The problem with people like me, people with the desperate need to disappear in to things purely for survival reasons, people who must give every last fiber of their being to things that perhaps are not worth the self that they’re giving, is that it cannot be sustained; it’s just not pragmatic at all. But the weight you bear from looking at yourself, I’m not even speaking of the image in the mirror, but looking at yourself mentally is so overwhelming that you cannot stand to be in your own presence to a point where you have accepted that your “self” has been dished out so carelessly you barely carry fragments of it anymore

I read once in a book, not a favorite book but one I related to in the most un-relatable way (if that makes sense), about this mathematician Kurt Godel who was obsessed with the fear of being poisoned so he refused to eat anything his wife hadn’t cooked. When his wife was hospitalized, his fear was so debilitating that he chose to starve himself to death instead of tackling it. The protagonist of the book continues to explain that Kurt lived with those Demons for 71 years until they finally got him. Understanding your crazy or your spiral or that itch under your skirt that just won’t stop burning no matter how much you scratch it, doesn’t make it less of a problem or an easy fix. Its there, as real as a chronic illness that’s slowly decaying your body from the inside out, worse even because you cannot explain it away. You can’t make people understand why you don’t have your **** together anymore or why its harder to balance things anymore or why you can’t clean you room everyday, or get out of bed, or just be there with your friends talking and laughing without wanting to disappear back in to the comfort of your shell that isn’t even comfortable anymore.

Your whole existence becomes one giant cursive that you’ve been trying to master but always ends up having too many unnecessary curves and scratches, and becomes ugly instead of graceful like your mind and your thoughts and this whole ******* paragraph.  

The problem with people like me is that we don’t know that we’re too much at times and too little when it counts and its exhausting being this- always.

I simply wish to fade in to oblivion
Like a sand castle washed away by the ocean
My essence scattered,
As if I was nothing but a speck of dust in the wind
Forgotten
Forever

We see
Evolution
As only the physical aspect
Of who or what we are
We see
Change
And we think growth
But growth should start with in
In the depth of our being
Beyond length or width
So that when eyes gaze upon us
An impression is left
Like the vast space above our head
With its stars and the moon and vacuum
An impression
A need
To know and to be touched
By a depth that is beyond explanation

So I’m sitting here, partially feeling the sun caress the side of my face between the shrubs that grew to be pretty enough not to be a nuisance, the heat weakened to a point that could be considered enjoyable as it can only be at 4 in the afternoon, watching people lost in their comfortable moments, listening to jazz being released from the speakers across the room. The half lit cigarette on my fingers burning away with every drag, better relaxing my oh so anxious mind like a lullaby heard with a drowsy mind.

It makes me think of all writers with broken souls; Virginia Woolf who said “You cannot find peace by avoiding life”  And Silvia Plath who questioned “Is there no way out of the mind?”  And I wonder if their peace came from flashes of instances like these, where they could only lose themselves in a crowed of other people’s lost moments and be able to revere in them.

I wake under the covers of plastic wrapped around my body; the sealed bag suffocating my lungs, turning them in to a world of silent aching. The piercing light from the windows penetrates my shelled eyes and I remember I don’t really need to breathe anymore. “Cadaver” my children call me. I have no other word to explain them as I know they have no other phrase to explain me. I am no longer inside the spectrum of names for in them laid an intimacy one could never hand to one so cold. I am the decimated clay in their hands but instead of them putting me back together, I marginalize myself with in them, with in their brains, under their probing hands, I live and I thrive, their minds my new home.

They hover over me, their touch a mixture of curiosity and displeasure as if their subconscious hadn’t yet adapted to my rough, cracked skin. My memories engulf me while I bear witness to the way my body comes apart, almost like silk underneath the scalpel, dancing the edge of the blade as gracefully as a ballerina.

‘I am a man’ I think to myself, ‘a man made in God’s image.’ 
 
However, the carved pieces of myself falling to the floor make me doubt my own thoughts. My senses have expired yet I wish to feel again, even when I’m peeled down to my bone, I wish to sense these curious hands upon me. I wish to feel my lungs fill with the city air, all the smoke and the stench of the sewers, the odor of the ground after a light drizzle, the sweat and breath of the people out on a stroll, I dream for it all to overwhelm my senses as it used to. My veins are empty of life and of blood, while my heart sits idle beneath my broken ribs, waiting for a ****** that will never come.

“Limbs aren’t meant to stay idle.” My father used to say while he was young and vibrant. Now I know his limbs, they too lay idle six feet under while they slowly rot away. Mine seem to be too battered to want the excitement of movement; under their nakedness lay all the mystery of Gods genius in its purest form.

They have left me here as an exhibition as though I had not been enough entertainment in life, as though my every waking moment had not been one roller coaster ride after the other, an emblem of unadulterated neglect from both God and man. And still I am forced to be situated on this stale bed day after yearning day until I am not enough to fill anything. But I suppose this is the true meaning of being a father, giving oneself so completely that at the very end of it, you are that something that dissipates in to the night air, shattered in to a million pieces but still knowing you will live on.

So you see
We're a parade of soft silky flesh
A mask on battered and broken bones
A plague on beauty
Parasites that drain the soul of the earth
Like we do with one another
Cherry lips covered in lethargy
******* the life out of the shoulders we lean on
And still
The wind whispers "prosper"
While the trees breath essence
Down our cracked throats
Building
And rebuilding
Like a potter mends his clay
We forget
In our blinding pride
We're only a fraction of the unrecognized particles of the universe

I saw, in her eyes
A sense of what could never be
While she wrote goodbye
Letters in her smiles
And when the sun rose
She'd let it hide the shadow
Clinging to her shoulders
Like a forgotten memory
On the surface,
So that all the world
Noticed was a mirage
Of pent up brilliance,
I saw, in her
A fear of dawn
And I told her
Close your eyes
So I won't have to see myself