Light

"If I could be with you tonight,
I would sing you to sleep.
Never let them take the light behind your eyes."
My Chemical Romance

~

I try my best.

What if your best isn't good enough?

But what if it is?

The walls slowly close in, aiming to crush my explosive mind. And I keep staring at the foreign paintings that decorate them, the faces of the people I love. I keep telling the walls that I can't breathe. I send them my pathetic requests with broken eyes because the words won't come out. But it's all in vain. For once you turn your back on the walls of your heart, the walls of reality turn their backs on you. Thus, still, hopeless, I remain a fan of the intensely dramatic, as loyal as ever to the wonderful realm of fiction.

Masks divide you. Dishonesty tears you apart. And the most beautiful things you feel remain inside your head. "Once a liar always a liar." "Once a quitter always a quitter." The voices lie because you subconsciously command them to destroy you. To overcome this, you must remember that one can never cheat their way into and out of destiny. Fate's hand floats around your heartbeats to see which are worthy and which are failed. Will remains free though. Someone I once knew taught me that.

But the world is ugly and sometimes the people we know and love, they become forgotten memories.

But sometimes, we meet someone that restores our faith in humanity, in love, in art, in the future.

And when the past comes back to haunt what's left of you, you find yourself just staring, obliviously flooded with thoughts of surrender, with ending credits flashing. "No, hold on," she says. You see a young soul masquerading as a veteran warrior, telling you that the love in her heart can fight off your demons. She hugs you, pushes you and starts running, leaving you with a gentle warning, "if you don't get up and run with me, you'll never know what happens in the future." And as she runs away from your gaze, you see a whisper flowing through her smile, "our future."

Life is full of surprises.

If you haven't met yours yet, I really hope you do.

Now, look around, after you close your eyes. Those people you love so dearly, are they not worth the pain?

Do not stand your ground as you face the storm. Run instead. Run toward it with weapons of heart and soul. Fix your eyes on the mountain you wish to climb and charge. Run with faith and conviction and you will find that they are the perennial wings of cosmic resonance, smoothly extended from your skin, mirrored in the light behind your eyes.

Run and know, that most storms are made-up ghosts. And though some are future dreams disguised as endless nightmares, you still need to keep your eyes closed wide open, because those details are divine.

We live and die in love. And a fall into shreds today is a chance for us to pick up the right pieces, the ones that can make up a whole that won't break tomorrow.

The music plays on within you, no matter how many doors you close.

Live on, dear friend.

~

"As we fade in the dark,
Just remember you will always burn as bright."
My Chemical Romance

Chocolate

"There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." 

C.G. Jung

~

In what concerns the choice between vanilla and chocolate ice-cream, he codes the first with 'V' and the second with 'C'. V reminds him of the fall from grace and the loss of purity. C reminds him of the glow, the glow of the dark side. He chooses V after convincing himself that the glow is truly that of the hidden light of people living in darkness. This makes him wonder why the shop doesn't offer CV ice-cream in the menu and call it Life. Deep down, on the surface, he knows that he just prefers the taste of vanilla. Or does he? Shortly after, he lights a cigarette and then uses the light behind his eyes, the one he licked off the tip of blazing ash, to observe his tentacles. Again, he wonders. He wonders if he is a squid or an octopus. He already knows that he is a squid because he thought of it first and he is definitely not in a self-deceitful mood. Or is he? Upon pondering the significance of the respective colors of black-blue squid-ink and black octopus-ink, he finds his tentacles metaphorically patting him on his now reassured back of a squid. He whispers to himself, in the sarcastic tone of rudimentary intelligence he despises: "It's okay. it's okay." A second later, after subtly extinguishing the flame of a potential rebellion in Stress Level District, he considers the possibility of coming up with a joke about a squid that likes vanilla. But right then or a fragment of a second later, he notices the salivary metaphor, just sitting there in the wet white glow, waiting to expose the contents of the squid's black and blue feelings on paper-like ice-cream. However, a young and forgotten voice interrupts the trailing train of thought. The train makes its infamous whistle, a lullaby of cryptic words in the supposedly distant cigarette smoke. The indifferent child is just standing there on some random rail in the railway. He looks to his left at everyone he loves as they attempt to survive an overwhelmingly beautiful and ugly Reality. And then he slowly shifts his head to the right: a comfortable, colorless bed, a silent, color-shifting window, and a comforting, infinitely-colored screen - The realm of Fiction greets thee with the infinite hope of lucid daydreams. Look at me. This is where you belong. Otherwise why would this fictitious speech bear your voice? The train's whistle returns, moving upward in curly lines of smoky ink, blue from his quasi-closed lips and black from the sleepless nights, nights glowing like arched lamp posts reaching up his inflamed skin to the purple light suspended in his eyes. The child's mind screams 'jump' but his heart writes it off in lowercase letters. He imagines the swing of an old pendulum hanging onto nothing. Left, right, reality, fiction, love, dreams, death, void, stress, security, people, him, cruelty, metaphors, delusion, illusion, purpose, identity, love, right? Jump? Where? What does a baby squid write on vanilla ice-cream? Reality or Fiction? What a terrible joke...

What if I don't jump? If the train is real and I am fictional, it won't hit me. If the train is fictional and I am real, it won't hit me either. If we're both real, I'll be dead in a few seconds. But what happens if we're both fictional?

Blood. Void. Rewind. Love. Faith. Purpose. Become.

If this is fiction, am I the kid or the train or both - or the distance in between? Am I watching or drawing or both - or neither? Am I the unmentioned elements in the questions or the potential fruit of the tree above their roots - ? Are you listening to the sound of the train or are you some writing writing in the smoke - or are you the sudden void after every question?

~

"What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate." 

C.G. Jung