Landmark

~~Poetry is man’s demonstration of mastery over human language because he cannot master the human heart.~~

This online collection has grown old and seen many changes in the world and in me — some good, some bad.  In reading over various markers in time in my life I discover what a silly kid I was in so many things…my speech was beautiful but my explanations were selfish and poor.  My rage clouded everything and it was unbridled rage…with no control or direction like it has now.  I find myself no less passionate, no more content with things than all those years ago….but now I do have more control.  Control.  Control control control.  I repeat the word and hate it each time I say it.  It is a masterful thing to exercise control over the world, over one’s self, over one’s emotions.  And it is useless in the utmost to have too much control….to be all witticisms, logic, reason, method, and organization.  The world, nature, is so chaotic and tumultuous, so must we be to really exemplify the fantastic things around us that we so admire.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery after all.

I have transformed into a different being in many ways, formerly a flailing hurricane of grief and anguish seeking to destroy anything that may have been the cause and protect anything that could calm me… I wanted so deeply to be loved.  I have loved so many so strongly, so deeply beyond reason that it has become a detriment to me, because I can feel it so acutely that I now desire it in another.  Someone who doesn’t have to fawn and fall all over me like exuberant couples who need outward displays to prove their love…but someone who really locks their world away in my heart the way I lock mine away in theirs.  It is this quest that drives me to be as open and upfront with strangers and friends constantly, to strive to give myself over to everyone in hopes that one will take me in and nurture the great pieces of me fractured so many times in so many prior years.  I don’t care if this is melodramatic, it is not meant to be, it is meant to be prosaic poetry, to be almost a biographical narrative as this diary has always been for me.

Why do I sit and write this instead of other things?  Why do I stare blankly at the screen and the page when I try to get myself driven towards a goal.  It is because I’m distracted by a single desire more forceful and prevalent than anything my mind can muster.  It is my heart yearning for what it has not found in full, in whole, in entirety.  It has found pieces of it in one girls’ laughter and another’s wit, in one girl’s ability to be cruel to those who deserve it and warm to those who want it, in each one’s quirks and charms.  I find myself irresistably smitten with them, each one singularly and completely and for awhile as of late, I have been the greatest fool I’ve ever been in my life.  Not for any reason that any of my friends have said, because their opinion of me matters greatly, but not enough to drive me from my convictions.  But my convictions were wrong.  Utterly wrong.  I loved someone for lies they built up and not for what I had already known them to be.  I have finally moved beyond them, moved beyond them by force mostly….forced cruelty, indifference, and false maturity.  It has been so disgusting to face the truth of the matter that it has almost turned me off to anyone under the age of 21 entirely, but my heart endures on and seeks out that which it thought it had found.  It is my heart’s own failure more than Stephanie’s, in the end, as I have always been known to find the good things in a girl and latch onto them, hoping that the poor qualities in their person will either vanish or alter with a helpful push….but I do not wish to change them by any degree of nasty force no matter how much I believe their faults to be nearly fatal and horrible….and so I hold on, my fingers getting tighter and paler and my face becoming an ugly visage of misery as I watch these qualities rebel against my imploring…and so I let go or am forced off.  With Stephanie, I tried desperately to salvage something worthless and find I only made it worth even less to me.  I now cannot look back on her and my times with any happiness at all and that is unfair to her and tragic for me…but she is one of the only, the only other I can think of now ironically being the other Stephanie…..that I would never desire to be with again ever.

I face the world with a child’s excitement and a father’s paternal caring.  I look to everyone and laugh at them with lightness and admiration, I expect great things of them,  I think they are magic, that at any moment any one of us will shoot sparks from our hand that mesmerize with their kaleidescope powers…it is a silly dream, a silly imagining, but I think it nonetheless sometimes.  But when we talk seriously, I’m always the one patting on their head and holding their hand and trying my best to be  both their encouragement and their honesty.  I spare their feelings as much as I can while being blunt when I sense they need it.  I know so much.  I really know so so much.  I wish I could word it so well because it is my heart that knows and not my brain.  So I find that this is where my tongue is most tied, because there’s too much behind it….too much dreaming, too much passion, I have to extoll it all in hours of dialogue and dialectic and no one gives me the time to really expel it all, nobody who I want or let my idle infatuations settle upon really indulges me the way I indulge them.  Stephanie did that.  It may be the one reason why I found so much faith to give to her…but she was a liar.  She was an actress.  She desired me then and was good, and when she lost her will to desire me, so went all her actions and her will.  And then she pointed to my taking it poorly as justification for it and justification for her further ugliness and stupidity.  My control is lucky, because I for weeks seriously thought about flying to Georgia just to find her and hit her hard.  But I no longer know or care which of us was right or wrong, I think we were both ridiculous now and I will spend my life atoning for it and, in a way, suffering.  Just the other day, thanks to an old flame, I looked back at my loves….the ones I got to have for a moment, the ones for months, the ones who I never really had at all.  God I have been lucky to love so many so well so much…..even those who would never hold my hand in the theater.  Even the ones who would not be the girl upon my arm who would become in a second the independent arbiter, the great orator who would upstage me so that I could smile at her and the room and say "Yes, she’s mine…but remember, she lets me say that."  I don’t mind being owned, because what I own myself is something more beautiful and won’drous than my body.  It is my love. 

What am I now?  What was I then?  I was then a young man, dreaming of being loved and accepted, hurt and shocked and lost….knowing something deep inside me was important and not having anyone who saw it or allowed it to breathe.  I was an exuberant child, loud and funny but mostly sad.  Sa

d in the quiet hours alone in the dark.  I was angry.  I was raw.

What am I now?  I’m a slightly older young man, dreaming of being loved and accepted, but no longer without knowing what it feels like, but now knowing what it feels close to.  Able to define it more clearly, not as some foreign concept I knew to exist but as a concept that is an amalgamation of various parts from various people.  I am hurt, shocked, but no longer lost.  I know who I am and where I must go and know that my doubts and fears and questions are part of the cycle that is life and that what is most necessary to embrace is not confidence based on knowing, but in faith and passion. 

 I bottled up that something passionate and did not let it see the light of day, I was controlled so that I wouldnt’ be hurt and so that I wouldnt’ be rejected again and again.  College was my new chance for a new life free of the old and I embraced it as best I could and each year I grew more reserved and controlled, unable to sustain constantly so in the end I was a very bipolar boy, sometimes witty and quiet and other times loud, boisterous, and brazen.  My sadness became a thing that came and went, all dependent on random life.  I’m still raw and now I have a tendency to ramble a bit like an old fool when I’m not old enough to be one.  And I am deeply in love with a world that I wait to feel loves me as much.  It is a hope, not an expectation….a wish, not a certainty.

I want to be loved.  Deeply.  If it does not come, well then, so God or the Universe or some other Divinity has deigned it not to be….but I want it.  I desire it madly.  I desire it so so so madly.  I have no words to express it properly, not the way I want to….my heart aches with all these words and the combined knowledge with my mind that they won’t quite be understood.  I was right all along to name this diary "The Stranger."  I am a foreign thing, I feel, unable to really be understood.  I can’t give anything not to be….for in doing so I would lose the very desire and passion that drives me to wish otherwise.  But what I can say is that I believe that we have, in all of us, the potential to make others understand us completely, but it can’t be the way people attempt it.  Everyone attempts it by trying to force their own mind around another person’s heart, the two do not mesh….they are separate and independent and only work slightly well together in the same body.  We must let our hearts work together….

I have often confronted the question of what I want in a mate.  I have never known how to answer.   I can see myself with so many of the girls who have now gone: Nancy, Jennie, Kate, Angie, Beks, Nikki, Nicole, Hilary, Bekah, Sarah…..so many others….those are just a few….I look back at them not wanting to be with them now…I don’t feel a desire to be with anyone anymore….I’ve stopped the pursuit in the hopes that one will seek me out a bit.  I will reach out for them if they reach out for me, but I find that I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.  I would rather love everyone and not be loved than to love someone to have it be destroyed.  Stephanie did that, too.  And Kate, but it wasn’t Kate’s fault, just the way things went. 

I don’t know, it’s getting late and I should watch a movie or something.  I’m sorry if by mentioning you I upset you or made things awkward, or by not mentioning you as well.  I just want you all to know how much I love you….I love all of you in very special and delineated ways tailored to who you are.  I deeply care for you.  I’m glad that you exist and have crossed my path so that I could.