rocketships

Terror. The ocean is great. I'm small and barely notable, me with my constructs of what a life is and what it means to be Here. The sky is vast. The stars are unknowable. We hurtle through the darkness and shadows that cradle space towards an ultimate demise of ice and other things too majestic for my humble being to understand. My constructs are meaningless. I am, by extension, stripped of meaning and alone, as is the human race.

Here it is

I'm just going to sit here,
cozy in bed
drinking my beer,
reading the news,

listening to you stumble around in your room
and hoping that it won't be yours soon.

And now I'm discovering
with indecent haste
the awkward annoyance
of the flavor of distaste.
It tastes like pity, self hate, anger, indignation.

I kind of hate you? I kind of hate you.

But if this were another world
and I were another girl, or whatever,
boy, or beast, something more tame
Without this pride that blackens my name

Maybe we'd get along. But probably not
because the flavor of distaste

surely

is so pungent as to permeate the infinite.



(Probably.)

Chapter One

She lived in between, in the spaces imagined by people but never conceived by human hands, the birthing spot of the idle thought and the resting place of complicated abstracts, an ethereal world in which nothing was tangible but everything was real. Here, no object was entirely defined by its definition; even she was not entirely female, although she would be described as Feminine. She drifted in and out of states of being, tossed randomly along the waves of Matter, but that was the nature of the place - nothing was permanent here, not even the shape of her form or the color of her skin. The trees, the floating paths, the very air shifted and pulsed like a living creature, thrumming with the rhythm of a golden heartbeat. She lived with unspoken poetry, dreamed songs, and whimsical fantasies, a hodgepodge of unconsciousness drained from the floating blue planet just past her arm’s reach.

Her thoughts were constantly turned towards Earth. If she stood on the edge of her world, looking through the effervescent lights and darks with her glorious shining eyes, she could see everything. Her insatiable curiosity led her to spend eons gazing through the lives of humans, silently contemplating their actions and existence. She was partly interested because of the slight sense of self-awareness that she possessed, and she knew that the mental workings of these creatures had created her and the place in which her immediate form was suspended; she also knew that they had no idea that their ancestors had been a part of the nebula that begot Earth, and had created their planet, even their own species, through the incalculable power of their minds. She often wondered what they could have achieved had their race not forgotten this.

Despite all of her observations upon humanity, and despite the occasional memory of her own origin, she didn’t see herself as independent from her surroundings. She was the channel for thought and Feminine focus, not an entity herself; that was one of the first things that changed.

She saw it happen, saw darkness blossom over the Earth in mushroom clouds of devastation. She witnessed the death of every living creature on the planet, felt their shock and terror as they realized that everything they knew was being extinguished. In that moment, for the first time, she felt pain, and it captivated her like nothing ever had - she felt alone, separate, incapable. The foot that rested on the misty waves beneath her was no longer a part of the waves themselves; something inherent within her psyche had been lost. She reached a long dark hand through to the mists of Reality, groping for humanity and the lost planet – through the corners of her eyes she saw a multitude of creatures reaching in a similar fashion, and somehow felt more alone for having been unaware of their existence – and gently fell to the wasteland beyond –

Mud Pies and Lullabies

She stares at the crinkled photograph,

her quavering fingers rubbing against the disintegrating surface,

nostalgically, painfully, very Aware.

The home she once lived in

raised beautiful children in

that belongs to someone else now, that is visibly changed now,

lives in the past, on a crinkled photograph, and

in the crinkled lines around her eyes and mouth, perhaps

in the gray hairs framing her face.

Closing her weary eyes, she imagines

a walk through that old hallway, into a small chalky white room

with the lines marking height on the door's frame

and the scuff marks in the floor from children's play.

She can almost see it in front of her. It is torture, this ghostly vision of a golden age

but the vision is tainted with What's Real. The walls

echo with silence, the paint smacks of newness.

There are no toys to be played with, no hair

to be tousled.

The children are grown and they've left now. There is a bitter taste

in her mouth.

There's a blank space in her head, a small chunk of her memory and personality gone, and she picks at it with her musings and music, wanting and not wanting to know what was once there. She can't remember why it happened, and she has a gut feeling that she doesn't want to - that instead she should just barrel forward with her life and worry about the past later, and from a safely distant vantage point - but she also wants to embrace the unknown. This is the same tendancy that forces her to climb heights that frighten and read books knowing she'll have nightmares, a slightly massochistic trait.

The seat of the passenger van has crumbs of sand on it that are grinding into her skin. She does her best to ignore this.

She attempts sleep, but her eyes are feeling for the sky, constantly opening and searching the cloudy sapphire depths for answers. She secretly feels as if a certain wispy pattern will show her everything she's been looking for, alighting her imagination with thoughts of airborne wonders and impossibilities, but also explaining her life in a way that is gentle and simple.

A memory, a distraction, explodes into her conciousness, and for a moment she is wracked by indignation, fear, anger, and pain...but this is a regular thing, and just as she suspected, it passes, and it is just another second of recognition among many that have randomly gripped her for months now.

She can remember her last night on the beach: the waves were crooning with the voices of stones falling and leaves shaking, a sound that she could say with absolute certainty was the only tune that could penetrate straight to her heart. The brilliant yellow moon, hovering like a deity among insubstantial gray clouds and sharp stars, cast it's eerily irresistible glow out across the waters like a golden path laid out for the brave walker. She had gazed intently down it's length into the glowing darkness far beyond her sight, enchanted forever, and forever wondering what would happen if she followed it...surely death, but perhaps death was the ocean, and the ocean encompassed death, and those who were swallowed became a part of something majestic and enticing. The thought was tempting enough to draw her feet into the water and to toy with the meaning of true freedom.

The undertow tugged gently, knowing that the battle was already won, and that she would be back.

A Pink Glowing Lamp Post on a Snowy Day

Today there was a layer of snow draped elegantly over the world outside my window. Tufts of white spiraled from the cloudy sky, dancing onto the flurry-crowned flowerpots; bushes and tree limbs ached and groaned under heavy loads, bending almost double in an effort to rid themselves of the proof of winter's prowess. Somehow, all of this happened while I slept, transforming the world into something alien and beautiful and timeless -- and though the moment that sunlight hits ice to reflect into your soul is infinite, the chilly flakes will die quickly, and February will pass, and life will continue despite their absence. Despite my slumber, or their death, or my death, life will continue infinitely for a moment and then stretch forever, so far outreaching to extremes that a moment becomes completely negligible. A snow flake's life starts and ends so quickly; but within that consciousness, if there be such a thing blessed upon a crystallized whiff, was there a brief eternity? I think about my own life and the eventuality of death, and I feel as if I'll never end...but I also feel brief as well, stunted, already finished.

A snowflake is so small. Thousands have slapped my windshield with puny malice, a pitiful display of strength that is wiped away by a mechanical wiper. The particles that compose the frozen tendrils of water are smaller still; perhaps the amount of minuscule components tends towards infinity. And just as they are immeasurably small, so the universe is immeasurably gigantic. It is all so small and yet so big at the same time. Maybe that's what the true meaning of eternity is; existing in a moment, being small and mortal and alone, and yet in that moment also being joined by the grand multitude of the universe, magnificent and endless.

Somehow two months went by without writing. College looms, sleep is hard to find, and I've healed from all the mayhem that passed through my heart.