I have been running on a curious mixture of a devil may care attitude and the inescapable innate need to see this week through, punctuated by five hour long nighttime rendezvouses with caffeine in its various elemental forms and three hour long sleep cycles. Out of everything and everyone I crave, I miss the words most of all. I have lost sight of the beauty of words. Swoon. Hollow. Semblance. Catastrophe. Parchment. I have been far flung from the ability to cave into bed, to cave in and hold myself tight as Bukowski screams out from long forgotten times that “YOUR LIFE IS YOUR LIFE DON’T LET IT BE CLUBBED INTO DANK SUBMISSION” and “DRINK FROM THE WELL OF YOUR SELF AND BEGIN AGAIN” and then Siken (I feel like I really do miss Siken the most) decides to chime in with:
“Here is my hand, my heart,
my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated
cities at the center of me, and here is the center
of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we
can drink from, but I can’t go through with it.
I just don’t want to die anymore.”
Sometimes I like to claim that the world has my heart. This is a sometimes always fact, driven by the revelation that I am unable to take ownership of something that terrifies me. With exposure comes erasure. I had a dream once, that a faceless old man came to my bed in the middle of the night, and using surgical/excavation tools worthy of any doctor or paleontologist, he clawed it out with mechanics and machines and bare human hands. This is when I woke up. This is where the story ends. Only that it doesn’t and I wish I felt more than a little bit of nothing. In shutting out the darkness you keep out the light.
There is a place in Norway known as Preikestolen or Pulpit Rock. It is a beautiful sparse delicate piece of this universe and most days I think about escaping and bleeding my bitterness and worries out all over the edge of the summit. Smash. Bang. Lightning worthy of Zeus himself. And now you have been absolved of all your sins. There is no longer a need to rely on prayer, no longer a need to sink to your knees. I have taken it all and you are now drunk on altitude assisted happiness, blank and pleasantly empty. Take this, take this new heart and feed it with so much love and kindness and sheer unadulterated joy that movement becomes such a problem that it just lies there cushioned and whole in your ribcage, beating, beating steady and whole. Take this organ back for yourself. And perhaps you will know what it means to sing for life again.
