Wolf

"Tout ce que tu ne sais pas donner te possède."
André Gide

~

...that the roads lead to nowhere when you have walls around your heart.

There are outer obstacles and inner scars, wounds at the surface and fractures that tear you apart. There is the decision or a lack thereof, the drive to authenticity or a falling to pieces, the will to build on goodness or a forgotten painting about forgetting - forgetting what?

Then there's you and you and everything stuck in between.

Then there's me and it feels as though I've lost all my pens, as if the words perceived my thoughts as unfair taxation laws so they drowned all the instruments of expression into the realm of immaterial ink and then wrote themselves off. Thus, I now find shelter in words that describe how the old ones used to arrange their letters in me. I know that my eyes have been closed for a while, and that none of this will open them because the roads on my eyelids are flooded with apologies that never made it out of my head - unless dreamworld counts.

For now, the dot follows the patterns that match the mysterious code of identity. The dot can't always see the dot within. The dot breaks itself into symbols under which obscurity hides meaning and meaning hides light. The dot sees itself in other dots and, sometimes, the other way around. The dot has no understanding of scale because it has never met a unit. The dot's favorite geometrical concept is the infinite line it can't wish into being by itself. The dot knows of the third dimension but pretends that it doesn't exist while it enjoys the two-dimensional labyrinth. The text, the paper, and the pen, they're all predetermined. But the dot is free. The dot is how much love you're freely willing to give. The dot is the handwriting.

Different people feel different things. But perhaps my void and yours are the same. My void compares itself to the empty center of a spider's perfect web, the eye of the secret storm that sees the Nothing in everything and feels the Everything in that Nothing. Perhaps that's what I hope to understand, the calm infinity dwelling in the nothingness of this beautiful song, the calm song in everything and everyone.

But the words don't always fit the music. For between the point where symbols fail to carry the feeling and the point where the heart can no longer beat off that feeling's weight, there is a line of lonely letters living lovelessly in the blind lavender ink spots of the imagination.

I watch and wonder, wonder and watch. I watch the games at their fingertips and wonder how aware they are of the game inside, the one between the hero and the villain, the victim and the pretender, the warrior and the chess-master, the composer and the lyricist, and my personal favorite at this moment, the ego and the anti-hero.

The game is won when the big antonyms become synonymous. I don't know them all. But for now, I can recall that sometimes unreading is reading, covering is uncovering, giving is receiving, unlearning is learning, breaking is mending, dying is living, doubting is suspecting, growing is a return to the child and, more often than not, I am you and you are me.

For now, in the seemingly perennial distance between being and becoming, I see a child riding on the back of a wolf, a grey and white wolf that was born in the snow.

I wonder where they're going next.

~

“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude, where we are least alone.” 
George Gordon Byron

Star

"And I just wanted you to know."

My Chemical Romance

~

An eternal feeling unhesitatingly and continuously screams in the depth of your dark abyss. Echoes bounce off the walls, fueled by a resentment toward the conditions of time and space. It says that it is unconditionally timeless, boundless yet wonders, under its breath, for how long it's been stuck in this hole. 

Some nights are broken, dead and true. Others are tender shattering dew. 

In the midst of noise, words crawl on a sidewalk. It must be really loud in your head, mockingly whispered the abyss. Even your words know there's no way out of here. Is our truth cold enough to puncture that heavy soul you so terribly wish to abandon? Paint the pain upon the brow, disillusioned by delusions, and punch the rain into your eyes, for this is but the world of lies. Like an inherently divided coin, sailing through the cobblestone, I wonder which side fortune will pretend-bury today, as its brother washes away under this dusty broken loan. Alas! Know that hell is not bounded by the red corners of your eyes. And so you must look further and beyond that gaze you distance yourself from - for the deeper you dwell, the closer your home to hell. 

We're in this together, said Heart to Horizon. 

Light music ensued. 

We're in this together, said Mind to Pattern. 

Mute lights fired through. 

Why is no one dancing? The soul wondered. 

I am, echoed Silence. 

But no one heard it. 

So listen. Listen to the shadow dancing in the rain, singing the praises of creation. Listen to your story and everyone else's, for a single thread can only resonate within its web. Listen to the lines hiding in their retinas, the ones their mirrors forget on the other side. Listen, second-most of all, to your silence. 

Some nights are broken, dead and true. Others just never make it through.

When time loses meaning, and you feel that you don't belong in this body, or at least that this planet is not your home, it makes you wonder if it's simply all a dream. Yet you can't help but try to make sense of the contents of your existence. Thus as I attempt to hug you, our feet planted at the center of the bottomless rift of our fractured identity, I find that you are as opaque and immaterial as I am, that this open-ended monologue is a meaningless echo that bounced off all the voices in my head.

I believe the main difference between the suffering individual and the individual whose brilliance is widely recognized is identical to the difference between difference and similarity, because empty space is empty, and because Divine Perspective rules them all.

Some nights are broken, dead and true. And the stars align with your suffering because they want you to be you. 

What about me?

What happens to me when the music is gone? 

How bright will the hour of my star shine when I pass?

How short is the breath to failure? And how deep is the road to contentment?

What about you?

What do you see in the horizon?

And how does silence make you feel?

How do you fill the many blanks between these lines?

And which of the seven versions of you is blinking right now?

Some nights are broken, dead and true. Others bless the divine in you.

~

"One who doesn't know how to dance, says the floor is crooked."

Nepali Proverb

Momentous

“In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd. It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.” 
Stefan Zweig

~

A melody of subtle happiness travels in floating musical notes around the center of my eyesight in a masquerade of invisible birds and planes falling into shreds of feathers and paper, settling on a heart that beats pain and anger disguised in a helpless symphony of sadness.

One, a shortness of breath. Two, an echo of a dying heartbeat. Three, a mind beheaded by confused and elusive variables with the constant ax of pain. Four, her eyes were once full with the depth and breadth of life. Five, her eyes are now a broken portal to a non-existent dimension. Six, flowers wither. Seven, flowers wither. Eight, flowers wither. Nine, number-shaped bullets shoot the music down.

Discrete hands softly encircle the kitchen clock that makes up her neck. She can't tell the time because it's hiding beneath her throat, face down. But her breath smells like seconds. And the focus shifts from the heaviness of chest pain to that of a headache as a single minute dives through her blink and into her swallowed pride. This clock is broken - it lost its parts in a battle against time. This clock is broken - and her discrete hands were not her own. This clock is broken - and it took them thirty-one blinks to slowly slit her throat.

Maybe things don't need to make sense.

But assuming that things do make sense. Perhaps I'm seeing you through multi-shaded spectacles, with thick lenses stuck between the color of your soul painting its outer layers and the faded hue of mine lingering on the worn-out interior. Maybe everything happens inside the lens and everything else is just the illusory reaction of the universe. Maybe we should all take off our glasses to see things for how they truly are, how we are all one. But then again, we are not all one. We are free to become whoever we want to be. Whether you want to be a jet black anti-hero or a desert gold victim, a greenish maroon protector or a blood red mercenary, whether you're a frozen ocean blue that paints paralyzed waves or the fiery purple privilege of the night sky, whether you're the most broken grey of all or the light-ray that only made it to grey blocks of letters, we are not one. We are many and each one of us must discover his own true color, dip that dry, unused, magical brush in it and finally get to paint beneath and beyond the borders of this line drawing they call 'life'.

So to each her own passion, his own poison, her lying truths, his truthful lies, the moments that meant so much to her though they never really happened and the moments that shaped the edges of his bed while she was half asleep. Reality recurrently dies at an alternating frequency. Yet the Truth is right there, at every corner and every turn, in every wave and every curl, engraved on the heart of the hero, and questioned in the mind of the weak. So send apologies to the ego of every weak hero because they forgot their introspective glasses in the house. And send flare signals for every starving existentialist who's writing stories with the crumbs that were supposed to take him home.

The ice, it either melts or breaks. And the same goes for glass. So whatever you're made of, sooner or later, you will stand in the middle of the line that joins your melting point and your breaking point. And in a moment of momentous divergence, you will make your move.

'Who you were, who you are, and who you want to be,' that's seven-dimensional chess with three demons and an extra player you cannot see. We are not all one. We are the seven that only become one after twenty-one handshakes, two broken mirrors, and a one-in-a-million mixture of humility and courage.

So blessed be the titans and the knights of honor that unknowingly know the difference between a game of chess and a set of drums.

And blessed be the brave.

~

"You've gotta find your big, gigantic drum kit."
Nick Andopolis