When buried deep in my head, I climb the ladder
Art by bluecapsicum
And yet again I arrive at the conclusion that I possess the wild desperation of an addict, drawn to the worst of humanity like the starving for their own bones. In the name of sucking the marrow out of life, I think I have been choking on the bone. However, Grief, like bone, bored deep into me, is boring to me. Too familiar. Too bloody. Too raw.
So I turn my attention to the windows that line my horizon. Of the white man that sits on the black plastic chair who downs brown bottles faster than the sea claiming entire ships, who blows gray clouds so thick that even the red eye of his cigarettes blur into nothing. Of the clockwork routine of the husband wife and their cook who eat dinner everyday at 6.30 pm, bathed in orange light that lines their square roof, as the cook watches his masters nibble food off a rotating marble circle that spins and spins faster than the clocks that clap their hands and tell me another day is at an end. Of the German Shepherd, probably named Max, Bruno or Rocky, who barks incessantly at invisible street dogs, a voice spearing through the dull din of a city battling its own hounds. Of the recently painted haunted house whose upper storey is eternally devoid of light, its forest garden waving its green mangoes that no one plucks except the invisible birds.
Somedays, under the blue, or through the unfurled blankets of clouds, I feel the unseen stars twinkling back at me. Someone once told me that the light I see is the light of the past, traveling through the infinitesimal dark, whose tiny pocket houses this earth, to land on my present eye. How light is the Universe's Time. What then, is the past, the present, the future, when everything is passing light?
“Let go let go,” the Universe’s been saying. It seems. To me. But I couldn't. Can’t. Don’t know how to. That’s why I struggle with faith. I cannot trust a God to save me.
What then of the shooting star, in the space between a moonrise and the sunset?
Sometimes, I cannot tell when a metaphor ends and life begins.
Now when I look up, I can, for a blessed moment, forget the fleet of troubles that lap at my feet. The blue in the sky is much unlike the blue in my heart. It is the brightest shade of cerulean I have seen in a while
.In this vein of thought, read this gentle offering of a poem: “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade” by Brad Aaron Modlin