love, read, write

listen:
i will be your first snowfall.
bits of my heart will float to your earth
in moments of fateful gravity,
blessing your world with my far-reaching arms.

the day i come to you i will be a swan of the weather
to cover you with the cold of my wings, drape my feathers
over your shoulders with grace and
deliberation, stitch my silent dreams to the
nape of your neck, my plumage your umbrella.

and when kingdom comes it will be me
who creates it for you in a gradient of blue to white,
warm to night, sharp to soft in the crevices of your body.
i’ll transform your world into a sky-floating palace
of plains and hills of simplistic beauty,
carve you fields of suspended, pure silence
full to the brim of your eyes.

as evening drifts near i’ll hang in the time-dense air
little ornaments of ivory. i’ll tuck into each crystal
lullabies of deer treading through blank slate
silent hand-made forests making
music with the muffled crinkles of their
weight in the snow and you will cry,
and i will blow on your cheeks;
it will be beautiful.

you will feel me shaping peace
into the spaces between your fingers,
splattering stars into the sky until they slip from its loose grasp
to create a gravity-orchestrated symphony of lights -

that will be me;
i’ll be that first snowfall.

no fall was ever truly
yours until the moment i came tearing the clouds apart
in winds full of ice stars,
when i kissed your nose in a burst of cold that you knew:
the world never existed until that moment.
no empire preceded;
no snowfall before me.

for years i lived with others,
in others, as others in a sense that my identity
was not mine unless there was someone else
upon which to see my reflection.
i had constantly sought mirrors in others’ reactions
to my every move and word as if alone,
my marks of life were too fragile to exist.
the reflections were often faulty, as others often are
when you are trying to see yourself through a remote lens
(i did not know that the identity which i wanted to see
was in fact right where i was, stitched into me)
so i lived, tormented and twisted with the gnarly veins of
discolored and misshapen refractions tightening themselves
into my eyes so that all i could see was the world
through a rotten net that i had let others sew onto me.

today i live alone.
the word still stings me like a faulty
claim about my identity, as if it is a negativity which i cannot afford,
but i now know better. because alone is a good thing,
alone in myself.
i live with myself, in myself,
as myself now, in a sense that my identity is solely mine
and i look to no other for any sort of reflection of my existence
because i stand before myself in a mirror
which i look through, alone,
and see the beauty that lies within and without me,
the person that i am when i do not look to others,
the identity which i create based upon myself
and my ideas. i look now to myself for my name,
a name which i can say with my own mouth,
create my own syllables,
and sing it out to the world without
waiting for a response or an echo.

00. preface

Babies are born crying. I don’t know much about biology or baby science or whatever it is, but it’s strange to me that from the moment we are birthed into this world, we begin with tears. It’s kind of funny, actually--the whole process of birth seems like an excruciating pain from beginning to end. There we are, watching footage of what people call “the miracle of creating another human” but it’s all bullshit because there’s nothing more uncomfortable than watching a shaky, timestamped-in-the-bottom-left-corner, low resolution video of your mother screaming from the most intense physical pain she will ever feel in her entire life while you emerge, bloody and bawling like there’s no tomorrow. Fleeting to and fro from any clear line of vision are a bunch of masked humans, trying to deal with the situation as calmly as possible so that no one dies. The beauty of birth.

Since my chaotic beginnings, I’ve contemplated the idea of existence quite a bit. To date I have reached no conclusions. The purpose that someone claims to find in their life seems only to be a sort of self-conceived phenomenon. There is, as far as my records show, no definitive answer to why anyone is alive or, for that matter, what we’re supposed to do during our unfortunate time here.

But when you’re young, things are new and exciting. There is this inherent element of amazement stitched to our core and whenever we see something new and inviting, that little ball of amazement bursts in our chests. As a child, you keep discovering these new, cool things in the materialistic world we’ve created for ourselves. For several years, the goods of life far outweigh the bad. Little hiccups in childhood friendships may cause remorse, but all tears can be quickly remedied with enough Lego Star Wars sets.

(You really can buy happiness for kids. I don’t care what the pseudo-optimists say.)

Things get old fast, though. If the first few years of life are devoted to discovering and appreciating the good sides of the materialistic world, the rest is filled with discovering throat-constricting expectations and constraints of society while also feeling remorse for not being able to satisfy our materialistic desires under this hyper-capitalist society designed for the already successful.

Emotional development is irrelevant. It occurs organically regardless of the societal structure. Interaction between people will probably never change--love, greed, anger, fear, sorrow, happiness. What matters is the frequency of each emotion and which emotion drives oneself to the framework of success designed by the type of civilization that one lives in.

But I diverge. My point? Life is cold and ruthless. The older you get, the more daunting and unavoidable that reality becomes.

In fact, I can simultaneously understand but also not understand why people believe in any kind of deity. It’s nice to lay the responsibility of life events on some sort of invisible but benevolent and sentient figure. That way, we can convince ourselves that the ruthless chance-happenings of life are somehow meant for the best. It’s actually incredibly smart that people have thought up this idea of religion. The basic framework for it is ingenious--no wonder it has such a large following. You lay off the blame and convince yourself everything’s going to be okay. Who’s not to sign up for that?

People like me, I guess. People who can’t do enough mind tricks to make themselves believe in something they cannot see; people who are too skeptical to put trust in an invisible figure; people who cannot make themselves join what has essentially become a cult following; people who are just too damn tired and sick of life to acknowledge any kind of greater purpose.

I used to think life was only cruel to me. That all of the bad things that happened to me were the acts of some sort of anti-God who wanted me to suffer as much as possible while I was alive. My thoughts weighed like heavy boulders digging into my back. On multiple occasions I met with unfortunate events that left me wondering why anything was worth doing. I felt isolated, like a little girl living alone on a deserted island, texting people through a flip-phone but knowing that I could never actually meet them because I was in an inherently different dimension.

I didn’t realize how universal this emotion was. Is life cruel or fair in giving everyone such crippling burdens?