Apr 2017
There is something
Violent
About everyday life.
And no one talks about it.
Maybe they don't feel it too.
But sometimes I wonder if we weren't made
For higher stakes than this.
I wonder if everyone struggles with it like I do.
Something unspoken and ugly hides beneath everything
Pale and waiting.
At this point, it isn't even grief.
Just silence.
It gets into the cracks and crevices of all the mundane little moments of existence.
It is something
I have tried my whole life not to listen to.
It sounds
Like the opposite of the rain falling
Like the opposite of nature.
And it never stops.
It can't be banished
Only covered.
It has no time of day
No schedule to keep.
Sometimes all of a sudden, as I'm eating a meal in the quiet
This feeling will creep down my throat with it
And spread roots of emptiness inside my stomach.
It isn't loneliness.
Sometimes I call it that.
But it'sā worse, almost.
Loneliness has an object, a purpose. It fills a need.
This creates one.
It has no anchor and no reason
It only is
And always has been.
As a child I spent so much time alone
And sometimes I would speak into the silence
Just to be sure I still could.
I'd hear my voice, feel the vibrations of it.
I'd know I spoke.
But then a moment later, suddenly I was unsure.
Suddenly I couldn't tell if I'd said anything
Or only imagined speaking.
And maybe this shouldn't have woken the creeping fear in me that it did
But I would get to shouting before long
Tears streaming down my face
Unable to prove to myself that I existed.
I would run downstairs to my mother
And interrupt her at her work.
Full of chaos and terror
I'd cry on her shoulder
In relief
Finally reassured, by her bewildered look, that when I spoke it made a sound.
This feeling
Is that feeling.
I think maybe I created it
And it has whirred around me since childhood
Latching onto all the small tasks of life and endowing them with fear.
It is a tiredness, a heaviness, a soul deep uncertainty grinding away at me beneath the noise of the world.
Tonight it is louder than everything else
And I'm writing
To ask it to stop.
Violent
About everyday life.
And no one talks about it.
Maybe they don't feel it too.
But sometimes I wonder if we weren't made
For higher stakes than this.
I wonder if everyone struggles with it like I do.
Something unspoken and ugly hides beneath everything
Pale and waiting.
At this point, it isn't even grief.
Just silence.
It gets into the cracks and crevices of all the mundane little moments of existence.
It is something
I have tried my whole life not to listen to.
It sounds
Like the opposite of the rain falling
Like the opposite of nature.
And it never stops.
It can't be banished
Only covered.
It has no time of day
No schedule to keep.
Sometimes all of a sudden, as I'm eating a meal in the quiet
This feeling will creep down my throat with it
And spread roots of emptiness inside my stomach.
It isn't loneliness.
Sometimes I call it that.
But it'sā worse, almost.
Loneliness has an object, a purpose. It fills a need.
This creates one.
It has no anchor and no reason
It only is
And always has been.
As a child I spent so much time alone
And sometimes I would speak into the silence
Just to be sure I still could.
I'd hear my voice, feel the vibrations of it.
I'd know I spoke.
But then a moment later, suddenly I was unsure.
Suddenly I couldn't tell if I'd said anything
Or only imagined speaking.
And maybe this shouldn't have woken the creeping fear in me that it did
But I would get to shouting before long
Tears streaming down my face
Unable to prove to myself that I existed.
I would run downstairs to my mother
And interrupt her at her work.
Full of chaos and terror
I'd cry on her shoulder
In relief
Finally reassured, by her bewildered look, that when I spoke it made a sound.
This feeling
Is that feeling.
I think maybe I created it
And it has whirred around me since childhood
Latching onto all the small tasks of life and endowing them with fear.
It is a tiredness, a heaviness, a soul deep uncertainty grinding away at me beneath the noise of the world.
Tonight it is louder than everything else
And I'm writing
To ask it to stop.
