the roots have to end somewhere

I liked Hell, I liked to go there alone relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone. The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then? I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come. Then nothing did, and no one.

“I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.”

I am a daughter of myself. I am born of my own dream. My dream sustains me. Seek no more philters than my own blood, do not retrace rivers for my source.

I halt. I shut my eyes. I remember things. I once knew better times. I was the arrow in motion, the flame, intoxication, flight itself. I dreamed impossible things. I visited out-of-the-way places.

We are travelers among other travelers in an outpost by the sea. We meet in transit, strange to each other, like birds of passage between a country and a country, and suffering from the same affliction of sleeplessness, we find each other in the night while others sleep. And between the languages you speak and the several I remember, we convene at the one we have in common, a language neither of us was born to. And we talk. We talk with our voices, and we talk with our bodies. And behind what we say, the ocean’s dark shoulders rise and fall all night, the planet’s massive wings ebbing and surging.

And it’s a relief, or a small death, to be standing, dressed in the simplicity of night, for once not crumpled by ecstasy, anticipation or senseless joy. Silently, you greet the ocean, this pliant metaphor for anything we feel at a given time. As of tonight, you ascribe to it no meaning, no truth, no character. But planted firmly in its moving sands, your mere presence is a question: is it true that everything will pass before your dry eyes, even this night stripped of tomorrow?

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying in its dark thorns. Still, there are good things in this world. It is dusk. It is the good darkness (…)

You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.

All things feel preordained, repeated. My body is numb. Without anticipation. I sit in the lobby of someone else’s potential, thinking it is my own. I go about my day convinced I am immortal.

“Where have I left my sweet childish heart?”

Expose yourself! Show me your tattooed spine and star-encrusted tongue! Admit your feral snarl, your bloody jaws concede your nature and reveal your dreams! each beast contains its god, all gods are dreams all dreams are true

“I understood that in the soul of a person–more correctly, in the essence of a person–there can arise an inner whirlwind of great strength, great and insurmountable. That natural whirlwind which made me lose my senses was somewhat like it. By drawing nearer, I understood what was really important –insurmountability. It sweeps away everything the human being could use in order to master it. It is a useless struggle. This whirlwind will subside by itself. If it does not, you must let it carry you to its end.”

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.