Preach love and practice
nihilism
so strong that it ferments into
narcissism,
a selfish regard that ages
and goes over
from a wine of acquired taste
to the vinegar of a sociopath.
“Nothing works,
nothing mattes.”
Take it further:
“Nothing's real.”
Take the dogma,
twist it
into a shape to fit your liking.
Freeze your smirk into its
bitter
shine.
Drift through life
touching everything, feeling
nothing,
curdling the blood in the veins of your lovers
and piercing the hearts
of the fools
who dream you a hero,
a Ghandi,
a god.
They look at you with hopeful eyes
that brim with a recipe that's
four parts awe,
three parts admiration,
two parts imitation, and
one part each of
fear and distaste
—for a soul so distant,
so vapid—
as they bleed to death from wounds
they cannot see,
wounds
that are half of your knife and
half self inflicted.
After all,
they chose to love you,
didn't they,
in the end?
Your smile never changes.
Nothing works and
nothing matters.
In the end,
nothing is real.
Not even you.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Family, Friends, and Allies
Alliance (noun): a connection based on kinship or common interest
I walk into the room with my hands shaking, which is most ridiculous thing to have happen, and the rational part of my brain knows it—I've been walking into this same group for nearly three years, and we've been meeting in this room for two of them. Still, the prospect of walking through the door this morning scares the living daylight out of me, and the argument I had yesterday afternoon doesn't help.
My best friend walks up next to me as we wait for the room to empty out, and I see the same look of apprehension on her face.
“I feel like I'm about to barf,” she tells me, and I have to agree. We have never been in charge of this before. The sense of impending doom and drama, as well as the weight of a huge responsibility, seems to wrap itself around us like a wet wool blanket in the middle of the summer. We share a sparse, stressed look, and then another friend comes up and bursts the bubble of swelling tension.
“Isn't the Gay-Straight Alliance meeting today?”
Somehow this makes us feel a little better, or at least reminds us that our focus is on them, not ourselves. I feel her take a deep breath in unison with mine.
“Yeah,” I answer. “We're just waiting for the room to clear.” It does so a minute or two later, and at this point, our regular group is beginning to congregate around us. Our third leader and the last part to our own personal Three Musketeers joins us just as we start through the door.
We storm the room and set the chairs up in a circle in record time. As we do, I see a stream of faces come in to join us—some I have known for three years, some for less, and some I have never seen before at all. Five minutes later we're sitting in a circle and I'm trying to tear my eyes away from the flat purple-gray carpet and make myself look at the people who are sitting in a spread-out circle with us. They are all looking at us with some degree of expectancy—they are here to listen to us talk to them, at least for today.
We do talk. For a good eight or ten minutes, that's all we do: Who are we? Why are we here? What is the group? What are the rules? During this entire thing I alternate between wanting to continue staring down at the floor and wanting to speak a million words a minute. Finally we are done with our spiel and can hand it over to them, let the words we all know are waiting there be spoken to a room of people that will actually listen.
“Usually we start meetings with a check-in,” I say. “But today's a little out of order. Our question for today, though, is 'why are you involved with GSA?'”
The question travels around the circle, and after each person speaks, I am more and more sure that my case of the jitters was for nothing. “We want the support,” they say. “We are the support. We love in different ways. We are comfortable here. We love it here.”
The new, glittery talking-stick that has made its way around the circle comes to me, and I am so overcome that I can hardly speak.
“I'll say it the only way I know how to,” I say, and I'm slightly alarmed to hear a tremor of emotion in my voice. I pray that I won't choke up completely. “I want to be here for anyone who's ever felt like the freak in the room.”
I pass on the glitter stick to the other leaders, and I feel bad later, because right now I'm not listening to what they're saying. I am looking around the circle and seeing the people I love, people I've known for years now. People who were with me on my own journey of self-discovery before I even know that was what it was. People who have seen me laugh and cry and scream and hurt. Suddenly my anxiousness is gone, not as if it never was, but as if they have all been sending me a silent reassurance that they love me and trust me and have faith in me.
The bell rings and we put the room back together, laughing and talking as if we had never been apart, and as I leave the relative quiet for the surge of people in the hallway, I am smiling—I have a family here.
And I am so proud to have them by my side.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
The human heart is a galaxy in miniature.
No one ever says
what happens after “the end”,
all concise,
no loose ends.
No one says
how the moon turns to dust
as you lie and defend,
lie and defend.
But you're already dead and my eyes
bleed in green,
not in envy but because blue
is unbreathing, unchanging.
It is lifeless and cold and this
acid
in me
is very much alive,
eating away at the rings of a planet,
while lusting for its core.
Crack open your skull to let the smoke out.
Let the layers slough away like
skin, like
the dirt on ancient ruins,
built and silent on alien soil.
Let it leave and expose the once-live shell beneath.
But there is nothing to see here,
no tourist attraction built on old remorse;
only hollow spaces in this wreckage,
begging
to be filled with something
a little more substantial
than the ashes and deceit—
ashes of the moon that
burned up in its orbit
waiting for a truth
that never came.
what happens after “the end”,
all concise,
no loose ends.
No one says
how the moon turns to dust
as you lie and defend,
lie and defend.
But you're already dead and my eyes
bleed in green,
not in envy but because blue
is unbreathing, unchanging.
It is lifeless and cold and this
acid
in me
is very much alive,
eating away at the rings of a planet,
while lusting for its core.
Crack open your skull to let the smoke out.
Let the layers slough away like
skin, like
the dirt on ancient ruins,
built and silent on alien soil.
Let it leave and expose the once-live shell beneath.
But there is nothing to see here,
no tourist attraction built on old remorse;
only hollow spaces in this wreckage,
begging
to be filled with something
a little more substantial
than the ashes and deceit—
ashes of the moon that
burned up in its orbit
waiting for a truth
that never came.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
This is the reason we are family.
It’s two-thirty in the morning, and I’m sitting here, shaking, angry, tired, trying to write a letter full of all the things I need to say to my ex and feeling like the world's most fucked-up person on the planet, and suddenly my phone buzzes: a text from my older brother. Just the normal hey, what's new? sort of thing. This is an event in itself, since he is extremely picky about who he talks to and when.
His text is not entirely surprising; I have been thinking about him a lot recently, and he always seems to get in touch with me after I’ve been letting my mind dwell on him, as if I’m broadcasting some sort of signal that he pick up on. I have never entirely ruled this out as a possibility. There are too many coincidences.
So I text back, Hey, not much, just writing an angry letter. You?
And I put my phone back in my pocket and forget about it, my twisted emotions fighting with each other for adequate coherent space on the virtual page.
Ten minutes later my phone buzzes again... and again. My first thought is Oh, cool, a two page text, which is awesome since he sometimes doesn't text back at all; and then it buzzes again as I'm taking it out of my pocket.... and I realize he's calling me.
So I sprint into the other room and pick up.
“Hey,” I say, and I notice my voice is warm and happy, with no trace of the shaky sadness or anger that would have possessed it only seconds ago. Just the sight of his name on my phone lifts my heart. “Why are you up so late?”
“I’m up at the cabin,” he answers. This explains a lot to me: he hates it there. It also causes a genuine smile to break across my face. His voice always does, because there have been so many times where I’ve been sure I will never hear it again.
“That’s always nice.” The sarcasm in my voice is evident.
“Yeah. It’s cold up here.”
“It’s pretty cold down here, too,” I assure him.
There is a pause, and then he says, “What a fucked-up year.”
I am speechless for a moment--the same exact thought crossed my mind while biking home just yesterday. But my surprise doesn’t last long. He and I have always been connected like this. “I was just thinking that, actually,” I say, and my voice is low because most of the effort spent in speaking is spent holding back tears that could be either joyful or sorrowful but are actually neither, since I never let them past the tremble in my words.
We talk for a moment of his ex--he wants to make amends.
“Will she talk to you?” I ask, and the question is honest.
“Probably not, but I’m going to try anyway.” That could easily be his motto, used in both good and bad contexts: No, but I’ll do it anyway.
“Will she be making the amends, or will you?”
“I will. I was a bastard for the last part of our relationship.” My heart swells with pride in his ability to see himself clearly, and the feeling is untainted by his next words: “She was a bitch, though” because I know that even if he means them, they don’t change his view of himself.
“Isn’t it incredible how your opinion of someone can change so much in such a short time?” I muse. I am thinking of his ex, who he had been with for over two years, albeit on and off; I am also thinking of mine, and the letter filled with anger sitting on the abandoned computer screen.
We are quiet for another moment, and I reflect on several things: one is that I was staring out the very same window I am looking through now on a terrible May weekend three years ago, a weekend I will forever associate with him and his strength and kindness; the other is that he is the only person I know of that I can be silent with over the phone and not feel the need to talk to fill the empty airwaves.
“We should hang out when I get back to town,” he says.
I’m caught off guard, but in my happiness, I don’t skip a beat. “When?”
“Tuesday.”
“School starts on Tuesday. But afterwards?”
“Sure.”
We sort out details for a minute, and then he says, “Well, I think I’m gonna go to bed.”
“Alright. Sleep well, ani.” The word is Japanese, the language I only took because he asked me to. It means my older brother, and I've used it as a term of affection for him for years. For the first time in a long time it doesn't feel awkward leaving my mouth. In fact, it feels like it fits perfectly, like a favorite shirt or a familiar smell.
“You too. Keep texting me, alright?”
“I will, definitely. Of course.”
“Goodnight, Sarah.”
“Goodnight, Joe.”
I hang up the phone, and when I sit back down at the computer, my anger is gone. My hands are not shaking. Even my fingers have warmed up from the icy temperature they tend to take when I’m stressed out and haven’t slept. There is a feeling in my chest that can only be described as peace, and as I open a new tab and start to type, it is that feeling that carries me through my words.
And now I am here, riding on waves of warm contentment. Because when my older brother is here, nothing can ever hurt me.
And right now I think I trust in that more than anything else.
His text is not entirely surprising; I have been thinking about him a lot recently, and he always seems to get in touch with me after I’ve been letting my mind dwell on him, as if I’m broadcasting some sort of signal that he pick up on. I have never entirely ruled this out as a possibility. There are too many coincidences.
So I text back, Hey, not much, just writing an angry letter. You?
And I put my phone back in my pocket and forget about it, my twisted emotions fighting with each other for adequate coherent space on the virtual page.
Ten minutes later my phone buzzes again... and again. My first thought is Oh, cool, a two page text, which is awesome since he sometimes doesn't text back at all; and then it buzzes again as I'm taking it out of my pocket.... and I realize he's calling me.
So I sprint into the other room and pick up.
“Hey,” I say, and I notice my voice is warm and happy, with no trace of the shaky sadness or anger that would have possessed it only seconds ago. Just the sight of his name on my phone lifts my heart. “Why are you up so late?”
“I’m up at the cabin,” he answers. This explains a lot to me: he hates it there. It also causes a genuine smile to break across my face. His voice always does, because there have been so many times where I’ve been sure I will never hear it again.
“That’s always nice.” The sarcasm in my voice is evident.
“Yeah. It’s cold up here.”
“It’s pretty cold down here, too,” I assure him.
There is a pause, and then he says, “What a fucked-up year.”
I am speechless for a moment--the same exact thought crossed my mind while biking home just yesterday. But my surprise doesn’t last long. He and I have always been connected like this. “I was just thinking that, actually,” I say, and my voice is low because most of the effort spent in speaking is spent holding back tears that could be either joyful or sorrowful but are actually neither, since I never let them past the tremble in my words.
We talk for a moment of his ex--he wants to make amends.
“Will she talk to you?” I ask, and the question is honest.
“Probably not, but I’m going to try anyway.” That could easily be his motto, used in both good and bad contexts: No, but I’ll do it anyway.
“Will she be making the amends, or will you?”
“I will. I was a bastard for the last part of our relationship.” My heart swells with pride in his ability to see himself clearly, and the feeling is untainted by his next words: “She was a bitch, though” because I know that even if he means them, they don’t change his view of himself.
“Isn’t it incredible how your opinion of someone can change so much in such a short time?” I muse. I am thinking of his ex, who he had been with for over two years, albeit on and off; I am also thinking of mine, and the letter filled with anger sitting on the abandoned computer screen.
We are quiet for another moment, and I reflect on several things: one is that I was staring out the very same window I am looking through now on a terrible May weekend three years ago, a weekend I will forever associate with him and his strength and kindness; the other is that he is the only person I know of that I can be silent with over the phone and not feel the need to talk to fill the empty airwaves.
“We should hang out when I get back to town,” he says.
I’m caught off guard, but in my happiness, I don’t skip a beat. “When?”
“Tuesday.”
“School starts on Tuesday. But afterwards?”
“Sure.”
We sort out details for a minute, and then he says, “Well, I think I’m gonna go to bed.”
“Alright. Sleep well, ani.” The word is Japanese, the language I only took because he asked me to. It means my older brother, and I've used it as a term of affection for him for years. For the first time in a long time it doesn't feel awkward leaving my mouth. In fact, it feels like it fits perfectly, like a favorite shirt or a familiar smell.
“You too. Keep texting me, alright?”
“I will, definitely. Of course.”
“Goodnight, Sarah.”
“Goodnight, Joe.”
I hang up the phone, and when I sit back down at the computer, my anger is gone. My hands are not shaking. Even my fingers have warmed up from the icy temperature they tend to take when I’m stressed out and haven’t slept. There is a feeling in my chest that can only be described as peace, and as I open a new tab and start to type, it is that feeling that carries me through my words.
And now I am here, riding on waves of warm contentment. Because when my older brother is here, nothing can ever hurt me.
And right now I think I trust in that more than anything else.
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