*
It's still early days, but I think the ghosts are waking up again. At night they tiptoe around the edges of my pillowcase, their footsteps echoing in the hollow of my semi-conscious mind. It never fails to fascinate me how loud that echo could be inside every individual, how an ache in another heart might not ever throb as strong as a friend in need / a friend in pain. Amplify your own melancholy by the population of the world and try to breathe, wait no, just imagine the waterfall of synchronised sorrow all around the globe and then breathe. I can't, you can't, it doesn't seem possible.
There is comfort not in that everything will be okay in the end, but that one day this will all be a reflection, a story, perhaps even some kind of nostalgia. Maybe you’ll even laugh about it. Isn’t it strange how melancholia could be comical moments or minutes or months later, it's like the sweat and tears dry up to make pages of a fairytale that won’t even seem real.
Lately I've been getting a little bit funny about time. It seems surreal that a concept existed, with nothing to monitor it but a hand that was forever falling clockwise through gravity or a teeny tiny battery or something stronger beyond my control. I get antsy knowing where I will be in fifteen minutes or an hour or more, what I will be doing, wondering how I will get from A to B to C and so on through to the night until it's time to close my eyes and dream.
Humility will try you, quietly but consciously. Can you go half a conversation without revolving the focus back to yourself? I tried once and tripped over at every hurdle that egocentrism threw towards me. It’s not justifying your actions per se, but reassuring me that your intensions are the very best. Sometimes desires get the better of me and their seeming importance is almost intoxicating – I get lost in the bouquet of impulse and preference and forget what is more real than the self-regarding thoughts that swim and swirl inside my skull. Imminence doesn’t necessarily dovetail with importance. Sometimes when I’m the only voice inside my head, I start to deplore myself in all my apparent self-importance; ruinous trait by ruinous trait.
What would it mean to make yourself somebody you yourself would miss dearly? I believe that high-quality company is inspired not inherent. Sometimes I forget that it's not who you were, nor who you're becoming but the certainty that you are indeed, becoming. That you're living and learning and loving and laughing and everything in-between.
( PS. you are what you love, kid, not who loves you back )
x
