Loatheletters

Funny how warmth will make you brave a chill.

Long enough for you to gain a certainty that you’ve been missing out on, short enough to leave you wanting, the gondola tips and sways.

Speaking till you blather, telling stories, guessing numbers, arguing about the REAL size of California king size beds— it’s new light with old hue, radiance outstripping the garish neon.

You spin in circles, head and all, and every time you re-open your eyes there’s new wonder in the background of something so brilliant you never thought you’d see it again, but have you seen it before?

It’s so easy to forget but so easy to misremember, and maybe it bears a reminder for later. That’s what this is for: capturing something exhilarating that loves to be tamed, and kept.

What if light was alive?

If she crept in through your window, while you were sleeping, and woke you, gently but without ambiguity?

If, before your alarms went off, before your thoughts intruded into your sleep-addled head, you opened your eyes to find the world on your own terms?

On her way to feed the plants, she doodles in the edges on all the shadows; the world is a colored coloring book, aglow after the dark.

You tell yourself that things are difficult.

In saying so, you make it so.

Not to say that things aren’t hard sometimes, because they can be, and maybe they are. But. In screaming your worth to the wind, you have only created a stronger wind.

Don’t get blown away, child. Your worth is worthwhile, though maybe in your blustering, you’ve lost it somehow.

Don’t.

Just remember that you are loved. And if you can’t figure out who you’re loved by?

Do it yourself, until they make themselves known again.

Remember kind words and warm hearts. It’s not a cliche to say that things will be ok, it’s survival, and it’s important, even when it feels naive.

It’s important. You’re important. You’re moonlight in darkness, maybe just a memory of the sun, but if you’re what light you have, be bright. Even if it’s JUST barely enough to illuminate your path, you’ll get somewhere.

I consider myself lucky, to be sleeping at 2 A.M.

My time becomes your time becomes our time, something familiar, but, thankfully, our own.

We tell ourselves that tonight we’ll sleep before (your) 5, and sometimes we do, for a time, but we keep waking because it doesn’t feel right to sleep without saying goodnight.

The hours are short, and not enough, but somehow they’re just enough to fill with too much. We look for for words, and find them, and forget them again by morning.

But we don’t forget how these nights and words made us feel.

The black and gray sat on my skin, but it colored my soul.

A call I couldn’t answer, a picture I couldn’t fully see; countless conversations without satisfactory answers to lingering questions.

And still…

Still, I learned who I was becoming, and who I wanted to continue to be. I chased happiness like starlight, and found it in caves where the people I’d grown up with never ventured.

When I tried to show them, they rolled their eyes and went back to their pointless fireside rituals, following tribal law that fell from the sky in ages past.

Tradition ate at me, even as I followed the smooth tunnels that it dug for me. Deviating little, I found myself miles away from the “beaten path”.

Blissful miles.

Ignorant miles.

I learned that hypocrisy was an unavoidable human condition, mixed with our soil, glowing with our fires, and keeping us up at night.

But as we discovered, we grew, and adapted. We couldn’t fix the world, but we could make it better for each other.

So we did.

Take the keys, take the matches.

Yellow gasoline seeds, a summer’s Spring, words whispering wildly on papyrus pages, a fire to keep you warm on nights when you only wish you’d had the presence of mind to burnt it all down.

Ink-stained hands, pointing like Hell’s Maestro into the underbrush, fire roaring to life five feet from your fingertips; controlled burning, flickering, serendipitously right where it’s supposed to be, even when it may not look that way.

There’s a logic; you wrote it. You bought it, you burnt it. You set it loose, breathing in red and orange song over everything black and white birthed.

Polarity, a pillar, a dichotomous design, Yin and Yang, yearning, through every word, syllable, note, rhyme, and reason you’ve thrown headlong into the blue and the black.

Lilting voices sing us off to sleep;

out here they are dying off, full speed.

Our mumbled prayers, half-hearted pleas,

are doing nothing for disease.

No news is good news

at the end of your rope.

If we say there is good news,

Burn the book.

It’s no good to you anymore, because you’ve added a character that wasn’t there before; you can’t turn a page without your unwritten footnotes burning your fingers.

Something so static shouldn’t change so much on a second reading, but all it took was a chapter, drifting on the soft Sunday air, and now the world is tinted in different colors. The characters are less Starshine, more Earth-bound, grimmer, somehow aware of the tragedies awaiting them.

The words are like molasses, sticking to the page, where they used to be a river, flowing, moving you to places you’d never been.

But once you’d been there, you wanted to bring someone along when you returned; they simply changed the sails to match their own and dove overboard, leaving you to sail the same waters on an unfamiliar wind.

They won’t even remember the title; The characters are forever strangers to them, friends you wanted to introduce, but it didn’t take.

You never died before this year, so don’t start now.

A house, a home, a hearth, a hope; these are the Good Futures you’d forfeit in the Bad.

But of us, *I* would become a ghost, walking like the walls don’t matter, a spirit of vengeance, hell-bent and bent by the hells I inherited.

Ask me who I’d haunt. In your unspoken will, leave me permission to stare into the glowing dark and hear you in words whispered by my sleepless muse.

The world doesn’t seem so bad, under a shade tree, as it did in your room.

Confined by walls and dictated by distance from power outlets, your house becomes haunted; your ghost relives memories and invents what-ifs to fill the restless air.

But outside…

Outside is just as quiet and still, at first listen. But just as your eyes adjust to darkness, your ears adjust to peace; you hear the many sounds of nature, and you are more aware of your impact in it. It feels like a crime to pad over to a soft spot in the grass and lay down, as if you’re a marching band at 3 A.M., but there’s no neighbors to yell at you, no angry faces in the trees, just the accepting lull of air that resumes once your movement ceases.

It’s not quite silent, but there’s no one yelling, either. The branches over your head are a woven tapestry for you to admire; even if they weren’t made for you, it’s easy to imagine they were. But a painting never moves with the wind like the leaves do, and in the backyard of your daily confusion, a missed masterpiece has been growing and changing and growing again.

It’s ok, you can experience it now.

You’re a new, unexplainable mountain to an ant, his confusion alien and impalpable, just like your pondering is to him. He’s just returned from a journey to the top of the nearby tree, hundreds of times larger than he could even dream of being, but you’re the strangest thing he’s seen all day.

Time still exists, but maybe only inside. Maybe here, existence is simply measured in breaths, steady, even, and green.

Oh, you’ve been stirring.

Just like Ophelia before you, I thought I could push you down to blackest depths, and your rot would drown with you.

But your arms outnumber your eyes, and you don’t need to see to grasp; yours is a strangled throne, breeding death and polyps.

Standing on one rock or another, it makes no difference. I need your telepathic hum to keep me disoriented, distracted, disabled and detracted. Just a brush of slime, a whiff of decay, and I’m your envoy to the dry, dry world.

Just keep me in your slumbering thoughts; dream of me, colored in reds and blacks, one more bitter appendage.

An anchor doesn’t have to be a weight.

For some, “grounded” is reassurance. For others, it’s an absence of flight.

An idle tug on daisy chains, loose but constricting purely by connection. The pale, flawless skin of your wrists couldn’t be any more chafed in your mind, your leash at least as beautiful as your wanderlusting eyes, but the one never considers the other.

Bliss is a word Shouted, silent, A radiance, exuberant, familiar, refreshing, Leaking in light rays From lips beaming, warm.

Your weight on them, Wakeful, sleeping, With nothing between you and yet, everything; Cheekbones in steady ache, Eyes closed, absorbing.

I hear the music, drifting off of tuneless pages, Careful scrawls, machine-printed rarities.

I realize that words are roots and vines, Bloodless veins, wrapped around worlds.

I follow threads and find myself tied to fictions, Glows and trees and scrolls and ink.