What To Do To Prepare...

It's a Tuesday, and it's raining.

Nothing seems real yet. I feel as if I have all the time in the world.
I haven't been out of the house in two days because... well... I don't like doing things on my own; by myself. Without a job, and with everybody else being busy, I think a lot.

I think that anything I do now doesn't matter. Friendships, relationships; they will all go away. No fantastic last consort with anybody is going to make them remember me any longer than they already will. I suppose I'll have to trust whatever history I've managed to create with them for that purpose.

This is an old feeling that I've felt before. Once, for someone else. Will they remember as I remember? It never seems like people remember the things you want them to. In fact, it has always seemed like everybody has a wonderful knack for going on with their lives, while I practice my talent for reliving the past.

A life of change will do that to a person. The more past you make, the more past you have to remember. Change is like a blanket; like a comfort. The only good feeling I have for what's about to occur is the expectation of change.

I wish the time was now. I hate waiting, but I hate leaving too.

I wish that I could take parts of my life with me; just enough change to move forward, but not enough to start all over again. A silly wish, seeing as how often I write of ghosts. Ghosts in my life, and in my thoughts. Things that aren't real. Things that I believe I see, but aren't really there.

I surely take those with me, yet leave them behind at the same time. Isn't it strange?
And terribly, I want them. I want to keep believing, I want to keep them with me.

Perhaps the best preparation I can make is this:

to start seeing my life without desire, but instead, two steps ahead.

That's going be pretty hard to do though.

The Feeling I Get From One Picture...

I have stories in me that will never be told. 

Looked at from a hundred different angles, they become different; a hundred stories in one.

Locked behind a beating heart, pounding with its rhythm.

I have tears that will never be shed.

Because they are forgotten.

Because there is no one to see them.

I have the joy of hope.

When something ends, and another thing begins.

While I am in between; waiting.

I have the fear of being alone.

Because I am the one staring, looking on; while the others show their best.

Because that's how it is; that's how it has been.

Apparitions...

Thirteen years past time;
when I would feel something strong.

A song brings it back,
if only for a moment.

It's been awhile now,
of nothing,
although I surprised myself last year
by making myself cry.

I think it was less about my
open eyes
and more about my
made up mind.

It seems that in getting older
it gets harder to see clearly.

Why do I desire ghosts
time and time again?

No Rest In My Hope...

I looked forward to this week for longer than it's going to last. This, my supposed week of respite in the middle of this terrible longing to be gone.

 I was wrong about myself; as time passes, I do look more and more forward to going to China. It wasn't like that at first, because I couldn't feel it. It wasn't what you could call "real". Not that it's any more real now than it was back in February when I found out, but that the end of my struggle here has a time; has a date.

Six weeks.

Still, this number is large enough to stifle my excitement. If you know me at all, then you know why.
What used to be four months is now six weeks, and it's going by slowly. Very slowly.

***

The end of something can provide a person with a unique perspective on who they are. For instance, I realized lately that I live in a constant fantasy world. Not that I just have lots of fantasies, but that they are so real to me sometimes. This world is my hope and my comfort; the thing from where any joy I have comes from. In my fantasies I am with someone, and that someone tends to change based on the circumstances in my life. In the fantasy I create in them the ability to give me what I want, or what I think I need, and they never disappoint.

In reality, the real people are not these people and I am disappointed. Not by them, but in myself for not being able to see them. I am blind, and I don't know where I'm going.

It's O.K. to admit to yourself that you don't know where you're going, but, as a truth-seeker, I find an issue with blindness. I need to see. I need to know how to see. I think I've always known how to see. I need the strength to practice real seeing.

I guess if I want to see better, then I must listen better.

What's going into my head? I need to explore ways in which to limit, or eliminate some things.
I don't want to be of the world, but for it.

***

I can't wait to be gone. 

Struggle here, struggle there; but a different struggle. That's what I seek.

Odd Future...

Yeah, we don't talk anymore.

I guess I could say that I know you, but some part of me kind of wishes that I didn't. That I didn't go through that; that I was never there.

What kind of life is that? Wishing that most of one's history was not there; wishing that we've never made the impressions that were made. It's almost as if we wish that we were never really alive, or at least never lived our own lives.

Deep down, I miss you. Perhaps I just miss the ideas I made up in the good times, because those filled me with a unique kind of hope. While I still have hope now, it is a different hope; an unfamiliar hope. Each new thing to look forward to has a different flavor, and I know which ones I liked and which ones were simply just ok.

But, I liked how you tasted, and that makes me wish I never tasted it at all.

I am left with these imprints, these small shards of change from each thing that I've tried and failed at. I am a collection of unique pieces that equal a person who is unlike any other. I do not chase the things that are familiar, but that I make the unfamiliar familiar.

So, I am odd, and I will always be odd, and this is odd, and that we don't talk anymore is odd, and this new hope of mine is odd until it becomes not odd.

My Sincerest Apologies...

My religion has too much thought in it; not enough action.

I feel as if it should be a martial art; instinctive and prepared to do.

Shame befell me and grew exponentially greater as the distance between my car and you got bigger. You needed help and I crossed to the other side of the street. The anti-samaritan. The one who would have passed by the Son of God too; a practiced reaction that I've cultivated to spare myself some pain.

There are too many reasons not to help someone, or even care about them.
I have too much practice in thought, and reason; it has become who I am.
Reason is not reason. Those who seek to bind the spirit and the heart in legalese are fooling only themselves. Made-up walls.

God knows no bounds that can be created or even fathomed by people, and neither should my heart.

I wish to be stronger in the future...

Apples and Oranges...

I’m sorry, but I once looked at you as a property. Not as such an object that completely filled the meaning of the word “property”; inflections of ownership and finality, but simply as mine. I had hoped you felt the same.

We struggled and fought, and ran and crawled down our road until we reached its end. Then when we diverged, I pained for a while with feelings of loss; feelings that I had lost something original, which together only we were able to make. But after some time, I was able to see. You were not for me. You were not mine.

Eventually you disappeared from my thoughts like the sun disappears from the horizon at dusk. You became a ghostly memory that appears from nowhere, only rarely, to remind me that I didn’t understand what was happening. You were never for me. You are somebody else’s.

***

…and then there was you.

The one who I thought I figured out everything about. I made up a life for you inside of my mind and fell in love with it. I thought of you and me at a distance, yet hopeful for a closeness. As we spent time together, I understood something else.

It was as if I knew what was happening this time; an old familiar feeling that I had forgotten, like the scent of something from childhood that brings a flood of memories along with it. We had no path to walk yet, we hadn’t gone anywhere; the only place for us to part was in my head.

I think we were making cupcakes, and I think I saw your thumb; and as the skin flashed, I think it was its color and nail polish and the tone of your voice and the temperature and the light in the room and my mood and the situation and my age and your age and what you were talking about and where I was going in life and all of the history about your life that you had revealed to me, make me think a thing that I once thought before: you were not for me. You were somebody else’s. 

I wanted to hold your hand, and knew I couldn’t.

It was at this moment that I felt bad for stealing that much time of yours away from the other person.

Both of you.