Theodore Monifore

[castle]

🌆You're a natural 🌆

[Safe]

Jupiter 

I was fourteen When you told me That if I could hit The moon with a stone, Then -- and only then -- Would you love me.

Since then, i’ve Torn myself apart And roamed this barren earth For heights and pebbles To finally be the first man To land a stone on the moon.

I remember that Years ago, I used to sit over At the kitchen table That was held up By an old leather Bound book you Never, ever read.

I remember the Sound of rain, Pattering away Against the glass Of my past With droplets running Away and down Into the muddy depths, Disappearing Like every ounce of fear That was in my Glass heart -- Fragile and prone To shattering -- When you came home And sat beside me.

I remember the day you said “I love you.” And even though the words “I love you.” Must mean nothing to you now, “I love you.” Will always fill my head, make me safe. “I love you.” Is said far too much. “I love you.” Is nothing without explanation.

We stayed up every night Pouring our hearts out While drunk on sleep And stumbling over our words Like alcoholics, who knew -- Who saw -- what we wanted, But couldn’t construct a bridge to get there.

I loved you with everything. Everything I had, I gathered it in my arms, Rocked it back and forth In place of you because, You were hundreds Of miles away and I couldn’t feel I couldn’t see I couldn’t hold you.

But that meant nothing.

I know it meant nothing Because you -- not with the voice That melted migraines and Moved me to tears -- Told me that I “Should be careful what you say, Because I know things they don’t.” The words weren’t what hurt. But the statement did. The fact that I’d trusted… Trusted you Above all other people And you were willing To give away each And every Ounce Of Everything I’d confided In you about, Just because

Just because you’ve been neglected doesn’t mean you’ve been forgotten. Forgotten is when nobody thinks of you as their eyes drift closed, or take thirty minutes to sign into an email just to see what you’ve sent them.

All neglected means is unappreciated. Unappreciated by people who don’t matter - who never mattered. Who never got to have the patience to sit through an entire show just to see an ecstatic absorption over something trivial.

It matters to you, and I think that’s all that matters. It’s all that matters anymore, at least. You’ve been ignored and cast aside by most just because the world is too bland to realize it misses you.

Don’t ever try to convince yourself you’re unimportant. Never believe that if you were to slip away, a smile would become brighter on somebody’s face.

You’re so optimistic to the pessimistic but you don’t see yourself as an optimist but little do you know, deep down you’re the sun holding together a celestial mess.

“They’re the one.” has to be the biggest lie I’ve ever heard.

“The one” never existed to begin with. While humans have a thought process that enables but doesn’t require human interaction, we’ve formulated it within ourselves that it’s required to talk and interact with people.

We don’t like people, especially those who are prettier or smarter or kinder than we are. We like the idea of being with somebody. Naturally, you don’t just see somebody and get that airless, light feeling to your chest. That smile you’ve hated since the fourth grade doesn’t magically jump from the yearbook page to your face. You don’t magically get that sick feeling in your stomach as you realize you’re scared they’ll just walk past. No, most feeling and most emotion is in your head. If you convince yourself you hate a person, soon you’ll trick your body into feeling dead and exasperated whenever you hear their name, see their face, hear their voice. It’s the same with love. You can’t walk down a store aisle one day and suddenly fall head over heels in love with the clerk; no words. No interaction -- you don’t even know her name. Movies have ruined the whole experience. “Love at first sight” is more or less the kind way of saying, “Goddamn, I want you in my bed.” You have to know a person. You have to sit up late at night, giggling over some dumb picture they drew and you captioned. You have to find yourself staring off at a person and smiling ever so slightly -- just enough to be considered high -- because they said something that reminded you of that person. You have to spend hours, days, writing out something to ‘show everybody’ but inwardly gearing it towards one person. You have to feel vacant, empty, dissociated when they say nothing.

It’s all in your head.

You don’t have to do any of these things, but it’s all in the man made idea of love that we have to dedicate our lives to making that one person smile so wide their dimples show and they have no choice but to close their eyes and shake their head and just tell you that you’re dumb. We have to sell the fortunes we sold our souls to obtain and buy them the prettiest things, just for them to set their hands on your cheeks and tell you that you shouldn’t have. We know that, but we did anyway.

Humans are materialistic. We’re never really happy until their ‘significant’ other has ripped their heart out and with their last dying breath, offered it to them with shaky smiles and fading lights, tensing their entire body in anticipation just to remain upright as they lean down on one knee and pray to the man-made God above that the person they’ve dedicated their entire life to will accept the bleeding token that’s dripping through their fingertips like sand. That they’ll accept it and remain with them as long as they both shall live, whether it be the blink of a bled-out romance, or the eternity that it takes for them to kneel down and replace your heart back in your chest and sew the wound back shut.

It’s never a matter about what they do with it, however. Some people we just want a moment with to be held and loved, for them to hold the heart in their hands with some awestruck stare, holding it to the satin white garment of innocence they’ve always wore in your eyes. Sometimes, they only know how to kneel before you and rip their own out, set it in your fingertips and cry because it’s the only way they knew how to love you. It’s your job to hush them and carefully put it back, teach them how to cross the stitching and fix what they’ve done to themselves so they can do it to you. “Relationships” are awfully one sided, but Relationships work on an eye-level basis, where two people work together to find the light instead of leaving the other in the dark. Try to help each other to help themselves. Smile to help the other find happiness.

There is no I in love because I can’t do this by myself. I can’t piece together feeling like I belong to something, to somebody, when I’m simply standing in ethereal light of trying to understand, hurting to feel and thinking to forget. Sometimes we just need somebody to be there, not to buy things to convince each other we love them, but just to smile and lay blankets over the backs of chairs and make some place to get away. Love isn’t laying next to somebody and running your fingers over their skin and feeling them. Love is showing up at somebody’s house, not caring how you look because at that moment you just want to survive. Love is having somebody to turn to when things aren’t just hard anymore. Love isn’t something you fall into, love is something you slip into slowly like bath water that only has enough room for you to submerge yourself in and relax. Love is allowing yourself to melt into somebody else’s presence and breathe. Love isn’t developing alcoholic tendencies because you need to afford a ring. Love is putting a ring pop on a person’s hand and them crying because it’s just… perfect.

Through year after year of being tired, I think I’ve concluded that the old ‘Have you tried turning it off and back on again?’ trick has a human equivalent.

‘Go home and sleep, it’ll be better in the morning.’

Sleeping doesn’t solve the problem, it just postpones the solution for as long as you sleep, and if it really ever was a problem, you won’t be rested. You’ll panic yourself into exhaustion over the fact there’s not as much time as before. The clock ticks down your sanity as you scramble to gather your papers and cram them into the suitcase your great grandfather bought used, trying your best to buckle a belt and eat toast at the same time. You’ll drop your food but by god you won’t drop that suitcase because at that moment it isn’t about your health. It’s your work. Shoving past people on the bus, you couldn’t care less about the angry stares or the woman cursing at you. You just need a seat so the damned bus will move and you can go, try to beat that deadline by the one second it’ll take to feel accomplished.

That moment -- analyze the moment where the bread slipped from your hand and you decided it wasn’t important, shook your head and jumped that first stair onto the bus..

That was the moment where you subconsciously decided that you didn’t need to take care of yourself. Slowly, it would melt into you sitting up all night, frantically shuffling papers and scratching down numbers and letters that slipped your delirious thoughts. You’re working for a future and destroying the present, teeth worn down from gritting your jaw in anticipation, eyes dark enough to close forever as they glance from you to the paper and shake their head, hand it back and apologize.

You’ve forgotten how to yawn and learned how to sleep with your eyes open, pupils glazed over like sheets of ice on the road that killed him -- your only son. He could have grown to be something, but he was too tired to keep driving that night, eyelids pulled down by the last remains of an unforgettable night.

People are tired of walking down empty hallways and trying to interpret the glass paintings we call windows, moving faster than the fatigue will let us process. It takes you minutes sometimes to realize it’s raining, minutes to realize you ran that stoplight and the pretty blue lights in the corner of your eye, the pain of your forehead on a wet sheet of metal was the deputy trying to arrest you for speeding, failing to do his job because a tree stopped you first.

There comes a time, though, when you feel wide awake, unable to stop moving or thinking or staring at the ceiling because you know at any moment something is going to go wrong and then it-

It does. The movement you’ve been longing for all that time is a jump and then you freeze, eyes cast over to the phone before shaky hands pick up and you set it to your ear. You’re so awake that you can’t see, and for once a hush goes through your head at the soft spoken words of the same nurse who told you she’d take care of him.

You’re tired of the lies, you’re tired of the disappointment. You’re tired of that one person who you loved with everything you had and despite trying to make yourself better they feared you because you didn’t know how to talk and you didn’t know how to act but you hoped ‘Dear God, let them love me.’ And they didn’t because they were tired themselves. They were tired of worrying, they were tired of making their lips move, they were tired of existing.

They aren’t alone, but they don’t realize that because when you’ve reached that level of exhaustion, words become a dull blur and you feel like you have a headache because every sound makes you want to close your eyes and just sleep forever, or at least sleep until it’s gone. You don’t want to be touched, you don’t want to be held, you don’t want anybody to acknowledge you’re alive.

Sociality is primal Men versus men With teeth at their throat And claws at their chests Scratching through the outer shell Of their security and breaking down Everything that makes them feel safe; Secured in their world of knowing Where the canopy stops And the cold, hard-packed ground starts. Man is an animal Teeth bared at the first flash of competition Eyes narrowed with a sacrificial fire Burning deep like rituals That raise the spirits of warriors before. We hunt in packs Seclusive to our own people And cold to those with different howls, Different pelts and different homes. The lions eat the wolves, The wolves eat the cats, The cats eat the hawks, The hawks eat the mice. Everything narrows down To a bedrock principle: Even the insignificant want to live.