Shipping off

I remember when two weeks away from you would kill me
I remember it like how I remember my first word
I know it happened, once, a long time ago
I have proof of it
But I can't remember it in my mind
I can't imagine what kind of person
Would be so lost without you
I can't begin to imagine
How he could worry and fret
Over I don't even know what

I remember when two weeks away from you would have killed me
But it didn't
And yet
I wish I could be that boy again
When I felt so alive with emotion
When I felt hungry with want

I remember when two weeks away from you didn't kill me
And yet I feel dead all the same

Times were simpler

There was a time when all that mattered were that my grades were good.
Another when all that mattered was that my friends liked me.
Another when all that mattered was my freedom, from parents and authority and life itself.
Another when all that mattered was my security, to live how I saw fit, and comfortably.
And now all I ever seem to care about, is that I get to keep caring at all.

Drinking Water

 The gasp of fresh air after a long overdue tall glass of water on a hot dry day. The last bit of crust on the last hot dog of 23 others eaten after a long night of drinking. The lean you make, arching your back backwards after having run a long race and the burning in your calves start to subside. The feeling of completeness after you turn off the computer monitor at the end of finishing that problem assignment.

Some day I'm going to die. I relish in that thought sometimes. Not the dying. But the afterwards. The simplicity that comes with it. The finality. Be it heaven, hell, reincarnation. Nothing. My remains burned and my ashes tossed into the evening breeze.

The long exhale that has been my life will reach it's conclusion, the "..." finally drawn to a close. The great questions finally answered. There is no reason to think there will be more questions unanswered, more stresses or confusions of the future. The future will blend with the present and past, for one long uninterrupted now, a now of no consequence. Time will be a line that I stand on the side of, no longer lassoed by it's tight grip on reality.

But then I finish the glass, and I gasp that sigh of relief.
And think that maybe it's not all so bad.

Trying to keep my head above the surface

You are the cresting of each wave of the ocean
And I am the calm waters between
Waiting for you to crash over me
And leaving me in a whirlwind just as quickly
Leaving me spinning
Lost and confused
Unsure how to go back to the calm I once was.
Finding it only moments before you crash over me once again.

L'Arbre du Ténéré

I once thought travelling in the desert must be amazing. I thought it would be so cool if I could cross the desert myself. When I was a kid, I watched Babar, a children's show about a royal family of elephants. I'm not sure that they lived in a desert, probably more like a jungle, but back then I thought they were always beside each other anyways. They're both hot places after all. At any rate, in one episode I saw one of them walking the desert with a canteen. At first I thought it was a purse, but when I realized it was filled with water, I thought it was so cool. So cool that I wanted one too. My mom had, years before when I was pretty much a baby, bought me a canteen. It was covered with red canvas and had a picture of Snoopy on it. I remember when I had been old enough to go to school for the first time I didn't want to take it to school, but now I thought it was just great. I started using it to play desert with my friends. We would pretend that our bikes were camels, we would bike real slow on them, and every few hundred meters we'd get really thirsty and have to drink out of my canteen.

My friend, Cameron, he loved the game too because neither of us knew anyone else who had a canteen and thought it made the game that much more real. We played lots of games together, usually with no toys except for our imagination. There was a tiny forest near our houses. It probably isn't fair to call it a forest, it was more like a small growth of trees, maybe 20 of them, bracketed on one side by people's back yard fences, and on the other side by a tall fence separating our neighbourhood from the train tracks. We would play in that forest all the time, trying to climb the weeping willow, and laughing wildly as we'd tumble off the branches.

He always wanted to play fighting games. Like cops and robbers, but he'd always be the cop, and he'd always have to wrestle you when he caught you. It wasn't enough to just get tagged, he needed to fight you to the ground. I didn't like those kinds of games. I liked the kinds where we were all on the same side, and the bad guys were all imaginary. That's why we almost always played Ninja Turtles. I was always Donatello, and he'd be Raphael. Armed with broomsticks and hand rakes, we'd take on invisible foot soldiers and aliens.

We would always chase animals and pretend they were monsters too. Pigeons and squirrels mostly. We would chase them down, but we would never catch them. They were always too fast. But then, one late August evening, Cameron decided he wanted to be Leonardo. I remember the clouds were an odd shade of purple and red, but it was no where near sunset time. It was like the skies were embarrassed. But maybe that's my own memory tingeing the past. He brought out a hockey stick, and it started off like any other day, except we had found a squirrel standing in the middle of the street. We chased it around the corner, and had it backed up to a brick wall. It tried to climb up the wall, but kept losing it's footing. And that's when he struck. Cameron brought the hockey stick high up over his head, and down on the squirrel. I don't remember how it looked. I only remember feeling sick. At first I thought it was an accident, but he brought up the stick again, and down on the squirrel's head. And again. It came apart quickly and the whole area looks like a balloon filled with blood and guts and fur had exploded against the brick wall. I told him he should stop, but he said it was a monster, and we had to kill it. He even stepped back and handed me the stick, and asked if I wanted to take a hit too. I ran into my house, washed the blood on my hands, and hid in my room.

I don't remember much else about those days. I do remember that we went to different schools. He went to a catholic school somewhere away from me. I remember thinking that the first day of school would be horrible without him. He was my best friend and I wouldn't know anyone else. He was the friend who always fought the bad guys so I wouldn't have to.

But I learned to fight my own monsters, in my own way. And he, he just learned how to fight himself.

There is a tree in the Sahara. Called the L'Arbre du Ténéré, it is the most isolated tree on the planet, the only one for 400 km around itself. It used to live amongst a couple other trees, but they had all died out, and it lived on its own for decades. And it was destroyed by a drunk driver. A man, driving a car, managed to miss 800 km of open empty desert, and hit the only tree in basically everywhere. How absolutely ridiculous is that? They have since uprooted the dead remains of the tree, and now it stays in the Niger National Museum.

Sometimes, on days like today, when the clouds look like they did on that August afternoon, I wish I could go back to the last day of L'Arbre du Ténéré as it sat there alone in the Sahara. And I wish I could sit under it's shade, and drink from my red Snoopy canteen. And look up and watch the purple embarrassed clouds pass by. As we await for the end of the universe.

Hanging onto the grudge

It's amazing how much effort it takes to preserve you
To keep the corner of my mind you live in so fresh
To make sure I visit every once in awhile to make sure you haven't vanished
All in an effort to remember a feeling
An emotion I am afraid I will never feel again

It's amazing how quickly a flash of anger and frustration can snuff all that out

It's amazing how quickly you forget
And how worthless it all really was

You're more alone than you know

So helpless to that feeling of belonging
Of necessity
The longing to have that person waiting in the bed you crawl into after a long day
The ache for that someone to be waiting outside for you as you leave the office on a rainy day
Donning a sheepish grin as they clutch an umbrella too small even for him

You always forget the power coursing through you
That picks you up on the gloomiest days
That keeps your emotions in check
You forget it is he who needs you more than you need him

You don't realize how wide your smile is when he's not around
How full your laughter is

We miss having you around

In this house, we don't believe in love

I got home early from school one day. My grandfather hadn't heard me come home or open the door. He was in the living room. I could hear him speaking softly and gently to someone, but I didn't think anyone was home. And the whole situation already felt a little weird, because I had never heard that tone come from him ever before. It felt like he was speaking in a foreign language. I silently went to the living room doorway, and watched, as my grandfather was on the ground, cuddling our pet dog, and telling him how much he loved him. Nuzzling him with his own head as he whispered in his ear how good a dog he was. I was so dumbstruck by what I saw, that it's my earliest and strongest memory of actually having my mouth agape in shock and surprise. 

I felt confused at first, I had never seen him treat anyone or anything with such affection. He had always been so stern with everyone in our family, always a little distant. Always belittling everyone. And here he was, telling our damn dog how much he loved him. The confusion fed into a combination of jealousy and anger almost naturally. That he could treat this dog so much better than his own grandson, his own family. And, after yet another beat, I felt a happiness as I watched, at this pure, unadulterated joy they were bringing to each other. And finally sadness. 

Sadness because I knew when I had seen my grandfather had behaved like that. He had used that same tone on me when I was a child. When I couldn't really remember the words, but I could remember the shape of the sentences. None of it held meaning to me, and yet it meant just as much. The roundness of the sounds and the warmth of them. Quiet enough for just the two of us. I had seen him speak that way to my sisters as well. Never when he knew I was around, but only when he was alone with them, and I was too young to really understand back then what he was doing. When they too were too young to form the sentences to talk back. At some point when we gained the ability to talk back, to question him, that's usually when it stopped. And then I thought the only other person his whole life he must have been like that to was his daughter, my mother. And his wife. My grandmother. My grandmother who died when my mother was just a child, and couldn't even speak herself. He must have spoke sweet affection to them both. To my mother who couldn't speak. And my grandmother, who's final days were in a coma. And as my mother grew up, and learned how to speak, he learned how to remain silent.

Around that same time in my life is when I started sleeping a lot lighter, and I would wake up from just about anything happening in our house. That's when I first learned of my grandfather's dreams. How he would have pretty regular dreams where he'd be barking like a dog in his dream, and he would bark in real life, in his sleep. At least that's how my mother explained it after it had happened a few times, and I had asked her. The next time I heard it, I got out of bed, and peeked in on him from his doorway. After I don't know how long of waiting, he barked again, and then, almost inaudibly. He started to whine. Almost a whimper, or a cry. And through his shut eyes, I could see the tears run down his face. Turned onto his left side, the tears went down his nose, and his left cheek. I didn't know what to do, so I went back to bed. 

I sometimes think that he only shows love for those that can't talk back, because he's scared of all the things that won't love him back. That can't any more because they're gone. Because someday it will all be gone. And so will he. 

Crystal

It scares me how much I love you
No, not how much
But the way that I do
It's not something I completely understand
I have known the love of a girl that I lusted as much as I love
This doesn't burn quite as intensely and needily as that
I have known the love of family
This doesn't feel as passive and foundational as that
The love of friends is so fleeting compared to what I feel for you
It's not like any of that
I want to say I love you like I would love a sister, but I know its a little more profound than that too
I love you the same way I feel when certain music plays with no lyrics
And there is only that feeling of immense joy bursting to break free from my chest
And a lump the size of a tennis ball forms in my throat
Or rather, you make me feel like I could leap right out into space and zoom off at the speed of light
And yet never be afraid of feeling too far away from you
And no matter how far we might be in space from each other
I would still feel the warmth of the love you seem to have for me no matter what
I think love might not even be the right word
Because the word almost seems to imply a beginning and an end
And I can't remember a time before feeling this way about you
And I can't imagine a time it ever will stop
I think love is the wrong word because it seems to imply I have a choice in it
And yet it feels as fundamental to existence as the earth beneath our feet
As the sun and sky about our heads

It scares me how much I love you
Because I am scared of the day you stop loving me
I am scared that when I am done living, there will be more days that I have loved you, than you have loved me back

I wish I loved her more than I do

I know a girl, Spencer. She complains that her name sounds like a boys name, but I think it's kind of pretty as a girl's name. She sometimes tells me stories far too personal for someone I know far too little. Stories about how her father would beat her slightly too hard and too often. And typically her more than her other siblings. She had two older sisters, two older brothers, and a younger sister. And of all of them, she got it the worst, she said. Of how her mother would berate her senselessly in public. Stories of her siblings living to become such great people with successful lives and beautiful children and a nice car while she has nothing to show for her own life, in her own opinion anyway.

She even told me about how her one older sister once tried to kill herself. Her sister had been found with her one wrist slit open across the wrist. In hindsight, she says, it was probably more a cry for attention, because she had only done the one wrist, and it wasn't a very long or deep cut. And she said that when her mother had called her father on the phone saying their daughter had tried to kill herself, he had responded "Oh, was it Spencer?" She asked me how fucked up that was. That he would guess her. That, in her mind, he himself knew that he was harder on her than on anyone else. And that there was no reason for it.

She sometimes alludes to how she wanted to kill herself once. How sometimes she still wants to kill herself. Sometimes its how we'd all be better off with her gone. Other times its "you'll see how much you miss me when I'm gone".

At times like that I sometimes think, that since the dawn of man, maybe 8 million years ago, there have been people who have thought the same thoughts. That have found so much value and so little value in themselves all at the same time. And that for all the advancement and technology and wonder we now have and take for granted, that we can fly through the air for god's sakes like fucking kings of the universe, that a girl like Spencer could have learned so little, and think thoughts so primitive they were likely thought the exact same way 8 million years ago.

It all seemed so important at the time

And in time, even empires of hulking glass citadels will come crashing down
Resting peacefully as they become the spines of mountain ranges
Pools will become seedlings for oceans
Gardens will become forests
Slowly but surely our mark will be erased from the earth
Just as those long nights have become mere wrinkles on my forehead.

Staring at the first rays of sun on the ceiling

I sometimes wake up
If the sun is shining in my face just right
I am brought to another time
And in my mind I see myself
Young
Energetic
Full of potential
My entire life lying before me

And then I try to get out of bed
My knees buckle from the pain
I slump back onto the bed

Those first few moments of the morning are the most blissfully ignorant

The guy beside me ordering food at taco bell

Think about the happiest moment you can think of. 

And just how happy and full of joy you were at that moment. 

A moment completely free of past regret and future doubt. 

Just happy. 

And then think of the saddest moment you can think of. 

That moment that fleeting scent in the breeze brings you back to. 

And how life altering its colour has tinged your life. 

And then, think about the last person you met that meant nothing to you. 

Passed before your gaze, not even worth a whisper of a thought. 

And how that person has felt the same highs and lows as you have. 

That that person is uniquely and singularly the most important person in the story of their own lives. 

And how meaningless they were to you. 

In your life story, that guy wasn't even worth a comma, not a drop of ink. 

And likely for them, you.

If there's a god, we must all be as meaningless as those nothing-extras are in our own lives.