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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| "Property of..." Excerpts... A Eulogy...It is enough to know what human letters, and human books are for-- to be read once, boxed, shelved, or discarded; so petty the thoughts and feelings they contain. Because these promises age each day away from my fingertips, and new promises are the firstborn of the old-- and the old are understood and forgotten. And writers are born to write, and readers to read, and between these two may be found in the shadows of resolution, a balance of sorts... But I will remember what magazine I picked up and flipped through at the eve of your goodbyes, hopelessly searching for an outlet for pain. I will remember every exchange, every umbrella smile, every effervescent stare. Because you changed objects as you touched them, streets as you walked them, and they took on your name, and became yours... | | |
| Confessions of a Career Bridge-BurnerThe solitude is slowly wearing on me. I've always had someone, somewhere, and nothing is more shocking to a primadonna than the concept of being metaphysically alone. I guess the physics of career nomadism, coupled with a predisposition of arson-of-the-heart, has finally caught up with me. Loneliness is romantic in youth, but in the passage of time it is the hand winding the timepiece of regret.
I had a friend describe maintaining a long-distance relationship with me as "awkward." I thought, it would be. I call sporadically, she calls once or twice a decade. I suppose that qualifies as awkward.
In college, we wrote a list piece. Mine looked forward, bright eyed, toward an unsought and glistening future. Perhaps I could add, a half decade later, to "girls I've loved-- bridges I've burned." Life imparts a wisdom, or rather, an honesty in hindsight. An unfortunate clarity, drawn from the stubborn eyes of myopia, distilled from a brew of apathy, a schematic of a heart's labyrinth, the sole survivor of a capsized hope.
I'm undecided on this longing and its complications. Is it the bare mechanics of selfishness fully realized, or, suspect in the inner workings of a heart once reborn, a barometer for the soul itself?
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| I am getting too old for this crap.All our thoughts are triggered- there is nothing that spring solely from ourselves. It is the pinballing of our emotions and musings off the people we brush against every day, and all our feelings are contrived. We are nerve endings and blood pumps, and we have the pretense to believe that we are making an impact on the sea of humans ahead of us. The only impact we make is when our body hits the dirt. Yet, we have emotion, and it is our end-game to indulge it.
Is the strongest emotion hate or love, or both coincidentally, and do both come from the same place? And what is love- is it some adrenal gland that flips a switch in our heads when someone fits our personal forms for attractive, or is it a choice, or is it loyalty, or is it some sycophant emotion that seduces us, and crushes our skulls as we sleep? Love is the beginning of disillusionment, and hate is the distillation of all the above.
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| ChicagoThree lights, divided by three flights. It's night, and morning waits like an impatient lover, separated by four restless hours. There is a lonely romance in the silence, in the cold, a romance pregnant from wedlock, and she bars sleep from me till her story is borne by pen. I met my muse again, her footsteps heavy in the fog, two years since I've glimpsed her face. There is no remembrance in her eyes, as if we are meeting for the first time again. She haunts me, from city to city, and she calls me, and I have returned. She wanders the city streets solemn, and her eyes are gold.
And the words fall, for the first time, again. | | |
| AwakeAll-nighters are a singular experience. Restlessness boiled hard in coffee, steeped in heartburn, hurtled toward the sunrise. They crystallize the moment you're at your earthiest, immortalizing it. Caffeine becomes you, your heart throbbing between your ears. The back of your eyelids burn salty, your pupils the size of walnuts, staring, staring, staring at the ceiling. Your arms itch, your legs crawl in millipede chatters-- your covers are piled over your body in a stifling heap, and your legs poke sheepishly out the end. Your attention span has been reduced to the space between heartbeats, your life bound to the deadline day, and your night reversed.
But this is before work. You've damned yourself to a day of manic somnambulance, a day that passes with the slowness of the minute hand in a church service. So stand on bamboo legs in the wind of morning, and guard your eyes-- no, bar them-- imprison them, lest your mind escape through their yawning doors. And breathe, child-- step outside and breathe the crushing cold of morning, gulp the sunrise, grasp the fringes of life at daybreak, and do not let go. This is life-- in its awkwardness and its fervor, in its sickness, in its darkness.
And then, when the day shuts its eyes and expels its breath, lie down and shut your eys and smile, because you've won. You've earned sleep, the command of sleep. Now welcome it. | | |
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