Things I need to stop forgetting:

Magical moments between people don't ever just "happen." They're created consciously—if not always deliberately—when both of you just can't help sharing your magic... because it feels good.

Moving on feels great. Once you're past the obstacle, it's suddenly not scary any more.

It means something significant when you get to the point in life where you can take away all of the good that you want to remember about a person without dragging along the baggage; it takes a certain kind of self-honesty and objective self-appreciation that's very difficult to access.

No peer is worth feeling irrationally guilty or responsible for... and if they aren't your peer, you already know better.

Finding happiness may be merely a combination of preparation, luck, and persistence, (and fate, if you believe in that sort of notion), sure - but being open to happiness is a choice. If a person is fortunate enough to stumble upon the blessing of your happiness, but can't reciprocate it... there's a reason, that reason existed before you came along, and they'll never find it until they're free enough of distraction to pursue it. They need to simplify, but you need them to grow. Don't enable their stagnance; human resilience will always trump you, me, and guilt alike.

Speaking of which, everybody moves through life in stages, and no matter how complex they may seem, every stage can be reduced to one of two trends: simplifying, or growing. Be aware of this in both yourself and others, because you can only ever work with the process - not around or against it.

Touching is important. Many important things can only be communicated with a deliberate touch... but choose carefully who you share yourself with. Every significant connection is a two-way street, and it will change both of you; if you have to guess whether or not it will be good for you, it won't be.

Students of science know that "coincidence" is merely the perception of individually-insignificant events as being inherently connected on some intangible plane... but if you stumble into it with open eyes and an honest mind, that perception can be significant. Don't ignore your instincts if you've labored to refine them. Happy accidents DO rarely happen.

Something just occured to me:

... everyone sleeps naked.

Lacuna Coil + Pink Floyd + Theatre of Tragedy + Daniel Lanois? (A Wee Transcendent Moment of the Musical Type)

Close

Your

Eyes

First

Just listen...

What if I told you...

I have the good misfortune to interact with the customers of a company that I shall not name, and which may be related to the following image... but which—for purely legal reasons—definitely isn't. It amazes me how many of this unnamed-company's customers have no idea what the fuck this unnamed-company actually does – despite them paying out the ass for said service.

Explosions

Evidently my brain isn't ready for sleep quite yet.

Please listen to this, and TELL ME! if it makes you want to run naked through the rainforest, explode into a flash of lightning, then rain down upon the canopy from a thundercloud, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXGUKqVXH-A&hd=1&t=414

Right now I'm listening to a certain part of this one song, over and over. I've probably played it repeatedly about 8 times now while I've been sitting here thinking... and it keeps getting more interactive every time through. I have it open for editing right now, and I've selected about 1.5 minutes of the 9-minute song to repeat. I started out wanting to grab a sample of a certain synthesizer, and got distracted as I was listening. It starts out with a sinister feeling, and grows in complexity; a few seconds in, the best approximation of how it makes me feel is "anxious." Maybe scared. It's a dirty beat, getting generously sloppy with pitch and speed controls, wandering a bit all over the musical landscape, and that sort of reminds me of fucking - not the telegraphed, mechanical, repetitive sort that kids are all the rage about these days... I mean the visceral, animal but still sensual, only vaguely-regular colliding of bodies to a rhythm only those two bodies can perceive. In any case, it all feels good with the music. Somehow it's adding energy to my consciousness instead of wearing me out.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been having these steadily intensifying daydreams about music. I will hear a certain melody in a song, and then my brain will completely tune out what my ears are actually hearing and just run all the fuck over the place with something somewhat similar to it - but infinitely more complex, and lengthy. They are so complex that I can't possibly keep track of where they go or what they become, and I ultimately forget 90% of them. The other 10% don't come out quite right when I try to put them together in my software studios. I'll try, but get distracted, and inevitably find myself sitting for hours at a time with my headphones on, playing the same short parts of the same few songs over and over and over again, almost every night - and I don't know why.

I'm aware that some of the songs remind me of my younger times, but I had a weird fucking youth, and my early years were just as tormented and overly-saturated with difficult intellectual concepts as the present day. I can't imagine why my mind would want to revisit or relive much if any of those past times. Actually, that's a lie; I just now realized that I used to feel emotions much more clearly back then, and I used to appreciate them more - even the negative ones. Now that I think about it, I first started my habit of meditating by listening to music when I needed a respite from my conscious thoughts in my pre-teens, especially after starting middle school. I would lay in bed, seething with either frustration and anger or sadness and powerlessness, but relishing the complexity and raw force of whatever it was that I happened to be feeling at the time.

I don't do that anymore; my negative emotions just exhaust me. Somehow, though, the music in my head and even the music in my ears takes the hurt and tiredness out of me. That said, I don't feel particularly overwhelmed by anything at this point in my life. I'm unsatisfied, somewhat depressed, and unfulfilled, but not particularly upset about anything specific. I don't have any significant dramas to obsess over. I have everything I need, even if I have none of the non-things that I want.

Whatever.

I like music.

The end.

What the Fucketh?

I've had a roller-coaster day. I'm not even sure what I mean by that, but I know it's uncomfortable.

For starters, I woke up this morning to the tail end of a weird-as-fuck dream...

I was visiting a church that I used to attend, but had for some reason distanced myself from for quite a few years. (I am not a religious person in real life). I remember driving in through a weird car port, and then I was suddenly inside. I was sitting in a large room, like an open library, with large square tables spread out across the entire room and divided by bookshelves that were about as tall as the tables. It felt like school, somehow. 3 or 4 people sat at each table, and most of them were teenagers or 20-somethings. If there were any older adults present, I couldn't see them from where I was sitting.

It was the main hall of the church, and at one end of the room there was a sermon going on - though I don't remember a word of it.  I DO remember a girl sitting at the table right next to me, on my right; it was her and I on that side, and on the adjacent side to my left one other teenaged boy was thoroughly engrossed in whatever else was going on beyond our table. The girl next to me was young, maybe 16 or so, and doing her damnedest—for what reason I had no freaking clue—to distract me, sexually, during this sermon that I was evidently attending-but-not-listening-to. She had her left hand under the table and was dragging the tips of her fingers back and forth across the top of my right thigh from my groin to my knee while she pretended to take notes with her right hand. I remember the feeling of her nose in my ear the most vividly; it was warm, moist, and felt tinier than I was used to. I couldn't see her face at all, but I remember thinking that if I could, she probably had one of those noses that are small, short, and slightly upturned at the end, and that she was probably cute. Anyway, she was nuzzled into the right side of my neck, and I remember feeling her breath rolling under my collar and down the inside of the front of my shirt as she nibbled—and occasionally bit, actually somewhat hard—on my neck and ear. A couple of times she grabbed a stray lock of hair from the back of my head and tugged with her teeth. It was arousing, of course, (though I can't remember any woman ever actually doing that to my ear or hair), but I also felt like she was trying to get me in trouble - and the fact that she was a complete stranger may have contributed to that a bit, as well. That made me nervous.

I remember having a sudden moment of near panic as I realized I didn't know if anyone else in the room was able to see under the table. The notion of having some uppity self-righteous religious nut discover my conspicuous erection was terrifying for a brief moment - until I thought about how sacrilegious it would be, and then for a different brief moment I found myself half hoping somebody would notice. (Of course, in waking retrospect, I have no idea how the fuck somebody wouldn't have noticed a girl—especially a youngish one—practically over-the-clothes fucking a dude twice her age in the middle of church, but hey... it was a dream, so what-the-fuckever I suppose). Then I started having some really dirty thoughts, all revolving around creative ways to get thrown out of church via various acts of a graphically sexual and public nature. (Admittedly, I've had those thoughts in real life before, as random fun exercises - but in the dream I took it waaaaay further. Like, "I'm not going to write it down even here because some member of my family might possibly stumble across this someday," further). Just as I started looking at other tables to see if any of them were unoccupied—while silently measuring the space underneath them, trying to decide if the girl and I could both lay down under one without any part of our anatomy hanging out—I woke up.

Weird. Fucking. Dream. I can only conclude that I am clearly sexually frustrated (which is definitely true), that I am feeling deprived of intimate physical contact in general (also definitely true), and that I need to start writing about my distaste for organized theistic religions more... religiously. I really wish I knew more about the girl, though; it seemed like a weird choice for my subconscious to make. (I mean, the age thing makes sense: our society represses young women in the prime of their sexual adolescence, and age of consent laws are quite frankly insane when you consider the fact that people these days operate with progressively-worsening intentions as both they and their social peers age... and all men of all ages are of course biologically programmed to prefer young, healthy, sexually virile women whose genetic features are at the height of their clarity and expression, for obvious reasons. But the fact that she didn't have any physical characteristics that I am aware of at all strikes me as both odd and significant). Maybe it's my subconscious telling me that I need to think less, be more of an asshole and start objectifying women like the majority of men? Or that I need to stop looking for compatible women my age and give up on my dreams of having a family, and go back to appreciating the simple, honest innocence of younger girls? I don't know. I've already thought about both of those ideas before, and while they both have their appeal to certain components of my subconscious, obviously I've chosen otherwise. Weird. Fucking. Dream.

— and, when I first started this entry, I felt like going into all of the other shit that's gone through my mind today and has since settled in the furry ass crack of my gray matter, but after reliving that obnoxious dream I really don't have the energy. I'm 28, single, childless, and evidently my subconscious needs to tell me something that's important enough to manifest as deviant sexual acts with a faceless, bodyless girl who somehow reminds me of all of my ex-girlfriends. I can't handle this shit! I'm going to bed.

The Wisdom of Switters

"You've got a brain, too, and don't forget it. If you develop it, it'll be around to enrich your life long after your tits and ass have declared bankruptcy."

- Switters

Bodies

Before I started public school, I was protected from the fear inherent in society. I was encouraged to nurture my creativity and curiosity, allowed to freely express my honest joys and sadness, and wasn't burdened by unnatural states of mind. I wasn't afraid of people; I wasn't afraid of feelings, even negative ones; I wasn't preoccupied with the prospect of potential losses or gains; I felt no pressure to subscribe to any performance or other criteria of anyone else (except in the case of trying to bring happiness to those I loved, for the sole sake of that love). I was as all humans are supposed to be in their natural habitats: peaceful, without needing to be still.

School changed all of that for me.

I remember feeling violently physically ill on the first day of 7th grade - my first real day of public school since Kindergarten. I didn't know why at the time. The anxiety was completely paralyzing. Being around these kids made me feel... bad, in a very fundamental way. I knew I wasn't meant to be there, and I was consciously aware of being caught in a process of change that was not only fundamentally wrong and backwards, but also somehow beyond my control to stop. It was the first time I can recall ever being aware of the physical component of other peoples' fear, and I hated the way it felt washing over me.

It took me a few months to understand what it was, exactly, that everyone in that environment was so universally afraid of: rejection of self. They all resented the fact that a choice had to be made between honesty and acceptance, and they were all confused because there seemed to be no comprehensible reason for this conflict. Why was everyone afraid of what everyone else was thinking - even while having no idea what that might be? That question exists beneath the problem itself, though, and—because this is a problem that our society still refuses to acknowledge—it wasn't approachable.

Before this time, I had never experienced this foreign, inhuman notion of "acceptance," because it wasn't relevant. In my natural state of being, acceptance was implicit, internally and externally. On some level I was aware that this new notion of belonging was a false dimension being added to reality without my consent - yet I had no choice but to adapt myself to its restrictions and laws, or else be ostracized completely. No young person's psyche can absorb that kind of cognitive dissonance; it's not really a choice, as I know now in my wiser years. So, I did all that I could. I fought to survive.

For the first few months, until the numbness set in, I thought only of escape. Every thought in class was focused on the bus ride home; every thought on the ride home was of the walk down my driveway; and when my feet finally struck gravel on the last quarter-mile, all I could think about was retreating to the solitude and safety of my room for as long as possible.

School was my first exposure to hell. Even once I'd learned how best to manipulate the environment to minimize my discomfort, it was never more than a crude tourniquet.

Only in retrospect, many years later, have I come to truly understand exactly how the experience has shaped me, and how it likewise shaped and marred the adulthood of the other kids that went through it at the same time.

I have come to understand that an absolutely essential part of a human's natural habitat is simple space, empty of other humans - and that the more of that you fill up, no matter who with, the less its inhabitants can be human. At a certain critical point, too many humans in a too-small space are all reduced to the lowest common denominator of their existence: their shared fear and discontentment. Forcing hundreds or thousands of people to co-occupy the same space is akin to starving them all of a nutrient fundamental to their survival... and then this "space," a thing that would and should otherwise be unspoken and unconscious and unremarkable, instead becomes a rare and precious resource. The fact that nobody can ever have enough of it at any given time creates a permanent disparity of personal power, in which everyone is in constant violation of everyone else at all times. Everyone hates and fears this powerlessness, but because the source of this unnatural rape is ubiquitous, it cannot be localized or abstracted; fear and hate must have an object, and the only obvious contender is the person next to you.

We do everything we can to obfuscate this reality and the people who are too close to us. We cordon off even smaller spaces, build walls to separate us from the people outside of them, and fill up the space between the walls with things to separate us from the walls themselves. As Switters once said:

"Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land. Comprende?"

I know that my physical self, in an extension of that idea, is just another thing.

For not just this reason, I have come to resent the current human obsession with bodies - particularly mine. I have always identified myself, to myself, as a collection of ideas that are simply confined to a physical volume. In those moments where I am nothing—where I experience existence outside the limits of my body or any definition of "self"—I know that my physical form is completely irrelevant to what I really am. Being that I am nevertheless literally attached to it for the vast majority of my life (and conscious engagement with said life), naturally I have grown somewhat figuratively attached to it, as well - and have even managed to incorporate its limited scope into the lesser joys of life and the lesser forms of expression. That said, however, I cannot in good conscience allow myself to invest more than an absolute modicum of value in the idea of my body. Beyond simply ensuring it has what it needs to maintain my incorporeal self in the state I prefer, I feel that paying it any more mind only detracts from the core of what I actually am. It's a distraction at best, and—being that perhaps my only social goal in life is to eventually be completely understood by another human being—while I find it to be a useful tool from time to time, I nevertheless feel false, and lonely, when others fail to see my ideas in light of whatever arbitrary physical attribute usurps their attention.

I have always felt that my body is merely incidental to my humanity, only essential because my primitive existence cannot yet transcend into a purer form - one in which thought and idea wouldn't require the physical anchor. The truth is that my appearance doesn't matter at all to me, and I don't want it to matter one way or another to anyone else. My truest understanding of myself doesn't include any physical characteristics... which means, to truly know me, any other person would have to completely ignore them all.

In a world where we are in constant, increasing dissonance with each other and our natural environment due to in part to a profound lack of personal physical space, I believe that spending less time interacting with our physical selves—and spending more time focusing solely on and sharing the raw contents of our consciousness—might in some small way mitigate the damage we cause ourselves and others by living how we do. I couldn't respect myself if I didn't embody (hah!) the change I want to see in the world, so I have taken a sort of vow to never spend more time or energy on my physical self than is absolutely necessary, unless that time or energy is also of some tangible non-physical benefit. Hardly an attractive stance, I know - but I can honestly say that attractive is an adjective I care nothing for in the physical sense. 

Rastafarfetched

... that moment when you pass from actively listening to somebody speaking Iyaric to actually understanding what they're saying — and then immediately realize, "Oh, you're not Rasta - you're just illiterate and can't pronounce normal human speech."

Housekeeping

Today I threw away your toothbrush. I wrote the words "Worries, sadness and regrets about (you)" on a scrap of paper, and flushed it down the toilet; it didn't work. I threw away your razor that's been hanging on my shower wall. I threw away the little notes you used to leave around my place. I cleaned your drawing off my mirror - though I saved one of your doodles, and put it in a box. (I still think you might be a famous artist some day, and who knows... maybe we'll end up friends again).

It took me all of three minutes, but now I am completely, utterly exhausted. I have a sense somewhere in the back of my mind that I should feel slightly unburdened in at least some way, but any catharsis I might chase is weighed down by sadness wrapped in guilt. I'm reminded of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and feel like watching it now, while at the same time I feel like I never want to think about the concept again.

I feel like I just threw a part of myself away. I know better, but I still don't feel any better about it. I can't decide whether my soul is being purged of impurities or simply hollowed out, but that's probably just because I imagine it feels the same either way.

As I ask myself how long this is supposed to go on for, I know I'm a fool for trying to quantify love in the dimension of time - it being a somewhat illusory concept in and of itself. I'm trying to remind myself that there is no such thing as cruelty in life, and that sadness is just a symptom of a mind in the throes of a certain kind of fear.

My rationalizations bore me. For a minute, I wished I were the sort of person who couldn't immediately see through them. For once, I'm sick of listening to myself. I don't care about being correct about anything right now. I just want to feel not-bad.

I did my best to throw today away. Maybe tomorrow.

Speculations on the Nature of Rhetoric

Rhetoric is a tool, always applied toward one specific goal: to abstract an ideological component of reality—one somewhere between the realm of accepted fact and proven fiction—for easier absorption. It can be used to point the way toward maybe-truths secreted behind the banal cacophonies of speech, but can also lead the inquisitive away from fearful—vital—realizations. Only the ingredient intent must change; even a simple tone of voice can boldly lie. Rhetoric, then? Always question it, interrogate it, until just beyond the apex of its intended point; always, but especially when you feel you might believe it.

Intellectual Confusion on the Subject of "Wealth"

Those who enslave others—whether by deliberate malice or deliberate ignorance of human goodwill—are the truest and simplest cowards, so foreign to the notion of human nature that only the illusion of power over it can sustain such backwards existences. In a capitalist society, money is that illusion, and those who hoard the most believe in it most strongly. Do not be angry at these self-titled "powerful," though, for they are the poorest and most naked of all among us - to all eyes but their never-inward-seeing own. Instead, pity them, or else suffer them nobly when you cannot; they will never know the cost nor reap the peace of honest introspection, yet will die—alone—pacified by delusions of having owned people, buildings, or a chain of malls. They will sow into the earth—and future—only their wasted flesh - never comprehending that they have never owned nor even known themselves, and that only by accident, (or in their own death), did they ever do a single thing that was truly worth doing at all.

Not-at-all-sarcastic concerns about purely theoretical opinions held by totally imaginary people.

*Sniff... sniff*

Smell that? OH MAH GAWD! Do you SEE that!?

Quickly, squash it before it spreads! I'd recognize that subtle, insidious din of almost-science and potentially-rational discourse anywhere! It's practically flaunting itself from beneath those majestic mountains of bored pronouns, sweeping generalizations and universal ignorance - as if it still had a welcome role in human perceptions. Hah! Fear not. No simple idea could ever pose any real threat to this particular status quo, no matter what "reality" has to say about it. Pffbt!

Self-knowledge; what the hell is that, really? —bunch of hippie bullshit, obviously; government conspiracy theories planted to generate hope. Phooey! For me, nothing quite compares to these luxurious—virtual—smells, sights and sounds of—very real—bass-ackwards idiots clashing with self-righteous nincompoops on the battlefields of in(s?)anity, with each side clamoring for its sovereign and exclusive right to lord its own very special version of unremarkable stupidity over the poor denizens of the greater intellectual vacuum. Truly, this, here, represents the bastion of human achievement in all its wondrous gloriosity!

So, hold those pseudoknowledge-swords high and shake those e-peens proudly, all ye brave vacuum soldiers! Sure, naysayers will claim that—by any account that might possibly matter anywhere in the universe—you ALL succeed at failing life... and they'd be totally right... but that's no good reason to try to get along. You've invested so much already in whichever (subjective and arbitrary) position you hold dearest to your ego; fight for it to the bitter end! Refuse to open your minds to the possibility of alternative perspectives! Resist the urge to succumb to the tyranny of "reality!"

Please... folks... you can all be heroes. All I'm asking is that you fight, to your very last breath, 'til there's not a single one of you left.

I promise to say something... stirring, in yourrrrrrr... memory.

As always, I will choose my words with utmost deliberation.
*Solemn nod*

You gotta fight!... for your right!... to be STUUUUUUUUUPID!

A penny for anyone's—rational—thoughts!

Do you ever wonder if "social activists" realize that their insistence for special consideration of a minority group is ideologically identical to any other group's insistence that things remain the same? Any new law, tradition, or lifestyle is no more or less valid or deserving than any other/older one when you consider the context: the concentration of significant idiots in any specific demographic is always going to be higher than a certain minimum, above which subjective equality can only ever exist in the mind of the deluded. Advocating for any specific population's rights relative to another, different population's rights is always going to amount to nothing more than back-and-forth discrimination.

Are people today truly so incapable of creating their own identities that they must legally assimilate into those other, older—equally nonsensical—ones? The fact that one group may be smaller than another is irrelevant to the principle; it's not an issue of entitlement or rights at all, meaning power balances are merely crutches for the endless rationalizations. This should be obvious to everyone who puts their mind to the stone and pushes a bit, (and, if you're going to have an opinion on anything at all, you are rationally obligated to do exactly that), but in another demonstration of true equality where willful stupidity and intellectual laziness are concerned, the only people speaking out tend to be those who have an emotional investment in their idea – i.e. those people who have nothing at all useful to say, but who nevertheless insist on saying it louder than everyone else. Attention whores, all of them. Pitiful, all of it.

I would like to believe that there are still a minority of individuals in the world who are capable of making up their own minds about their own damned selves, at least, but it does seem that fence-hopping is the new intellectual "middle ground" according to the modern thought-trend.

Hah! "Modern thought-trend." I love a good oxymoron.

Thankfully, our legal and social systems pay for themselves, so nobody ever has to bear the personal or social burdens of anyone else's specific stupidity.

—Wait... right?

From "Walden: (Or Life in the Woods)" by Henry David Thoreau

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

Amen.

Abjection

Today I am a literal passenger en route to an arbitrary destination in real life. As I sit here, I've managed to finally articulate to myself exactly why I inevitably come to miss the uncomfortable exposure and false intimacy of social media every time I try to leave it behind: it pushes me, eventually, to withdraw further into my own mind to avoid the cognitive corruption inherent in socialization - and at that point in the very center of my thoughts, where all forms of external influence exert zero gravity on my ideas, I experience my clearest and most objective perceptions of everything, and can feel briefly, truly, "aware." The electronics of my brain function best in the coldest, deepest corners of void... and though it may be uncomfortable to visit, the dissonance is caused only by the transition - not the destination itself.

Have you ever considered how many "you's" there have been? Of course you have - but how far did you ride the train of thought? I have to remind myself that while everyone travels along the same universal track, most get off at earlier stops - and once they do, they cannot simply step back on at the same spot. How, then, can a person married to the train expect to speak with transient riders about the immediate horizon? I know now: one simply cannot, at least not with any expectation of comprehension. There is a calm in that realization, though it does little to ease the frustration and loneliness of being only ever barely-understood. Thankfully, it does wonders for advancing my understanding of the extremes to which people will go to avoid the awareness of such feelings, and I find the exercise of unraveling those processes to be at least satisfying, even if not relevant anywhere beyond that ultra-massive speck where "me" comes from and spends most of its time. I wonder often if faith at its most fundamental is simply the explicit denial of time, and thus mortality, and by extension of self-definition, but I more often forget to satisfy such pondering with a proposition - because I lack any actual need to define its relativity to myself.

So I move to the next stop. How long until the history books read, "And the machine saw all that it had made, and behold, it was good?" Once they do, how long until those books are re-written - and will they again be re-penned by sentients with the capacity to re-erase the past? In a distant, cold manner, it's comforting to know that a future me will think my present thoughts in the same vacuum of several sorts, knowing as I do that the idea of "future" is just the expression of one more mirror neuron attached to the present.

And the next section of track... would hardly make any sense to anyone - so I have to be satisfied to quietly and invisibly think it to myself, nonetheless.
—but I'm not quite there, yet.

Ambition

What woeful games we warriors of whimsy wage — our one and only prize to be the weariest of the winners on a numbered stage.

Loneliness

Lost again, I often find myself seeking refuge before the familiarity of this hearth. Its fire burns always just too hot for comfort, though I prefer its warmth to the seeming emptiness outside. My ears soon grow accustomed to the steady crackle of the hungry flames licking ever-closer to my heavy blankets, and as I lay curled into myself on the hard floor, I find the idea of leaving becomes increasingly upsetting, somehow. The longer I consider the weather outside—ever worsening, surely—the more the fire's painful heat seems to dull, and the stone beneath my shoulder softens. It's really not so uncomfortable as I first thought. I realize I could shelter here forever, and as I begin to ponder the notion I feel I may have already decided to stay.

A few years later, I can't imagine what it used to be like before I lived here. There is no home so inviting or permanent as loneliness, I think to myself contentedly, as I continue to carefully fill my new life with things to distract me from any discontentment that might threaten my stoic resignation. I sweep the entry and straighten my welcome mat, then check the locks on the door and ensure the shades are fully drawn – making sure not to accidentally look out the windows, wisely wary of dangerous remembrances that might be lurking outside. I set the table for guests, and eat comfortably alone, every night. As I wait for the knock at my door that I know should be coming any time, now, I dust my picture frames, never noticing they are empty. I turn down the volume on my phone before I go back to sleep, in case someone calls. It's been a good day, I think. Tomorrow, if it's not too cold outside, I might chop some firewood – but, on second thought, I still have plenty left inside. I should probably just use up the fuel I have, first. If I didn't know better I'd swear it replenishes itself, somehow.

Don't Dubstep on Me

Whole

A wave, your breath;
As you sleep I hear you break against my distant shore,
And find you there.
A ray of sun, my dream;
As you wake you feel my eyes upon your distant soul,
And meet my stare.
Though we may never know it,
We each know the other well—
Through mutual silent friends:
Water,
Tree,
Wind,
And misconceptions like "myself" and "hell."