"'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."
-Alfred Tennyson
Truth-seeking
A noble pursuit in which we can always be engaged and with which no outside force can interfere.
Truth-telling
Best done selectively.
Flight of Fancy
Flight of fancy, I lost you somewhere between dream and reality.
I lost you, and the truth is not hard to see but, all too easily, we slip down into the valley where the mist parlays until it can rejoin the river.
I lost you, flight of fancy, when I lost hope, and in my despair I clipped my own wings.
‘Twas for the better, I think.
Pipe dreams and primal screams echo in the smoke from the campfire, worlds within worlds churning in the spaces between the spaces between the spaces.
I lost you but I never forgot how good it felt to have you, to hold you, to know you and feel connected to you there, in that special place we set aside for our selves; there, where we were one and alone but two and together; there.
The spaces eat me but the man remains in the spaces between the spaces between the spaces.
He talked to the walls and now... the walls talk.
Whispering in the midmorning sun: of lost love, of Icarus falling, Helios calling, Apollo singing of the scattered remains of a soaring flight of fancy.
Of the Lordly train of a gliding flight of fancy.
Of the growing pains of a rising flight of fancy.
Do you hear the sweet refrain of a dying flight of fancy?
Stained Glass
Dear windswept and lonely morning near the bay,
There are more bad than good memories where I came from and no desire to make memories where I’m going, but I persist.
The warmth of the sun presses gently where its light caresses but it does not console.
I was this creature, living and breathing, but that was then… what is this now, this statue collecting offerings while it crumbles to dust?
What is this now, in the temple of a lost ideal, surrounded by glass windows stained not by representations of holy things, but by the blood-spatter Rorschach tests of free association, telling the story only the moment wants to hear?
In either case the windows don’t let us see out.
Mark that.
Mark that even in the holiest sanctuary, the windows don’t let us see out.
I would rather stare out of darkness through a dirty window that sees the world by contrast than abide in a clean and well-lit symbol of a world I never cared to see, living in a darkness self-imposed by the blinding brilliance of a false light.
Transformational Ethics
To hide is not to escape.
The child runs from the broken home but never escapes the edifice it built in the mind.
By the time some of us figure out where it went wrong, we are haunted mansions.
We compartmentalized ourselves into locked rooms and secret spaces, and want everyone to believe we are naught more than what they see in the foyer.
(The darkest part of my self was just an empty room with a scared child huddled in the corner. Imagine the disappointment of anyone hoping to find a monster equal to themselves…)
Everyone else wants to belong but I just wanted to become. Trapped and traipsing through a rose-gilded field, I was caught in a net of thorns.
Transformational ethics scar the flesh and leave the mind wanting.
Who can grasp the mind?
To hide is not to escape.
Sweet ache. Neverending. Get used to it.
Sometimes I imagine us instead of just myself, an unbidden fantasy and a testimony to the impossibility of ever getting over you.
I imagine us, walking together along some shoreline or on some forest path.
I imagine comparing the flowers to you.
Is this flower beautiful? I would say.
I would hold it up and look over at you, as if you were the very metric of everything beautiful, because to me, you were.
A thousand such fantasies bloom and buzz and burst in my head wherever I go, all things I could have done when we were together, but never dreamed of until you were gone.
How could I feel such a way but be incapable of expressing it?
I really did feel it. I know because I still do, even though I don’t want to.
It’s the sort of pain that doesn’t work itself out. One just learns to bear the weight of it, even the shame of it.
There shouldn’t be shame, but there is. The shame of feeling as if we have been made a fool. The shame of feeling we were not, are not, and never will be worthy of love.
The shame of a raw testimony: I cannot make love work no matter how hard I try.
I feel love but I do not want to engage in the game of love.
Is it enough just to feel love even where we cannot express it?
It seems to me after all these years just another meaningless self-torment.
Yet the torture experienced in the aftermath of a love lost greatly outweighs the self-torment of love unpursued.
All the trite platitudes about chasing our dreams are no consolation to empty hands, to broken hearts, to minds exhausted from chasing phantoms in the haunted mansion.
Yet it is our home now. We cannot raze it to the ground without destroying the integrity of our own mind. So, knowing that the haunted mansion must outlive us, we make peace with our ghosts and our demons and attempt to transform them into something beautiful, because that was all they ever really wanted.
To the ephemera we create, we are the monsters.
"I know this love, that sovereign of hearts, that soul of our souls; yet it never cost me more than a kiss and twenty kicks in the ass. How could this beautiful cause produce in you an effect so abominable?" – Voltaire, Candide
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