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A letter in the World
Listen. I am speaking to you and no one else. Wherever you are I am right here right now and I am speaking to you. I need you to know that my allegiance is waning. My headphones fill up my ears more than they ever have before and I am losing my imagination. Losing my sense of time. I am on my heel, my weight is shifting from one foot to the other. This is not good news for you, for us. Once you catch that image of my back it will only get smaller and smaller. Listen, I used to hold your body in slide guitars, chord progressions and warm dream-tinted lyrics. I used to keep your features secret in all the figures in my drawings, your beating heart in obscure news articles that read like fiction. I used to hide your skin slick and pure in the sting of the cold November air, the radiance of your gaze in the bundling of stars against the dark. But now my lungs are full of air, that deep breath you take before you jump over the edge, I'm holding it in my lungs right now. At this exact moment.
This world has me on my knees and I am forgetting how to be that person; the person who could wait for you forever. Maybe it's not just you, maybe it's me as well. Maybe our sense of timing is off, our focus is lacking. But more than likely it happened like this: You are hurting, there is a pain, a pain deep inside you that sounds more like your name than the one in your checkbook. If this pain had a title and someone spoke it aloud you would turn your head without thinking and stand at attention. You did well in school, you had your name in the local paper a few times and every now and then you appear to the world exactly as you should be, they see you exactly as you wish to be seen and the night fills itself with stars in approval. But through it all this there is that pain and it is with you at all times, even when you are not aware of it; it's always there looking out for you. It doesn't live in your stomach or in your left ear or down in your heart, it doesn't hover around your head in an eliptical orbit, this special pain of yours, you can trace it all the way down to where you begin. Within your cells that make you up and the atoms that live deeper. Deep within the clouds that are never seen all the way down to where it is most quiet, this special pain of yours lies motionless just for you.
This pain makes you exactly like me because you realize that you believe in me just as I believe in you. You continue your life the best you can, you meet interesting people and see interesting things, you find yourself at parties thrown by friends you hardly know. You glance up from the brim of a cocktail glass or a plastic cup and you catch a glimpse of the world quiet outside. Framed in curtains it's vague lights paint a gathering of opportunities and possibilities, bent slightly by the rain clinging to the window. The end of someone's sentence trails off and drops to the floor like lead and yours eyes are floating. You secretly share the greatest memory of your life with yourself and you smile. You are invincible because you believe in me. You believe in me and that is pain. Because all you can do is believe in me and all I can do is believe in you.
Soon you meet a man, men like you've met before, but this one talks wider than the others and makes himself a carpet beneath you. He has a name and it takes you longer than it should to learn it's spelling. Your parents like his paycheck and plastic smile and suddenly you find yourself considering him as a way of fitting in with the people and places around you. You think about yourself briefly and it scares you, but the years start to pile up and before you realize it you are the owner of a gold ring and small child. When you are around him the pain is screaming but you are so terrified to be alone that you make him the happiest man alive and your belief in me weakens. I settle into the land of the tooth fairy and the easter bunny.
I don't blame you if this is how it happened, if you are reading this buried neck deep in a life you never really expected and the pain is wailing inside right now as these sentences enter your eyes. It's okay. I understand. If I were better at life I might have tried this trick on for myself, but I'm curious, does this really banish the pain from your body completely? I know this kind of life might give you little time for thoughts, but when you are alone with yourself and the world is quiet in the background, does it really go away? Is that special pain ever really gone or have you just learned to tone it out?
I want to send a scream spinning across the equator, intersecting latitude and longitude at terrible speeds. This is my pain, I feel alone at all times. I can form sentences at will and I can learn all the backroads and shortcuts in my town, but I can never be less alone until I find you.
I feel old, I feel hollowed out, but mostly tired. I've wanted you in my life so very long ago, to have had you simmering inside of me all this time. By this point I would surely be superhuman. But I've waited and have been waiting for you still because I know that when it happens it will be good, but I'm not so sure that it will happen anymore. I am stuck in the world and it is manipulating my life in the wicked way it does. Today it is November 17th 2005 and right now my life is: uncashed checks, papercuts, empty beer bottles, uneven fingernails, near-sightedness, one set of keys, dead lightbulbs, pockets of change, giftcards, rechargable shaver, twelve mile drive to work. There are too many washing instructions on my labels, too many places to lose my eyeglasses, too many callers I don't recognize, too many creams to apply to my face. I am dripping in this world, my body has lost it's form. Would you even recognize me if you saw me? Energy bills and loose threads are are cascading down my face stealing away my tears, making me look complacent and tame. Don't you see? There are too many details and not enough mysterious! We don't have to live like this; we have a choice. We've always had a choice, but its been buried under all those details until you hardly know it's there anymore. Bring back that pain, call it up and let it define you, make you different again. We are becoming casualties, we are being hushed to sleep. That pain is there to wake us up. Wake Up! Wake Up! This is me and I am calling out to you.
I am thinking of two words in my head, if you are anywhere in the world right now and you can hear me speaking to you, then find me and give my words back to me. Here, in the land of the tooth fairy and the easter bunny, I'll be waiting.......
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