Life Unlived
How can I be honest with myself when all goodness and badness attempt to blend into a ball of same colors and familiar smells and sensations? How am I to distinguish what sort of life I am meant to have from the life that I now believe that I live? Reality to me has diminished and some form of fantasy has crept into my life and has replaced all things in me with replicas of what really were mounted firmly in foundations of honor. The soil of doubt has grown seeds of content into my body; my mind has become deluded with hurt and with a lack and loss of hope for true meaning. My very future appears to be heading into a very bleak terrain where nothing grows and everything cries.
The valley of the shadow of death is near this place to me now. I hear weeping and screaming but I never get to see these hurt souls who silently march alongside with me. I never get to attempt to comfort nor do I get comfort from any others in these days. Occasionally I will bump into a lost soul such as mine and for a brief moment…we linger near each other…long enough to only see the milky white soulless eyes of each other…as if some sort of premature cataract has set in. As I part from the other, I only wish that I could help them but how can a blind man such as myself help another blind man? In honesty…I never truly do see these others who suffer…just apparitions of the past…the tormented souls of lives I once knew and perhaps friends that I once loved.
Then there are those who are oblivious to the shackles on their own hands. They walk in daylight, openly in bondage. Hey rub at their wrists but don’t see shackles. The roam inside their cells but see no bars. They are forced to do as they are told yet they feel free and secure. They are in some cases worse off than the lost wondering souls of the lost oasis that I wonder in. The water is dry in these parts though. Any life left lingers only for a period of time and then fatigue begat them all. But those who enslave their selves by the authority invested in evil…they doom their very individuality to captivity of the mind and of the heart.
And so in the end when people begin to imagine how the gloom in their past may have been the peaches and cream compared to their current allowance of gradual death, a new unsettling thought creeps in unaware of the captivated soul and it destroys them from inwardly and then out. Nothing tries to roam too close to investigate because business as usual is suspected forever more from those that once truly cared but now only hold the outer shell of daily trauma, empty of reality and life inside.
No man or woman has caressed me with pure love from the day of my inception. The tree’s wafted their greeting to me across the universal divide and I began to wonder if this was death. No longer could I think or breathe or imagine anything. I was attached to strings that I did not put on and I was doing things that I did not understand. My heart melted as if it was wax and I was altered beyond cognition. Who betrayed me worse them me?
The letters from my lover who is death have even stopped coming forward. Even death is a destination that my meaningless existence has captivated a dream to settle upon. Inside the rot that I call my heart I can feel the ice that runs through my veins and I know that neither death nor life has chosen me and the fence that I sat upon still holds me center frame. They say that you can’t forever straddle the continental divide and so I found a way to vanish into the spaces between existence where time burns us and where life destroys us.
Who invited you to speak in this very drafty day? The breeze pierces me and my center frame is disambiguated. My heart which was and yet is not has left me open to attack yet closed it is for love and comfort. What must a man do to end his suffering and stop the pain and learn to live again?
I sit and pat my shoulder…the shoulder of the younger me who sat crying one day many years ago. Travelers in my past have had familiar faces and the intent was to install hope into a hopeless future and a bleak world history. The younger me is asking if everything is going to be OK…of course it will be OK. Your future will be bright and full of hope. You will be rich and you will be loved. Do not worry young man…things will be good for you one day. You will lead many out of darkness kiddo. You are very special and talented.
Am I to be the blame for telling myself these things even if I know they are not true? Does it make me guilty to lie to myself…the frightened boy from the past who wants to believe that goodness can and does destroy bad things? Am I the villain of the story for being a liar when all I wanted to do was give a little hope and allow that to pass me through life without too much pain?
I can’t bear to see what I have become today. Alone and bitter and seeking nothing in particular. I use to have wants and needs…those things have been killed off slowly in increments by the tossing of the waves of an ever changing humanity and its desire to be greed filled on the upper levels of corrupt royalty. Everything has lost it’s true meaning minus humor which will forever more appear as it always has and it will always serve the purpose of healing wounds that nothing else can reach.
But even pure humor can’t heal the march of oppression upon humanity. The boots of those above us are being dug into our necks and ground down even further until our faces are smooshed into the mud. So what kind of thing can be done or said to those above us with power and control? What can we say to the oppressed?
