love, read, write

my ghost speaks to me when i need it least,
when i am sitting with friends, enjoying their presence--
she points out to me a look in my friend’s eye (just a split
second, it passes, perhaps unnoticeably), a look that
seems of disgust and she whispers,
“they’re waiting for you to leave,”
i blink,
“waiting for you to leave.”

for moments afterwards she helps me hunt more signs of their
subtle distress, conspiracies drawn between small gestures and
words and absences of words and again the familiar feeling returns
when my ghost sits on my heart and i feel it sink into my stomach as i recall:
that’s right, you’re included for show,
for kindness,
just go--

and i do.
i leave.
i sit alone in my room and i sit
and i stare and i wonder why i am so worthless
and my ghost reminds me with no particular rhyme or reason
that it is because of who i am,
the things i say,
the way i stand.

Eddie looked off into the distance. "I don't know." She sighed. "It's always been like that."

I didn't know what to say. "I'm sorry about all that."

Several leaves danced in front of us in a colorful waltz. I shivered from the cold. I could feel the icy metal of the bench through my jeans.

"You know, my name wasn't always Eddie."

"Oh, yeah? When did you decide on Eddie?"

"No, like--"

A dog owner and his dog jogged past us. He looked pretty content about his life.

"It's just. My parents."

"Your parents? They made you call yourself Eddie?"

"No, well. I chose that name myself. Nickname, I mean." She paused. "I mean, my name is actually Edward."

"Oh," I said. "Edward."

Eddie laughed. "Yeah, I know. I don't know why they chose it either. When I was twelve, too."

"What?"

"Look," Eddie turned to me. "There's just things I can't explain. My parents weren't very... normal. I didn't know that then. I thought names weren't permanent things. I never lived in places long enough to realize that nobody changed their names every two years. I never... I never got to stay. I never got to build myself up."

I rubbed my nose because there was nothing to do, but immediately regretted it upon feeling the chilly wind bite my exposed fingers.

"I see," I said slowly.

She looked at me in a strange way. To this day I can never explain that look. It was a rare expression.

"You don't have to say that, you know." She sighed, then shrugged. We sat in silence for a bit.

"I feel--I feel like I'm saying too much--"

"No, no," I said. "It's good that you're talking. It's good. To um, build yourself up."

"Yeah." She bit her lips. "Yeah."

Silence.

"You know," she turned to me. "I think everything about who I am is... is because of my parents. Or everything about who I am not."

"They do seem like an interesting bunch," I said.

"Interesting, yeah." She smiled weakly, her eyes searching desperately around the park for something to distract herself with. It was excruciatingly calm.

"You know I had five names before Eddie? And I lived the first two years of my life without one. They refused to give one. I was named 'Baby' for two years. That was my name on my birth certificate.

"And they never let me in on the names, either. They always decided. They had all this money, from god knows where. Ellen--my mom--said she inherited a ton. And so did Phil."

"Phil's your dad?"

"Yeah. Never call them by their titles or whatever. They were never really a mom or dad to me, anyways. They were so lost and indecisive about themselves that when they had me, they couldn't bear to be decisive for the sake of this poor living soul. I inherited all of their insecurities."

"They changed your name because they were indecisive?"

"Well, I mean. They thought it was cool. That it would make me a more creative person or something. They had the connections and the money. Legal issues aren't too big of a deal if you have a lot of money and know a lot of people, you know. I grew up with everything like that.

"But I guess I also grew up with nothing."

She wiped her eyes. I didn't know what to say. So I didn't.

We stayed like that, sitting on the bench, looking out at the quiet lake. The water was calm. I felt calm, but unsettled.

"Let's go inside," I said eventually. "They might be waiting for us."

function breathe(){
    air. oxygen. how could it
    seem so easy;
    inhale(problems);
}

function inhale(it){
    it isn’t.
    exhale(thoughts);
}

function exhale(it){
    it is composure;
    i watch it leave out the
    window because my heart
    beats too fast for fears that exist();
}

function exist(){
    return false;
    they don’t.
}

a series; will continue.



In silence, I contemplated the importance of having ten fingers. Was ten really necessary for a comfortable life? I stared at the extensions from my palm and wiggled them curiously, watching the bones bend and fold at my command. How easy it seems that we have ten. But how much easier would it be, then, to have eleven? How much less at eight? I assumed it was all just about social norms--about not having to be stared at strangely when one has an extra finger.

x

I always knew I was different. Well, let me rephrase that: I thought I was different.

No, that's not quite it, either. The former makes it seem as if some future event ascertained my difference; the latter makes it seem as if my assumption was grounded in falsehood. Neither is true. I thought I was different, and continue to believe so. Nothing to date has ascertained nor disproved this theory. I simply feel this way very intensely.

Nothing ever seems to come easily. The way I see the world, I like to think, is different in color and taste from the average human. Perhaps it is my inner Darwinistic hunger. The will to survive, to remain. To be remembered. Death is a scary thing even to me now, after all of the things I've been through. It is true that I like to believe that I will do great things that will leave a mark, so that my life here will not mean nothing. After all, we simply exist and then leave. Our ashes soon turn into air molecules that people swallow and cough up, or that animals swallow (which then are consumed by humans or other animals, then pooped out). I shall become nothing but a part of the great recycling bin of life. In millions of years an atom from my arm may be in the dinner meal of a bear king's raccoon maid.

And who knows if some atom in me was once an atom that belonged to a great ancient King from Egypt. It may just as well be the origin of my internal illusions of greatness and destiny.

I presume it's easy to say that one does not belong where one is; that one actually deserves better but that the circumstances were misfortunate. It is true that we are mere victims of our circumstances; there is nothing to respect of a child of royalty other than that it had immense luck being born into a powerful and rich family. Nothing more to look at a poor child in disdain. The child, and all subsequent events in the child's life, is never truly the child's fault. If it knew of the horrid life it would inevitably live, would it really have chosen to be born in between dirty rags and under a tattered roof?

But really--I was never meant to end up here. I was different. I believe so. I had thoughts unlike any other; rarely did I come across people who had similar minds as me. I did meet someone once, as I was waiting in line for a book signing. Later on I found out that he was working on some sort of revolutionary novel of sorts. It became famous, and marked as his magnum opus. He gained a wikipedia page and several articles, one on Huffington Post and a vague mention in a New York Times article. He later got addicted to cocaine and went to jail for trying to smuggle an assortment of drugs into the United States by tying packets onto their underbellies.

It seems that my greatness was forgotten by the gods (or God, whomever the majesty is). I skipped all wikipedia articles and went straight to infamy. Unsung infamy. It seems nobody thought it decent to at least make me known for the things I may go to hell for.

x

To set things straight, I was never a humanitarian. I spoke and felt as a humanitarian. I certainly believed in humanitarian ideals, and thought that social justice was very important for society (quite self-explanatory, I tried to explain to others). The people around me believed I was a strong believer in humanitarian causes and called me a sort of servant to society. But I was never truly humanitarian.

Within my heart, my morals were never quite set in stone. While I believed strongly that the poor should be helped, I often contemplated the necessity of human deaths, and the idea of torture. I was masochistic from a young age. I never dared to act it out - I lived a long twenty five years as a model human - but inside, I thought of images and scenarios that repulsed me. It was in my mind; it served no purpose than to cause the effects it had on myself. Pure disgust.

Often I dared myself to think of gruesome images of people I loved (or that I thought I loved). My mother, cut in two. Or the idea of using the knife I was holding (to chop carrots) to slice an arm of mine off.

The ideas were fleeting. I was viewed as a humanitarian. I still do believe that we ought to save the world from its injustices. I still cry when I think about poor children starving, or about orphans, or women who live their lives oppressed and abused.

x

There was no turning point. Turning points, in their entirety, are misleading. No human simply turns around and walks in the opposite direction. Gradual is the only type of path we know. And such was my change.

It wasn't even a change, really. It simply happened. At the time, it felt natural. Nothing really had changed; I had simply decided to do something other than what I had been usually doing. It was nothing out of the ordinary to me, as I was fully aware of my internal thoughts and the paths they had traveled in the years previous. Perhaps to others, it seemed like a full turning point.

(There were no others, though.)

x

Another thing I must make clear is that I never believed in the idea of impossibility. Nothing, in its own right, is impossible. It simply has not been done. Or it has been done, far off, millions of miles away. Or it has been done in another dimension. There is no guarantee that everything we see now is the only thing that exists for all of eternity, in all forms of existence there may be. It is simply ridiculous. Simply because we have not witnessed something, is it really worthy of the ugly label, "Impossible"?

People warn others not to jump to conclusions, but they have no idea of the biggest conclusion to which they have jumped.

x

When an advertisement arrived in the mail, I never thought it was any more strange than an offer to go to the Bahamas. Both were equally preposterous and strange. One appealed to me more.

It was titled "Night Errands." On a deep purple and glossy paper was the matte, gold cursive font. The end of the s seemed to travel on for eons before it touched the edge of the paper. Heavy weight paper. It boasted high monetary awards for those who ran errands for clients who needed it but didn't have the time or the capability. A company of errand boys.

My first mistake was in leaving that ad on my table and throwing the rest away.

I am a slow learner. I cruise through the world at a speed different than everyone else; while my friends whiz past me in both body and mind, I stagnate. I linger. I mull over ideas and let things settle before I move on.

It would be a lie to say that I am not affected by my comparative slowness to my peers. It feels, very often, as if the world is too fast for me and that I do not belong. Perhaps, in the busy world that we live in today, that is true. Perhaps I am disadvantaged by my speed (or lack thereof). But I must learn to, one day, convince myself that slow is okay. That slow is good. There is nothing wrong with taking an extra week to learn the material. There is nothing wrong with spending more time reading a book. There is nothing wrong with not being able to finish a test.

Capitalism has created a sort of economic Darwinism; he who is fast will make more money and will succeed more quickly. He who is proactive will get more; he who gets a head start will reach monetary success before his peers. And while to some extent these assumptions may hold true, it is certainly not the dominating rule in the game. Firstly, money is not always the most important. We often forget that learning is not just for money, but for the sake of finding out more about the world. In addition, speed is not just the most important. So is patience. So is initiative. Many people lack the speed but have the grit to reach their goals. Speed gives the illusion that your peers will get more done in less time, but in the end, we are all together blind, searching for answers we may never quite reach.

Even the greatest thinkers and the names we see in textbooks, the names that are left behind as legends, have been slow thinkers. It is not the speed of thinking that finds the answers to mysteries in the world; it is more often the quality of thinking. The philosophy that drives the mind. The reason that the person is thinking.

While I may feel inadequate, incompetent, and very unintelligent when I see myself surrounded by peers who solve ten questions in five minutes while I am still on number two, time will tell what is more valuable. We each have different goals. Perhaps for my friend, speed will give her the tools to find a quick job with good pay. But for me, jobs are not enough. I have bigger goals. And these goals do not require fast thinking but slow and deliberate thought processes.

One day, I will look back on my younger self and wish I had not fretted so much about the different qualities that I had. I will tell myself, "Thank God that I was slow. Thank God it took me a long time to do things. If not, I would not have been able to digest and re-digest and re-digest the information I learned to become the person I am today. Even brilliant people can be slow. Pace has nothing to do with intelligence, and intelligence has nothing to do with success. It is the mind that drives the body to its goals, not solely the brain." And someday, I will believe this with all of my heart.

It was his first time.

The sky bloomed into an uncomfortably ripe purple and rose, spilling blue-black at the fringes. It looked down at him, a small man in a small car driving at a relatively small speed.

The steering wheel was sweaty in his hands. His pants stuck to his legs and his foot felt like a rock, sinking into the accelerator reluctantly.

Cars, in their ephemeral colors and youthful speeds, rushed by and by, as if he were still, a lone driver sitting alone. But stillness was an illusion; stagnation was simply impossible. He was moving, alright.

He broke the silence with a curse, soft, to himself. He pulled off to the side.

“Foolish,” he said, leaning his forehead carefully against the cool glass of his window. It landed with a soft thud. “Foolish.”

Contemplation. And then he started the car again and left through the next exit. The car veered reluctantly into the parking lot behind Wendy’s, where neglected soda bottles and burger wrappers danced quietly between the painted lines.

More contemplation ensued over a bite of sandwich and fries. People continued to slosh around him in their daily lives.

“Foolish,” he said while swallowing a dry lump of beef and bread with ketchup. He stared emptily at the vending machine at the opposite side of the cafeteria. The coke was cold in his hands, and even cooler washing down his throat.

“You’ll know when you see him.”

His thoughts flew back to the days splayed across various walls and streets, a montage of cardboard signs and tin cans and begs for donations and dirty rags. The money—of course it was worth the money.

As if suddenly hit with an idea, his hand reached for his pocket. Rummaging produced a haphazardly folded manila envelope, creased unevenly along the left. His dirt-crusted fingers unfolded the flap and pressed the envelope’s hips inwards to see the inner contents.


Crisp bills, freshly printed. Five hundred dollars. A down payment and a sign that they meant business.

Five hundred was enough. He could make good use of it, he knew. He could buy a gun. A knife. Set up a scheme, hire someone. Something. Or he could, hypothetically, run off with the money, since five hundred was certainly enough to find a hiding place. Enough to stay low for a bit.

At the very bottom of the envelope, illuminated in the eerie, sick-colored yellow of the envelope sat the piece of paper with two words. Stephen McLaughlin.

Stephen McLaughlin Stephen McLaughlin Stephen McLaughlin.

A bit of French fry got caught in his throat and he swallowed more coke, slowly and pensively. Stephen McLaughlin.

He imagined a white male in his forties, an architect that received little to no recognition, lived in an apartment, had a wife and one daughter who secretly smoked with her friends on the weekends. Slightly balding, protruding stomach. Raspy voice, good humor, a kindhearted smile. That kind of Stephen McLaughlin. He thought of this image hollowly.

This would be harder than he thought. Five hundred might not even be enough. Of course, they’d meant it to be an endorsement on the line—making it too easy would have just made it all a giveaway. Kill a man, get free money. No, it wasn’t as easy as that. You had to work for it. Nathan knew that. He knew that from the days behind that great wall of failure he’d hit in his twenties, when he was a tryhard teenager working for grades at school. School. He scoffed and a snort escaped his nose. His teeth sunk spitefully into the burger. School. People liked making respect and triumph sit with a raised chin on a tantalizingly high pedestal. Then when you got it, you realized it didn’t mean as much as you thought it did. School. He laughed bitterly.

He could start with phone books. Find all Stephen McLaughlins in the state.

But who knew where they came from? Perhaps it was international. Maybe Stephen McLaughlin wasn’t in New York. He could be in Washington. Five hundred would become a daily ration of $3 per day, then. Or what if Stephen McLaughlin was overseas, in China? Or Ireland?

The hamburger settled uneasily at the bottom of Nathan’s stomach. They hadn’t given him a due date. There was a reason for that. Nothing was easy when you made a deal with the devil. Signing up was the equivalent of writing down your own expiration date. It wasn’t a matter of staying alive—it was a matter of whether you were used to maximum capacity before your eventual demise. Nathan had signed up knowing this—he was very well in danger of being killed himself, but that meant very little. After a life of emptiness, he needed the million dollars.

By the time the soda cup fell into the garbage bin (lonely ice cubes rattling softly within), he was set on his next destination.

earthquakes are at once terrifying and beautiful; they speak of the fragility of even mother nature but they are so great, so powerful, so grandiose. we shiver at the idea of earthquakes, the beauty of soft soil crumbling into an even deeper abyss we are too afraid to venture into.
her fingers, brown and warm and welcoming, at once become claws, angry at us (for what reason? what have we done wrong?) and she swallows us, scratching from the inside outwards, raking in bodies and edifices and things in which we take pride. she swallows our pride. she eats our pride.
but in doing so she also swallows some of herself, letting trees and beautiful animals fall into the unidentified hellscape that is below, where perhaps fragments of buildings, leftover limbs, and misshapen animal carcasses all gather to have a tea party mourning for those above.
her children, the beauty which she has birthed (though prematurely--they are still attached to her) are taken back into her insides, where they will lay for the rest of eternity. why so? perhaps she is embarrassed of the creation she has made, and it is her way of bubbling up her anger and taking back some of the terrors she has caused, though inadvertently. she did not wish for this in the beginning. everything begins with a benign cause; catastrophe is never intended - it is only an effect of the element of existence. we cannot help but be impure and a curse to mother nature.

Opinions differ.

As individuals, this is a fundamental fact that we must all learn to accept. While I may believe A, you may believe B. Someone might believe C, a fusion of A and B. Or D. Or E. The spectrum of opinions is not a discrete scale; it is continuous and infinite (could we take a derivative?) (jokes).

We accumulate opinions as we grow. From our personal experiences to our familial background, our brains collect opinions, like bricks, and construct a home around us. These bricks create a shelter where we can feel safe. It is a starting point for us when we approach problems and understand the world. It becomes the place we visit most often.

And if we're not careful enough, it becomes a prison which we cannot escape.

Arguably, this constructed home of ours (formed by our opinions) is technically not a prison. We feel happy when we are inside; we feel safe and we feel protected. How is that a prison? What's wrong with staying there your entire life?

News flash: you are not the only person living in this world. There are a few million others. And unfortunately, not everyone lives where you do, within your constructed walls. Opinions differ. It is a fact we must all accept. Someone will, one day, tell you something that offends you or confuses you. Someone will challenge you to an argument. Opinions will clash. You will debate. You might lose an argument (but still go home convinced that you are right). Every step of your life, you might add or change a brick in your home. In fact, your home is constantly changing--but minutely. (Because the closer your home is to completion, the more difficult it is to replace bricks at command.)

Perhaps you are in a situation where you would like to convince another person of your opinions. I'm sure that many of us are familiar with this situation, even more so because of the upcoming presidential election. Everyone seems to, at one point or another, be arguing about presidential candidates. Conservatives and liberals clash; Internet arguments spike; comment threads on Facebook might get feisty. (Lol.)

What I notice in these situations is the idea that everyone, or at least the majority of people I have seen, watched, or read about, is arguing the wrong way.

Maybe wrong isn't the right word. Maybe "inefficient" is.

Anyways, what I see in these arguments is this picture: person A introduces their opinions (shows person B to their house). Person B observes, and reacts negatively. Person B shows person A their house. Person A observes, and person B reacts negatively. But then, when A and B argue, they repeat their own opinions again and again and again. Nothing is really said and done at the end of the argument. Essentially, person A is hiding inside of their home, hollering about what they believe, and person B is hiding inside of their home, hollering about what they believe. Person A still likes his home and Person B still likes his. It just ends up being a massive waste of time.

I have seen on CNN, for example, a "debate" between a Trump supporter and an anti-Trump speaker. The "debate" lasted for about ten minutes, but all that really happened was this: the anti-Trump speaker would repeat and rephrase "Trump is not civil and is rude and indecent," while the Trump supporter repeated and rephrased "Trump is doing this because people are attacking him."

Now, as a person whose opinions align more with the anti-Trump speaker, I felt very frustrated. "Trump is not civil," though certainly a valid statement (in my opinion), was in no way a good argument to bring forth to a Trump supporter. The anti-Trump speaker had severely miscalculated the art of debate. What had she done wrong?

Her first mistake was in speaking from her point of view. In essence, she was just hollering from inside her home at the other home quite far away. This is not a good tactic when debating one's opinion. Second of all, she considered her home the only home and then disrespected the Trump supporter for her opinions. This, too, is a terrible tactic. Personal emotions, unless used as a specific technique (such as pathos), should not be involved when trying to logically point out flaws and "win" a debate.

Perceiving your opinions as The Answer To The World will always end with some sort of violent argument. Being against Trump is one example. Some people see it as a no-brainer, and I agree that Trump might not be the best presidential candidate (but again, my opinion is irrelevant here. I'm just clearing my conscience by putting this out there lol). But when the topic is brought up for debate, there is no use in simply asserting that you are right. Of course you think you're right--that's why you're defending it! You have to take a step back and remember that even though you might believe that your opinion is the "right answer" for society, it is not really The Right Answer. It is an opinion, and there are others out there whether you like it or not.

Maybe your opponent's opinion is repulsive and disgusting in your point of view. Such instances do happen. But while you have the right to feel disgusted, it's not a great emotion to reveal when you're trying to get them to change their mind. As much as you hate it, you have to learn to respect the other person. You don't have to respect their opinion, but you certainly have to respect them.

Even further, you should walk inside of your opponent's house. This is because empathy is important. Why has the person has constructed such a house? Understand the facts and the opinions--the foundation, the reason. The progression of logic. Comprehend the situation fully--so much and so well that you almost fall for it. For a second, you might consider the idea that you are wrong.

But you will then snap back to your home. What did you learn in that other person's house? What makes your home better? It is not a person-to-person matter. Do not jump to the conclusion that your opponent is "bad" or "stupid" or "uncivil." From your understanding, form a careful list as to why the foundation of your opponent's building is weak.

Then comes the argument, when you are ready to bounce opinions back and forth. You're ready to change their mind, to open their eyes to what you believe is right. You're prepared and you know how they think. But where do you start? A lot of people think that you should start by showing your opponent your home. I, however, don't think so. Arguing is not about you. It is about them. You're giving them a tour of their home. How does this work? Well, if your opponent only believes that his house is right, there is no point in starting in your home. Doing so will only shut his ears from the very beginning. In order to convince them they may be wrong, you must start with your opponent.

For example, the existence of misogyny is often argued among some men and women. There is a tendency for men to be manipulative and aggressive and condescending to women, and yet another tendency for men to refuse to acknowledge such a history, believing that sexism is a myth. What do we do? Do we just argue that it exists? Do we list a bunch of instances? Hollering insults or calling all men stupid will make no progress when it comes to convincing some people that sexism exists. We must accept that our belief is not an Absolute Statement (it is a perception). We must first empathize and see where they are coming from (no matter how painful it is to do so). We must be calm and we must state observations, sneak in facts, and then come to a conclusion.

This, in my opinion, is what makes a good argument. Not the simple stating of opinions, but the complex weaving of empathy and attack, empathy and attack. Stating facts will not do as much as beginning with empathy will.

And so, the attitude that many people must fundamentally change before debating "efficiently" is that no matter how right you think you are, you must always accept that there is a possibility you are wrong and that your opinion is still just an opinion. In order to break someone else's home, you must break yours. You must be able to walk in and out of your home, even if you will likely spend most of your time within your walls.


--


Note: I make this post because I have been recently irked by the way some people have "debated" on certain topics. Please remember that while you may be "right," the other person won't really believe you if all you're going to say is "I'm right and you're stupid."

Disclaimer: This entire article is an opinion, lol.