the sun is setting over the hills & galley kitchens;
Another piece of epistolary prose to a friend from
last year. Words seem to be the only thing I can
take solace in lately. They hurt, but being hurt
will always feel better than feeling nothing at all.
It’s metronomic, in at least there’s a pulse.
This has been slow denature, and over the past several months
I’ve been gradually feeling less and less like the main character.
It seems above all else that I’ve failed in feeding the particular
arc of momentum I had prior to becoming another splayed out
murder victim of nihilism, which like a lush, has drank from and
emptied my inner reservoirs to a point where even climatologists
would say, “well, it appears there’s a slim chance of restoration or
recovery unless by divine intervention.” I’ve since dammed up,
neglected, and forgotten what found end in these once rich springs
of perception. I’ve cried plenty, at times with deep positional
awareness, and other times for the sake of a good ol’ honey-filled
ad hominem. I’m learning now, or at least it’s being displayed to
me, that nothing will fill these reservoirs: not tears, not a raining
of dollars and sense, not the devoted reign of a lover, who, mind
you, will actually have to put up with someone like me.
Maybe I do need God.
Maybe there is in fact a god somewhere for me besides at the
bottom of a bottle or whispering from the receding smoky head
of a joint. Maybe they have a plan for me and it’s honorable.
I’ll hold my breath so I can be blue in a different way.
I thought I had found a home in helping people find homes. I
distinctly remember telling myself that I was going to put my
nose to the grindstone and become one with the process, my
little joke being that I’d lift my head off it at some point only to
realize I was noseless. But it wouldn’t matter if my schnoz was
missing because I’d be a fine edge. And filthy rich! Or at least
at a point of sustainment, independently, in a future as rich
and vibrant as my imagination could allow. And it allowed
a lot—I was very creative in dressing the tangent hereafters. I
tiptoe into futures now. They all seem less than delightful.
That imagination, like the aforementioned arc, has officially
died and disappeared since my exiling and pulling of my
business cards out of their apportioned holster at the grocery
store (no one ever called from those anyway).
As much as I try and tell myself this portion of the timeline
was “for the people” and actualizing my “why” of being one
of humanity’s little helpers in such a trialing process for the
masses, it’s hard not to feel that not only was it all about the
money—especially when I had none—but that this period was
a hyper-locality of being so caught up in what people thought
about me that I completely discarded the ideal that “daunting”
and “impressive” are meant to be interwoven and forged into
the simulacrum that we’d call the complex & fulfilling lifetime.
(As if my track record shows I ever had that sense to begin with.)
But where’s balance in shallow acquisition and hollow theory?
Prior to now, the sun was always halfway between high noon and
a six-foot grave below the horizon. Presently, there’s only a little
shard of it still left, as if crying out little insights of what’s left of
my known embellishments. Is this begetting a very particular
dark as it embraces its new sense of agency? This couldn’t feel
more like being born again: learning how to latch, how to breathe
on my own; how to bite down, suck, and persist. Oh how deep
discomfort in existence goes when you use the same allowance of
imagination to build out the substance.
K
P.S.—I believe you remember that my pull in the tarot reading for
career had been the emperor. I wish it would’ve mentioned if it
was in the style of Trajan or Caligula. I would’ve at least worn
something decent for the execution.