Intermittent Ennui

Sometimes stars align, sometimes they collide.

We file into the subway, rushing to get inside. Actually, file isn’t the right word, it is more like trample, with everyone trying to get into the cart as quickly as possible. The pushing, shoving are the only signs of awareness that there are people next to us.

Make a habit of uncertainty, wrap yourself in it like a towel after having slipped through while dancing carelessly on ice. You’ll find a strange comfort there in the inability to foresee what comes next. You’ll warm up to the challenge, look forward to the beacon that is tomorrow, and the next, and the next. This is how we go by living. Cherishing that which we don’t yet have as much as that which we have for certain. Because even that which we have can disappear or otherwise walk out on us tomorrow. Make a habit of being uncomfortable in any given situation. For if you are not able to readily adapt, you may join a category of people specifically created for such occasions: a memory.

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.

I am sea, you are sky, remembrance in every sigh

The lights are always on in your eyes. I hope no one ever has the audacity to turn them off.

Learn from the earth from her calms and from her storms. When to be still, when not to be. How to be loved and ignored and continue being everything.

Sometimes you want things to change so badly, you can’t even stand to be in the same room with the way things actually are.

Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.

I am restless. I am athirst for faraway things. My soul goes out in longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance.

Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky.

Let my doing nothing when I have nothing to do become untroubled in its depth of peace like the evening in the seashore when the water is silent.