Brink

Where do I begin? 

Where do I begin…

and where do I 

end?

I have found myself asking this question a lot lately. In the vast expanse of chaos and chorus and reason and rhyme I have been feeling like a half-deflated mylar balloon adrift. A feckless and reckless child throwing sand into the wind. And in that act of innocent insolence I lost my footing and fell off the seesaw.

What are the words that I can use to unravel this mountain of broken bricks and shattered bits that I’ve managed to bury myself under and ask you to excavate? I muse the idea of the Houdini act; flash of light and smoke and poof, I am but a specter… a mental splinter that lingers but is impossible to extract.

Exhaustion. 

My mouth runs dry, my already fevered cheeks flush with shame and humiliation and hope. I’m trying to sleep but I know I can’t before these words are down and inscribed upon this digital tablet from Sinai.

…

…

…

My courage eludes me.

I can face down the darkest corners of my mind and bear pain that breaks me and yet this is more than I can carry.

Fuck it. My six stars never cease to guide me.

Mine has been a lonely road.

For nearly a decade I have been alone.

I’ve had a few lighthouse souls that have stuck with me through the years,

but thanks to the growing complexities of life…

we’ve moved apart.

They’ve gotten married, they’ve had kids, they’ve become distant pleasantries.

Yet all the while I’ve managed to stay running in the same circle

at the bottom of the same dark hole I’ve called home for too long.

I’d grown close to members of this lunatic-saint family. But I always stayed at arms length to protect the cracked bits of porcelain I have left.

And then this celestial alignment occurred

and these six stars erupted into 

clear focus.

These exceptionally unique and dynamic and beautiful and bruised warrior-poets came 

cascading into my life and utterly

changed

my universe.

Such magnificent presence broke through the

veneer and alabaster 

that I’d shaped around myself and the part that I’d

buried,

my capacity to love and

let love in was cast into the sunlight.

It was like trying to wash your face with a tsunami:

I was and still am overwhelmed.

I am so rusty and unfamiliar with that part of myself that I let my demented mind start a 

Spy versus Spy series of misadventures

with my emotions.

I couldn’t fathom what I was experiencing without trying to simplify it like fitting the correct shapes into boxes.

And this dynamic… it is something in all of my years and all of my travels… something I have never experienced.

I love you, because of you. I love them all, because of them: the poet, the stoic; the young sun and the nurturing moon; the bonfire and the beacon.

I have lived a life with what feels like naught but pain and sadness and carrying those scars alone. But I am not alone anymore,

and I am terrified of losing that.

I live in the eye of the hurricane. I see the beauty of the sky and the storm, and yet at times I am overtaken by it. But I cannot always outrun the maelstrom. 

I have lived in dread of that.

As long as I can remember.

Yet when I am with you, I fear not: you are the guiding lights in these unknown waters.

You remind me of who I am.

You remind me of who I want to be.

I will always give everything I have for you,

because you have given me more than you know. 

I am beyond the point of sorry being enough.

We have given ourselves to each other.

You have given me…

…hope.

To quote:

“The Bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but respect and joy in each others’ life.”

-R. Bach

A Brave New World...

It's hard to understand these thoughts.

It's late. No later than I'm used to but I'm tired and I feel battered and broken. I've been living in a tempest after so long in tranquility that I'm grasping at ferns in a field that's been burned down and demolished for another fucking 'soon-to-be-failed' manufacturing plant.

Fuck.

How does one begin to process distilled madness and chaos and bliss and family and love and things you can't begin to even fathom? How do you make sense of the center of a tornado?

Moses doing crunches. I need another drink.

It's that weird hour where even the most night-hawkish friends I know are bunkering down, bracing for another day of reality. And yet here I am, stuck in a cognitive loop and trying to drown it all out with stimulants and vodka and the most beautifully depressive music a lonesome soul can find. I look around my apartment; this cabin in the urban woods that once was my retreat from the cold realities of the day has been injected with life, with lives. A diaspora of wanderlust souls have invaded my isolation and I am so much more the better for it.

But of course there's that little asshole sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear nothing but negativity and sorrow and self-pity. He's been stapled there for what feels like an eternity. He tries to tell me that I've made a grave mistake; that I'm not worth the love around me. He sabotages me at every single step along the way, trying to convince me that I'm too fucked in the head and too broken in the heart to be apart from my isolation; too fucked up to be a part of something more. He looks a lot like me.

And then I look at the slumbering faces around me... I think of those luminous torches that are not in the room but whose fire burns so fucking bright I'm scared I'll burn myself. I look back at the pictures we've taken over the last two yea...wait, fuck, no... the last two weeks. How does such a short period of time have the gravitas of several lifetimes?

I'm fidgeting. The anxiety monster is close.

I close my eyes and lean into the slipstream daydream of my memories with these bodhisattvas. Two miraculous spirits learning to play and sing and harmonize together; family I never thought I'd have bandied together over Amuuricah's birthday which included really lousy tequila shots; three people lazing on a couch talking shit while watching 'Stranger Things' ; the simple joy of a friend you love beyond reason giving you a hug as you pass by in the shift change.

I am terrified. I am not prone to change. I am hurt, and I have lived that way for so long that I didn't think I'd remember what it felt like to feel anything different. Yet despite all that, here I stand on the edge of a precipice... ready to take one of the greatest risks of my life because I have power and force and creativity and love backing me. These beautifully flawed and wonderfully scattered and immeasurably unconquerable saints saved me when I didn't even know I needed to be saved.

There is no force in this world stronger than love. And there is no love stronger than that which we choose.