the rage of achilles

Isn’t it tragic how easily and how often we forget the struggles of our mothers? From the way they carried us from a state nonexistence to a point where they endangered their own lives to bring us into the world. They even did it for our siblings, and would again if need be. They made sure our bottles were made and our bellies were full, and that we had warm beds to sleep in peacefully at night. And after all that pain we’ve caused them they still jump to pick us up with tears in their eyes when we’ve fallen and scraped our knees. And they do it again, and again, and again. A mother’s affection never really ends, despite our age. One might actually say it only grows stronger with time. Isn’t it tragic, then, that their care and nurturing somehow gets overlooked and undermined as we grow older?

But still they endure. Such is the nature of mothers.

Freezing rain

Somewhere, someone is writing away their pain, immersing themselves wholly in its bubbling toxins and looking for a way to make beauty out of the damned. Someone is penning out their sorrows so it can hurt less, but also so they also can feel more. Someone, somewhere, is writing the saddest words of their life; a poem that catches in your throat, a story masked as fiction where the character is really them and most of those things actually did happen. Someone out there is writing the best worst piece of emotionally charged emptiness, and somehow, in some way, it will resonate with you.

When you’re out fighting your demons for so long, is it in the slightest way possible that one day you yourself become one of them?

A friend of mine messaged me today. He actually once used to be a really close friend of mine. You know, he was just asking how I’ve been and how we haven’t talked for a while. He copy and pasted something from his email that he once sent me in February 2006. I barely recall what we were even talking about to be honest.

At the of his messaged, he wrote “lol, funny how things change as we grow up.”

My question is, is it? Is it funny, or is it really just a whole different kind of sad? Maybe ironic comes closest to funny, but it’s still not quite it.

It just takes me back to the whole notion of friends and what they say about only ever taking a handful if the people you know with you to the grave. To be honest, of the handful of people I wished to take with me to the end, I can’t think of anyone with whom relationships still remain intact enough to ever make it that far.

People change. But that’s just the start of it all. We all have different paths in life and sooner or later break off into our own ways. I’m in touch with a lot of people, yet at the same time, I’m not in touch with any of them.

I’m partially insensitive to this whole sentiment. It barely leaves a scratch on my surface. Not that it doesn’t matter to me, because it does, but I’ve just been conditioned otherwise than to wholly believe what people say they feel. I think, a lot of the time, I can speak better on behalf of what people actually feel opposed to what they say (or think) they feel.

People leave. And then, gradually, I started leaving people. Not because they’re not good enough, no. But more so because I’m convinced that the best I could possibly ever give to anyone is a shit load of disappointment.

I don’t know if things will ever be the same. They probably won’t. Because I’m not the same outgoing person who’s willing to go out on a limb for people. I just don’t have it in me. I figured I’d have to start living my own life at some point, so I did.

Now I’m just as cold as they never imagined I could be.

Maybe it is a little funny.

Lifeline

She watches a boy become a man, only to become a boy again. By the minute, their age difference changes, fluctuates, never holding steady long enough for a real answer. And yet, always steady at the same time. They are in constant motion. 

“You are immortal.” She never understands. He doesn’t mind. 

And with all this trying to figure things out, he tries to figure her out too, but not so fast or so well that he should ever run out of new discoveries. Keeping in mind that her laughter sounded warmer than a vinyl wafting softly through a summer evening, that her voice cooled his soul in ways cubes of ice clinking against the sides of a tall glass of iced tea never could. 

“I’ll make an ass out of myself,” he was certain. “Hell, I’ll do it again and again if it makes you laugh the way you do.”

It wasn’t so sweet a thing as it was endlessly greedy, for he would be the ultimate beneficiary of her laughter.

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Whether you’re willing to admit it or not, we all spend the majority of our lives, if not all of it, trying to figure things out. 

And then there are those few individuals who go against the odds to stick their hand into the darkness of the abyss to pull us right back out. There are no words for such an affection. No words at all.

Monochromatic melancholy

When extinguished, the flame of a candle lets out a quiet whimper, a thin wisp of smoke, which fades like a ghost’s breath as instantly as it appears. Great fires, on the other hand, leave behind billowing pillars of ashen clouds, which remain long after the fire has been tamed.

In the same way, there are certain people in our lives whose absences leave behind dark clouds that loom over the rest of our days. It is not particularly the sadness that returns on those days, rather the greatness of their memory which demands to be remembered.

It’s amazing sometimes just to look back and think about the way we met certain people in our lives, to be blessed with the way things happened the way they did. It blows my mind every time I think about it. :)