"it's been this way from the start/i need some rest/i'll go to sleep at a decent time/when i find something worth waking up for"
- "sleep", flatsound
It seems like I only come here whenever my head is swimming - no, floating - in the ocean of thoughts flooding my brain. And yet, the page always seems so daunting. It's like every single time I know I should come to write my feelings on these lines, my boy rejects the effort before it begins. Some part of me, unsurprisingly, enjoys the suffering induced by denying myself the animal instinct that inevitably overpowers me, and I find myself here in the end even if I know it's only a temporary fix.
Even when I don't write, the words come, and I'm not sure why they scare me or why I suffocate them before they have a chance to live. I think endlessly, often drowning in thoughts, feeling the weight pressing down on my shoulders. When I try to write like this, the thoughts are stilted, stale, unoriginal, yet I continue; we continue, even though our very existence is as unoriginal as these words. We go on and on, repetition coded into our bones. All desiring the same things: love, money, power, ***, to be wanted, to be known. We all want to leave a mark, yet we as a whole tread paths worn so well that the bones of the Earth can be seen peering out from beneath our tired, aching feet.
Even worse, we all have something to say, all want to be heard and remembered. I'm astutely aware that my words, my thoughts, my entire being is a shout that sounds like a whisper. We scream our lungs out, thinking we are trees falling in a forest with no one around, when in truth our words and prayers and heartbeats are all minuscule layers of a complex beat. Rather than the bang, we are the whimper, going out without a second thought.
The year 2015 has ended; I swore I'd end it in another journal, but I'm fickle and flighty and I want to start over. I always forget that each "start over" is code for giving up, letting go, closing the door - on what, I'm never sure, but the past never remains gone or forgotten, and I truly wonder why I continue spinning in familiar circles at times like this. I slept through the celebrations and the change in year. Lately, my energy is lacking, and I have little hope that things will change. Any optimism this soul held has vanished again, it seems. I'm not sure I've hit the lows of my past, but this exhaustion is taking more to come back from. The longer I'm left alone with myself, the more I feel my presence fade to the ghost-like state it appears in - flashes of sincerity, importance, solidity, only to become nothing again as the times change.
I wrote a bit online a few days ago, and one line came out that didn't surprise me, per say, but made sense in a way I wasn't consciously aware of: "Still, I can't help but feel that I'm yearning for some place I can never quite reach..." Maybe this is the exhaustion in my being right now? Though I am more happy than any other emotion, this feeling still presses in on me with a fierceness I didn't expect. I'm neither here nor there, and perhaps it's always been like this. My skin has always itched to fin somewhere I belong, somewhere that is home. I am terrified that this may never happen, terrified at the prospect of never truly feeling satisfied in or with my life. The horror of adulthood and the future looks like a city skyline, dark and foreboding despite the deceiving glimmers of life lighting up the windows.
It all comes to this, I think; I cannot know how things will turn out, if I will be happy, if things can change. A million small fears stem to this one, and I can only hope for some meaning, some lasting reason to exist. There are billions of lives, so what makes mine significant? Though this thought runs the risk of making me sound like the rest of foolish humanity, it's impossible not to feel this way. Do I matter at all? I believe in things like fate, but it's difficult to imagine that I have any effect on the paths Earth and humanity both take.
-a.c.
