucky one who stumbles upon a quiet moment and catches my blog unaware 😉

I believe this is suitably creepy for this blog post...

I believe this is suitably creepy for this blog post…

** This story maaaay have been inspired in part by a section from the children’s book A Little Princess **

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I Do Not Want Excitement

25 Nov

excitement post image

I am probably not your typical twenty-something. I do not want excitement. I do not long for the rush of the big city, the adrenaline of packed boxes and a newly signed lease for a shared apartment seven cities away. I do not yearn for the clunking whir of train tracks rushing beneath me or an airplane engine revving to life under the wings. I do not seek the fast-paced, the tight-scheduled, the not-enough-time-but-hey-it-was-worth it.

No, I do not want excitement. I want to be fulfilled.

Now, I don’t mean – oh god, no way in hell do I mean the little-house-on-the-prairie kind of life. I do not want monotony. I do not want the same plodding expectable, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute. Dear lord, I would go bat shit crazy.

I think, more correctly, perhaps, I should say that I want roots. I want ties that are stable but are not limiting, that support without restricting. You see, I’ve done the whole tear-yourself-away-from-everything-and-throw-yourself-upon-the-world thing. And it sucked.

Perhaps I was just forced upon it with the wrong footing. You see, every time I’ve been forced into an unexpected journey, a total life reorganization, it’s because I was sick. I had to pluck myself out of where I was and ship myself off to treatment, often without parental support or any idea where I was going. I just had to leave. That was all.

And then, when I returned, chose to come back to where I had left rather than stay in treatment longer because I felt that I learned what the journey had to teach me and my heart was aching for the friends I left behind, I realized, finally, that it is not a what or a where, a something doing or somewhere being that really define my happiness. Because, you see, I grow my roots in people.

And then they all graduated. Or went away, for some reason and for some time or other. My roots were torn up, leaving me gasping for air and starving for the water that had been holding me up. It’s hard to enjoy adventure, when you can feel yourself withering through the whole thing.

Excitement becomes mere pain, new becomes a strangeness that rubs and chafes the heart. Adventure is no high, wild dream but a slowly executed torture.

I do not mind exploring. I just want a home base to come back to. I want to know that there is still a place – even if that place is not so much somewhere tangible – where I can still know that I belong. I would not mind the packed boxes, the newly signed lease, the road trip, the excitement, the strangeness – as long as through it all, there’s a hand holding mine.

Because then, home becomes a place that can be carried with you.

Because then, home is the place where you are not empty, but fulfilled.

Because then, home is the place where you are not alone.

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Falling Awake

28 Oct

A poem for this late Sunday night.

 

awake at night

 

 

Falling Awake

You never go to bed alone,

with the whispers of your memories

sounding in your head,

keeping you awake

with the uneasy doubt

that there is something you forgot.

One flash in your brain, like lightning,

silent.

 

You never go to bed alone,

with all those ghosts behind your eyes.

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