Sunday, February 5, 2012

Awake My Soul

Awake my soul, but with something else than pain and misery. It doesn’t matter if the lying and the cheating of the heart are to someone, something, somewhere or sometime; the bleeding still persists and the hard shell that so quickly tightens itself around poor experience is closed up and must be slowly broken down again from scratch. It is a heavy burden, like stones constantly brushed by cool water on the ocean floor that I imagine is filled with magical creatures and terrifying monsters. I wouldn’t know – the ocean scares me. It is too great and too deep of a void to grasp and thus to be comfortable with. My heart is lying on that ocean floor, among the rocks, and is being held down by the powerful waves that created happiness yesterday, fear this morning and sorrow this evening. I am not what I was those few and seemingly irrelevant hours ago that became so important with what was said and discovered and felt, and I wonder at the time that will pass between now and that point when things are a mirrored but still blurry image of what they were before I fell asleep last night.

I am lost. At a loss of words and pages and ideas and merely a shadow of the person I had started to become as everything unchanged itself and I was back to that place between icy fragments and crystal clear stars somewhere far away out in a deep I don’t know. The ink dots scream out to me. “Read me! Write me!” – I cannot any longer remember how to do either of those things and am staring at a word count that does not grow to the same rhythm and beat as it did before. It used to be a dance between me and the phrases; an eloquent piece of beauty that I felt confident and safe and certain in. Something that made me utterly calm and filled me to the brim with peace and serenity. The sound of my fingers typing still creates a soothing atmosphere as I look out to the glorious park I face and marvel at the elegance of the heavy leaves swaying in the wind to a song by Jamie Cullum in my head.

Unlike the ocean, trees comfort me. They are living testament to the eloquence of time; to growth and wonder and creation, that have been around for long enough to remember that time can heal all wounds. Great big bulks of green that seem to exist in utter unison with that other glorious force of beauty; the wind, with her many tales and memories blows smoothly out and in, in and out, and lets the leaflings enjoy themselves like children in a toy shop on Saturday afternoon. The sun touches lightly upon it all and crafts a stunning light that reminds me of picking strawberries off the side of the road right after school had ended in May. I remember it as a simpler time, although it probably wasn’t, when those heavy stones had not yet been let into my life. When it was all butterflies and scratched knees and dirty pants and smiling faces waiting for one miracle after the other because everything surrounding us was a miracle. The snail crawling steadily from one bush to the next; the drop at the tip of a leaf waiting persistently for a little more water so it could help feed the earth. Running quickly inside to eat and quicker even back to make more marvellous discoveries. It seems lost to me somehow, that time when all was well and nothing was worse than a boring day. I miss the simplicity and that gorgeous sensation of naïveté, which was wholeheartedly called for at age seven. Now I am almost twenty-one.

The sky has turned purple and blue, like my favourite something I cannot remember. I think of the time behind and the time ahead and pray to my own universe that I will somehow remain in this vacuum between the two. Paolo Coelho talks of losing faith; I think of losing myself. It isn’t a silly identity crisis or a case of pre-menstrual grieves. I believe this may be the wandering of my spirit from one space to another while it screams out in agony at the thought of being left away from its place within me, forced to walk lonely in the dark until it is swallowed by something that is surrounded by dust and mist and will not leave it be for its purpose of love and hope and creativity and strength and growth. Where am I? I was all those things sometime not too long ago – I can still remember it – but this never-ending stretch of unorganized time has left me like a pathetic piece of pudding at the end of a boring house-warming party while I know painfully well that I am my only solution.

I must write. Even if just a sentence a day. I must write. It is like that beautiful old man told me once in a continent far away from anything I sense or feel now, because he knew that if I stopped it would be the doom of myself and I would go tumbling down a hole and be left to rot among moulded rocks and cold, hard emptiness. There must be some grain, some essence however small, of what I was before everything became unchanged that can lift me back into the dome I once inhabited in piece with its climate. I have to re-discover that dome with the different eyes I now lay upon my reality and re-build it, re-decorate it, re-live it as I calmly breathe in and out like I used to. My breath tells me to relax while bolting down its highway from heart to vein, vein to heart, and screams out to me that the present is my now, and not my future nor my past.