A Broken World

It smells like something is dead.

Or maybe I'm just broken

Something is broken

Someone says it's my fault and I take it

Attention

All I want, until it is thrown in my face and set on fire

I've never wanted it before

I was okay with the silence

my own company

Why would I need yours, when my own is a world where I don't need to fit in?

A world where I do fit in.

A world where you could fit in too

A learning curve for the world

People laugh and throw stones

and I watch in concern.

People kill people.

They do it for love, money, hate.

They do it for honor, country, loyalty.

Animals kill too.

They kill for food

What makes us special?

What makes you special?

I would rather be sick in your eyes, looking on at the broken ruins that people built and destroyed

Than be like you.

Maiming and destroying your way through life.

I throw stones too.

They just don't break bones. They cut cleanly and leave scars.

Hesitation

It feels different this time.

Last year, I felt like I was going into something unknown and strange, but something that I wholeheartedly wanted. I was going to be with one of ny best friends, and everything was going to be perfect.

Then she hated the life I felt like I decided for both of us. And I looked at the year through her eyes and blanched. It was not just her, either. Many left. Many friends.

Now I am heading into this upcoming year hesitantly. I know what to expect. I understand what is going to happen. I will be mostly alone. Nobody is going to be thrilled to see me. I will be a freshman in high school again. Alone, but desperate for friendship. Desperate for a connection to somebody at a level deeper than just friendship. I want someone to desperately want to see me. Someone who doesn't share my blood.

Tomorrow morning is coming. I can feel the earth turning underneath me. I can feel the stillness of night collapsing upon me. I look forward to the classes that will bring me some sort of peace. But I am not at peace. I am broken. I am alone. They forsake me and the system I try to uphold.

The Lack of and Presence of Imminence in the World

So few people in this world get to choose the way that they die. Yet it is inevitable; each person will grow older- for some not perhaps old...but older- and then pass into the next level of human existence. We try to flair this up with speeches of the afterlife, heaven, hell, what have you. I can almost see teenage girls decorating their ideas of death with flashy tassels and stickers, just to make this universal ideal palatable. Something that every person who ever will exist will experience, and yet we shy from it like it is something untouchable and foreign. Everyone will touch it. The only true question in life is when?

But, back to my original thought: few people get to choose the manner in which they lose themselves to the openness (or closedness) of the infinite future. Only those who seek it, who take their bodies made of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and push it past the barriers of life. Suicide. What a word. Apparently sues means oneself in Latin. I know that -cide indicates the ending, or murder of an individual. But is suicide really the ending of your life? Or is it just the (forgive my gaming reference) forced respawn of yourself, your identity, your thoughts and dreams into a new form? If death is a new beginning, is suicide just a jump start into a new life, new everything?

And the infinite future. It sounds daunting. A professor once said that when he was in Catholic school, nuns would try to scare him by holding his finger over a candle and asking if it burned. When he finally relented and said that it hurt, they would say that the fires of hell would be a million times hotter, all over his body, forever. It would never end, never get better, and never ever change. Forever. The timeline of forever will surpass the amount of time it took for the planet to form, life to begin changing, dinosaurs walking, butterflies breaking free from the darkness of their chrysalis. Millions of billions of years. Quadrillions, trillions of quadrillions of years. And death is something you reach after approximately a century.


Before I stray too much, I want you to try to grasp this. Feel each second draining past you, falling, sliding, groaning all around you. Feel yourself trapped in the amount of time it takes for your heart to beat again. Infinity. Something that so many people ink their bodies with. A sideways figure 8 that manages to encompass the idea of a never ending thought, or feeling. A sentience. A thought, an ideal. Much like "0", infinity is not a thing we can touch. But 0 is not as scary. I have one cat. Six months ago, I had no cats. I will never have infinitely many cats, however. (Not that I think that owning infinitely  many cats is a good, viable idea.) Infinity is something nobody can wrap their mind around. It is something that does not physically exist. Everything comes to an end, and everything has it's number. Yet, after a measly handful of years, days, hours...we expect a vast nothingness of everything?

 

I saw a movie where the main characters face death prematurely. Fatal diseases. They both face their impending upheaval with dignity and regret; they do not want to leave each other behind, their families behind, or the life that they shared. They believed (as much as one could tell) that they would meet again, but they wrote one another's eulogies, a promise that this would only be a bookmark in a chapter of a long story, a slip of paper folded in half, untouched by the years and yet old beyond measure. It was beautiful and profoundly wrong at the same time. They knew that they were not long for this world, and did not waste time in expressing their feelings for each other. But by the same token, no teenagers should look on their death with such inevitable certainty. They did.

 

My best friend's grandfather died a year or two ago. He was told he had months to live over twenty years ago. He set his affairs somewhat in order, choosing to rearrange things as necessary. He had leukemia. After all of this, he died of brain cancer. He was a resilient man, a man who kept his ideals and beliefs until his mind wandered to where nobody could follow. But, nobody told his granddaughter that he had died. She missed his funeral, his memorial, and her inheritance was swept under the rug. His house was cleaned out by a child he had not been on the best terms with, and family possessions were thrown out. Who knows what happened to his precious cats and dogs?

 

Before you start to look at this as a rant, take a moment and think. This is not a rant, but an outcry to the masses to think! If life shortchanges you as it has so many times before, will you be prepared for it? I am not proposing looking to every shadow in fear of the Reaper, but only that one takes the joys of human existence seriously and carefully. Live your life like it is your last day, but prepare for many ahead; and know that the end may just be the beginning to a future physically unimaginable. π

empty

Within my open casket

we speak of times long past

we dwelt in the highest tower

and fell to death in turn

speak of these times, and see what has been devastated

 

innate brokenness draped around frail shoulders,  a grove

where Juliet and Romeo laughed and died

walking alone in empty corridors

hallways with doors closed and locked

and no chance of survival

 

untold stories of innocence lost

like a paradoxical twist

for my story is known and told

deep in the shadows of the haunted forests

amongst the shattered hermits of the past and the ghost stories of tomorrow

 

Thus my life is wrought like impure iron

molding beautifully

looking strong and whole, hiding weak fragility

of an imperfect breed

unworthy of the charitable euthanasia

 

boxed like an orphaned litter

and left to die like a stray

concrete pillars of society falling like burning candles

laugh at the dictatorship they created

where the outcasts are removed like hemorrhaging cancer

 

balanced on the tip of denial  

sweeping towards the end of the earth

all knobby groves and screeching forest

encased in broken iron

held together with pyrite and geode

 

together we find a stolid night to share

Those Better Left to Wonder -by me

I feel indebted to your secret softness
The side of you never shared
I saw it first, loved it first,
Yet you never told me why
You kept it hidden
From all of the world
But held me close through it all

You told me I was special, once,
And I told you that you outshone me.
Even though I was destined for greatness,
You would be strong,
Strong enough to change your fate

I knew that you would eventually leave me
The pain you left me with shattered me completely
Moving on is just another challenge for me
You claim it was for me, yet you are the only one to benefit
My loss made you better, you broke me

I thought that you would bring me the moon
You promised me everyday
Any star was in reach, Polaris at your fingertips
But all I wanted was the moon.
And you never gave me the moon.
You left me to die like a forgotten philosopher;
A life meaninglessly dreaming for redemption
For those better left to wonder.

So look at the blood moon and ask me a question.
Laugh at the jokes I wrote but another lover tells
And dream of the forsaken life of another broken soul,
The ideal of forever lost in the ocean of promises
Underneath the stormy seas of forgetfulness

And look at the raven, each feather plucked and pruned
And remember how the ink on my skin tells by each feather
How I aspire to live. Alone. Forgotten. Wholly shattered.

I think that this is me finally coming out and deciding that I need to find someone who is who I want out of a partner instead of me just being who they want. I need to stand up for who I am as an individual, and not let my boyfriend walk all over me. I've had terrible writer's block lately, but ironically, I have been my own inspiration these last few days. It was pretty hard for me to write this; it came out rather disjointed and not as put together as I usually am. Stylistically, this is borderline ridiculous. I prefer four line stanzas because of their general stability and structure. My earliest work sometimes has six line stanzas, but I broke down into four liners as I grew.
It reminisces my past relationship and looks at how it broke down; he gave me everything but what I actually wanted, and left me for someone who is just a little further along in the grand scheme of things than me. He is going to be great-I will never doubt that. But he did not think that I would become as great as other people believe, and that hurt. I still feel rather disjointed and broken, but this is quite like what I just wrote. Writing something like this can take me hours or days to write; this took probably about fifteen minutes and a quick read through afterwards to double check that it retained the way that I felt- I don't want everything to be about me, but I need to address my own needs and wants at some point in time. This is raw and wholehearted, more than many of my past work...

Alone

Throughout everything that I have done, I have always had someone with me. I love being far away, separate from the people who I care about. But this is different. I am about to be purely isolated from all of the people who I have built relationships with or made friends with. I am going to have to start over from scratch.

My roommate/best friend doesn't like people very much. She can deal with groups for a few months, but then finds enough wrong with them to not like them anymore. Some of these people really are assholes. But she is leaving next year, and I need the friends that I have made in order to have a good support system in my life later. She has come to dislike literally all of the people that I want to be friends with.

I want a boyfriend again. Not the last one, but a guy who is actually committed to me and wants to be around me. I want someone to talk to other than Faith. Its not that I don't like talking to her, but there is so much that she cant understand because of her past and personality. I want to connect with someone, but I know that I wont find that someone here or soon. It's just my life, that I realize something about myself and what I want for myself, and it is just out of reach.

The Overrated Truth

So, if you didn't know, I read a lot. A trend in the books I'm reading is boyfriend keeps a secret, and the entire relationship disintegrates as a result.

Honesty is something that this generation seems to completely lack. White lies and small fibs aren't discouraged (in fact, they are pretty much deemed necessary for courtesy and politeness), and the truth is something hard to come by. Honesty is something that I have always striven for, from finding simple beauty in everyday life, to representing myself in ways that can be respected by others.

I think that I am truthful to others about myself, but I want to stop with the subtle, exaggerating lies and become more honest. I can only hope that the people I surround myself with can see what I am trying to do and attempt to emanate me.

If that isn't self centered of me...