Pho

Kisses that taste of pho and vanilla

On the good days

Whiskey and cinnamon on the bad

The scent of sweat mixed with weed mixed with vanilla

On the good

Not close enough to know on the bad

A touch soft, a breath in my ear, a kiss on my neck

If things are good

But when they aren’t

Ice

Cold

Stone

A glare into nothingness, stabs right to the gut

Left breathless

On every good

And on the bad

Evolution of Love's Criteria

Upon the empty slate of our lives is jotted down first and foremost, boldly and brilliantly, etched deeply:

Love.

Years pass. 

Time scribbles notes in the margins of that thick and endless page.

Words may fade, but cannot be erased without an upheaval and shaking off of our skins that change us at our very core.

Even then.  The eraser leaves dust.  Evidence will always remain.

As such, I contemplate the evolution of what love meant then (and means now) in my life.  I draw the parallel lines and I am comforted by the soothing, undeniable constants.

At five years old I saw the prince kiss Snow White as she lay still and cold, while her family watched and mourned their loss.  Without any expectation or agenda, he expressed his love to a woman he believed lost to this world.  He gave of himself as he said goodbye.

Offer your whole heart to me, even in the face of losing me and without promise of return.

At 31, I see love at the side of a hospital bed, never wavering in her faith that their life together is not over as long as she pushes on and carries him through his weakest moments.

Be my strength and faith when I've none of my own left.

At seven years old I smiled as Prince Eric couldn't shake the notion that his true love lived within this stranger who washed up to the shore of the seas he sailed.  As he held onto this inexplicable faith that he would find her and that she was closer than he could possibly imagine.  That his soul knew her soul so well that he cared for this woman and heard her song though she spoke no words.

Hear in my silence my soul singing to yours and have faith that I am still and will always remain me.

At 31 I see love at the side of a hospital bed, reading from her favorite books in a slow, patient tempo, relishing these last moments of a life together.

Love me until my very end.

At eight I watched Westley endlessly pursue Buttercup in order to rescue her from a man who could never love her as he did, however, putting her needs and desires first always, "as you wish" he says.

Believe that you are what I deserve but allow me my choice, no matter what, and know that I will do the same for you.  Know that I will see the distance you traverse, and that I will save my heart for you.

At 31 I see love at the side of a hospital bed, smiling and laughing and exuding positivity when the room is bleak and he is weary.

Help me hold onto a smile, even when the pain and fear is overwhelming.

At 12 I watched Fiona turn away from a prince and the promise of a life of riches and physical beauty, to walk into the arms of the ogre who lives in a swamp.  Love meaning so much more and holding so much more weight than all the superficial rewards of a life easily within her grasp.

Love me when I'm ugly and when it seems I have nothing to offer you, because my heart is worth the entire world when I offer it freely to you.

At 31 I see love at the side of a hospital bed, learning and listening and hearing and understanding the hard cold reality he cannot and making the choices for him she knows will be best for him, even when it isn't what she wants for herself.

Know what I need when I am unable to choose for myself, and have the unending strength to accept the choices you know I'd make if I had my own voice, even if the answers hurt.

At 25 I watched Hellboy toe the boundary of hell itself to bring Liz back, ready and willing to cross over if that's what it took to get her back home.

Fight through the fire for me, find me in the darkest depths to which I may be stolen to, be ready to sacrifice so that I may be restored.

At 31, I see love at the sides of hospital beds.

At 31, I can outline love for you.  And I can promise you that what love means to me is everything that I promise to offer in turn to you.

Que Sera Sera

Que sera sera

Forcing fates hand

It’s what I do.

Such a juxtaposition

Of legs that tremble under the weight of uncertainty

In my own abilities

Yet a poised determination 

That sets my soul aflame and lights the way as I forge my very own path

Disregard

For every cue that destiny whispers to my turned back

“What will be will be”

In those words 

A challenge

I rise

 I lift my head

Throw my shoulders back

Feigned valor

And I rage

“No.”

The echoes of a contrary spirit

Rattle the window panes

The floor tremulous

Quaking conviction

That simultaneously anchors me in this assuredness 

What I choose for me

Is what will be

Ignite

Ignite

You fragile thing

Burn

The world down with a breath

Upon

Which a hoarse scream rattles the windows of his soul

Endless

Will seem the hours of hollow mourning

Tomorrows

Promise respite and healing

But

In this darkest of todays

Remember

Lest your past knock on future’s door

Your

Aching and bleeding

Soul

So spattered with soot and ash

Is

And will remain always

Impervious

Sushi and Cigarettes

Gentle rain fills the air
Taste of bitter coffee
The taste of bitter life
Only brings about within my soul a craving
For the sweet, enamored, smooth and lush potential
Impregnated within all the days yet to come
A chill that gnaws on my fingers as hot exhalation dances upon the air before my face
All gentle reminders
I am alive
It is true that I stared into that abyss
And it could be that the abyss stared back into me
But only created anew within me
This unmatched desire, tenacity, urge, yearning
To occupy the gaping nothingness that threatened to swallow me whole
With any and every beautiful little wisp of life that I could create
To fill the abysmal and bleak
With the profound
To make this world of mine whole once more
Endeavoring to piece together all of the shards of this broken existence
To raise up
And finally allow the warm sunshine to dance through all of the colors of my soul
As I pull another drag and whisper into the air a smoky breath
A wordless acquiescence
That this intense drive for meaning
May not raise its weary head tomorrow
Or in a week
But insisting upon wrapping it tight, if only for now
That I embrace and hold fast to it, today
Comfort and acceptance in this realization
Discovery
An overpowering awareness
I am not the shape of this world I have been born into
I will never fit the contours cozily
Of a destiny not fashioned of my own free will
Rather, I too hold a pen
And it is my own strength and obstinacy
That will drive my hand
Shaky
At times
Steady so rarely
But a constant
The pen is in my hand
If I am a book
Then I am no longer to ignore passages simply so that I might tell a better story only to please those who sit beside me
My lines, my edges, my contours
Shapes of my intangible self
Me
A new creature to behold
After a bleak pause in my consciousness
After
Staring helplessly
Hopelessly
Straining to find beauty in a story that is outside the limits of my soul's ability to perceive
Reading those bleak nothings
Frantically
A voice gone hoarse and rasping
Over and over again, words not born of my own hand
Praying
Pronouncing and repeating
Each line of foreign text
Until my throat was raw
And my tongue burned
Live!
Live!
I begged
Until eventually it came to be
That I could no longer turn my gaze back into myself
Finding what was within to be repulsive
If that which was within me wasn't enough
For someone else
Until the truth shook me from my roots to my limbs to my leaves
Unsettling the air around me
The very universe folding in on itself for
Five minutes?
Ten?
Father Time slept as I opened the box
And it was within that breathless limbo that I understood
I can stitch together all that is within and all that is without
Fashion a new reality
One that the whole of existence can gaze upon once and only once
That pen is in my hand
And so
I choose sushi
I choose the silken hair of my children brushing past my cheek
A tempered mug of strong coffee
Inhaling the autumn wind as it billows through the open window on a long drive
Laughs shared with a dear friend
Hellos to strangers
Unprovoked smiles to passersby
To splash my own color upon the canvas of all those who venture near
To hungrily seek meaning
To mend and repair
Understand that all great works of literature were never jotted down in a mere moment
But rewritten and fussed over
Just as I now contemplate this life of my own
I open the box and in my hands I turn over once more this heavy truth that pervades the entirety of my being
A beautiful life will mean the staunch resolve to pen my very own lines
Onto the pages of what fate may have already written
To create anew
A story old as time
Make it my own
Bend the world around me to fit my benevolent truths and my joyous whims
Again and again
Each day
Even if it may be only one word today
On others an entire soliloquy
Insisting for all the tomorrows that will be
Upon amplifying
Ameliorating
As this pen and the power to do so shall always remain within my grasp
Such
Is my newfound hope

Don't Shut Up

(A disclaimer:

Nitroglycerin patches act on your heart.  An important organ.  Insulin does what your pancreas can’t.  An important organ.  Albuteral opens up the pathways to your lungs.  Important organs.

Psychotropic medications act on your brain.  The most important of them all.

People need these to balance their neurotransmitters.  Undeniably.  I am the very last person to claim a person doesn’t truly need their medication.)

How the humidity clings to your flesh when the storm seems impossibly and uncomfortably far away…

That’s what it’s like.  To experience depression trapped under the heavy blanket of psychiatric medications. 

Such shame, that the side effects listed have nothing on the actual experience.  Leads you to wonder if it’ll just take more?  Something else altogether?  Something else combined with what you’re on now?  Something stronger?  Electro convulsive therapy?

You see success in the advertisements, hear it touted by this friend or that who knows someone on that very same medication whose life was completely turned around by the pop of one pill, once daily…what they forget is the part where this regimen is followed “for the rest of their life”.  And what they forget is the part where it’s such a very unwelcome topic of conversation that the reality of taking this medication is seldom discussed in polite society.  Afterall… you’re taking that pill to blend in, to conform, to fit the mold of a well-adjusted human being.  Fall in line and keep your mouth shut, just like that medication is telling you to do.  Or, more accurately, what you’re told should happen once your strict treatment with such medication begins.

(Maybe I need…nothing at all?) 

(Quiet that voice, immediately.)

Those of us with a mental health diagnosis (or even more than one) are no strangers to what is called “self-medicating”.  Traditionally, this applies to behaviors such as alcohol use and abuse, illicit drugs and abuse of prescription medications.  All the things we do when we’re off our medications in order to control the barrage of symptoms that set our teeth on edge, that drown us in despair, that send us into tailspins of spending, sex, dangerous exhilaration.

The nasty truth of a psych med is this:

Sometimes the symptoms still lurk just beneath the surface of the fancy name printed on that pill bottle.  Sometimes the thin veil (meant to protect the world from us?  Meant to make us fit for the world?) is even worse than half a bottle of liquor to quiet the mind each night.  Sometimes that veil clings to the outlines of the beast that lurks behind every thought and every word spoken aloud, and hides the details only to those who look on.  But we’re trapped underneath.  We can still feel its hot breath on the back of our necks. Only now, we’re rendered silent.  If we’re lucky, it’s not strong enough to shut us up and we trust our doctors enough to speak. 

It’s a shame that many of us aren’t.  Self-medicating shifts to the unexpected, and it’s only when we’re willing to break through that false placidity to confront what’s happening that it we’re shaken up.

See, it’s hard to admit when something you swear is uplifting, your very joy in life, may be one more tool your clever, clever subconscious wields to control the chemical balance of your brain.

When a small voice from somewhere deep, deep, deep within whispers, “You’re doing it again.”

What?

“This is self-medicating.”

No it isn’t.  Not even close.  I’m normal now.

“Hardly.”

I’m a normal person contributing positively to society while I simultaneously follow my passion and calling in life.

“The joy you seek is nothing but a chemical solution.  A reach for endorphins when something other than your consciousness is willing to admit that you have absolutely no ability to make them rush all on your own.”

…

“You’ve flat-lined.  You’re flailing about in an exhausting pursuit of kick starting that emotional right hemisphere back into sweet life.  Your extremist is showing.  Tuck it back in, then I’ll believe you.”

Leads one to the question…is this solely chemical solution inappropriate for the spiritual problem we’re seeking to address?

Is this society we currently live in unable to support the notion that these pharmaceuticals should be a means to an end, and not the end itself?

A ladder to transcending our symptoms, even if it is a lifelong climb, used in tandem with quiet self reflections, journaling, fucking walks by a lake at five am when the rest of the world sleeps and we have no other choice but to listen to what our soul swears is the eye of the hurricane if we would just take a moment to pay attention?

The problem is this:

That would require a conversation.

That would require the radical notion that reaching out to those beside us struggling to take steps forward toward self-acceptance and self-love is necessary for the evolving of mankind away from the beastly and towards the transcendental godly.

The truth is that everyone’s experience of a psych med varies vastly, based on a wide variety of factors such as diagnoses, age, size, gender, environmental factors, diet, and so on.  What I’ve experienced is not what another knows of the same medication I took at noon today.  What I’ve experienced of the pill I take at 8pm is something someone who takes theirs at 8am may have no concept of.  What I write here may be foreign to a large number of those who take any dosage whatsoever of the same on my list.

But I can almost guarantee there’s others out there…

The pills we’re handed and the attitudes surrounding them are wildly successful at reaching the goal our culture has set that says we won’t have anything to say any longer about such nonsense as mental illness.  Someday, a myth.  Today, a myth?

Because they shut us up, the commercials, the furthering of a foul stigma all shut us up.  The reality is largely invisible to a world who turns its back on the ugly, beautiful truth of mental health.

Meanwhile, all we can do is wait and pray for the storm to break through.

A Piece of Prose

A moment of breathlessness stops time.

Love.  Death.  Such art.  Art itself.

Time freezes to allow the slow but all too quick consumption of an emotion so much larger than this life can possibly constrain.  Delicious, savored, devoured...all at once.

Almost as if...

The stars halt their ecstatic motion to gaze down upon the eruptions that destroy the bounds of the universe itself.  Time capsules planted, crystallized and frozen in details so very precise, the shapes, the outlines traced by the fingers of human consciousness to paint a picture in impossible detail.  As if to relive perfection again and again.  Such art.  Meant to steal away your awareness and melt away all that surrounds you.  The Earth beneath your feet to vanish into nothingness.

To cease to exist in the now.  Vanish from this timeline altogether, to remove your spirit away to an enveloping something "other than".  Defiance to be anchored by mankind's  deepest understanding of physics.

Loopholes in the concrete math.

To offer up your soul with a faith so blind as to experience that ethereal "other than".

To allow that very muse to aid you in the offering of love to another, to encapsulate them in your "other than".

Even in the darkest moments when agony and misery slice you to the bone, still eliminating the atmosphere and gravity that surrounds you.  Stealing away pieces of you and wrapping them so neatly to tuck away on a shelf you find yourself revisiting time after time, without time ticking away at all.  Those moments swell inside of you.  Grow limitless.

It's an exquisite art.

In the same way that a soft kiss is an art relished when the world stands perfectly still.

In the way that allowing a rattling of your soul to sound out as a fierce beat with which to dance along freely without shame.  To find in delicate prose those perfect and...breathless...moments in time.

In the swirls and lines of color to see and feel a yearning to relive all of those timeless and perfect "other than"s.

To hear in a gentle rhythm all of the whispered "goodbyes" and "hellos", so delicate and tender in the dark, in the eloquent release of time itself.

To experience and hold all of those macrocosms and whirling orbits of time lost again and again, stealing time, halting time. 

Such art.

Lost in seeing without seeing at all.  Gazing with eyes wide shut, examining the impeccable shake and rumble of a life truly lived.  To hold in your hand a life exalted beyond the physical dwelling of your human form, as a masterpiece hung on the walls of corridors winding through your very quintessence.   A mess of sound, fury; a sharply cornered and lined packed box so juxtaposed as to exist as a completely incomprehensible "other than".

To paint with words and pauses.  To speak in color and texture.  To see a hushed promise with ears and hear with subtle stare.

Every guttural cry and laugh and tear and smile, a proof of teeming, searing, seeping life.  Opening your core to the experience of illustrious "being".  Never JUST being, as to be, to truly exist in a revolving, spinning, twirling world pushing and pulling the high tides and low tides of each soul it creates from an energy indestructable...

Breathlessness.

Sacred and unfathomable.

Without even one word
Let alone each paragraph I've written
Able to capture its essence.