Shower Thoughts
This collection of my sometimes manic, other times, kind of profound ramblings is something I hope will bring positivity into the world, even when I write about some not so positive things. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at bftgrave@gmail.com. Thank you and happy reading :)
Preface
When discussing strange ideas, we often find ourselves curled up in our glass houses of “fundamental truths,” unwilling, but more often too apathetic, to step outside and see the greater suburbia of glass houses we are all willfully inhabiting. So, I ask that when you read this work, that you give it a chance. Allow yourself to be transported away from your beautifully constructed home to a slightly more worn and remodeled glass house that I will paint for you; set aside the fact that painting a house made of glass is an awful idea. I hope that while you very likely will not find any absolute truth, nor suitable answers, you may at least enjoy the experience of a strange new perspective.
As She Lay Dying
She’s driving at 110 with her eyes closed and hits the center median. The left side of her car bounces off of it and both front tires go flat. She skids on her rims across four lanes of traffic to slam into the right shoulder, cutting yellow sparks as she goes.
She’s almost completely unharmed. Her crash was insignificant, just a fender-bender. She feels tiny, belittled. She screams and smashes everything in reach with her elbows and knees, strapped up tight in the wrecked car. The airbags deploy, making it difficult to get out. She tears at the seatbelt binding her arms and the padded white doors holding her trapped inside. Eventually, she makes it out.
There are two tourists waiting for her outside. Bystanders come to help. She is still screaming. Now sobbing too. She tried to kill herself, and it didn’t work.
She runs for the fence overlooking a 20-foot drop to some warehouse. She keeps screaming that she just wants to die as she struggles to climb the fence.
The first tourist runs over and pulls her down off the fence. The second is yelling “you won’t die, you’ll just break your legs and be in more pain.” She runs the other way to try and get hit by traffic.
The tourists follow. The second one stands in front of her and shouts “They’ll see you and stop, you’ll just cause another accident, you won’t die.”
She collapses in the grass and sobs as the tourists stand above her, conflicted.
They look at each other, then away. The police sirens sound on the opposite side of the highway, they’re close.
She hears them too and sprints. They can’t stop her, so the tourists just watch. She goes to a shorter ledge with a far steeper drop and sits at its edge just as the police cruiser arrives.
They negotiate with her as a second cruiser arrives to interview the tourists.
She says she would rather die than go back to the hospital where they all call her crazy.
The tourists shout over one another, guessing as to what they think is wrong with her.
The police pull her off the ledge and lay her down to sob on the asphalt.
The tourists go home.
She’s taken to the hospital.
She wakes up to a full arrangement of professionals sipping their coffees, crammed around her hospital bed. The doctor, the nurse, the police officer, the family lawyer, the janitor, the insurance agency rep, and the priest. Not a single flower in the bunch. She keeps her eyes closed.
They talk in loud whispers about the damage she’s caused and how she’ll pay for it. About how damaged she is and how much it will cost to fix her. About who she’s hurt and what they want for it. And all the other horrible things they know she doesn't need to hear. All while she lays there battered, pretending to be asleep.
When she finally opens her eyes, having heard all they have said about her, they turn mute. Looking down on her with sad eyes and forced smiles.
The only thing they’ll tell her is that they couldn’t reach her family, but they’re sure that they send their love.
Finally, the priest brings in another face to gawk at her in the already too cramped hospital room: the punitive face of God. He quotes to her Matthew 27: 3-4:
When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders.
‘I have sinned,’ he said, ‘for I have betrayed innocent blood.'
‘What is that to us?’ they replied. ‘That’s your responsibility.’
As she lay dying, the second tourist wakes up to celebrate his 21st birthday.
It’s very difficult to write objectively about an experience like this. And so, I won’t. For once, I’ll try to write completely subjectively, and in my own very real, very personal voice. Please forgive me my trespasses.
I need to begin with the disclaimer that I know nothing. I don’t know who she is, not even her name. I don’t know why she tried to kill herself or why I was there to see it. I don’t know what could have saved her. And most painful of all, I don’t know if she is safe, even now. I don’t think she is.
She reminded me of three different people I’ve seen. The girl in a wheelchair who spoke in our high school gym my sophomore year about how she attempted suicide, failed, and was grateful to be alive. Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as he pretends to swallow the pills the psychiatrists try and force him to take. And Emily, a girl I only saw briefly as we passed each other in the halls who later died driving 100 mph down Culver (the 50-mph main street in my home-town). I don't know anything about her, but she reminded me of all three of these people.
I also thought about who I was. Was I the one who saved that girl from her wrecked car, dragging her paralyzed body to a hospital and getting her the treatment she needed to go on to speak to young adults about suicide and how to seek help? Was I a part of the institution that condemned McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) to forced medication and eventually lobotomy for what I saw as his problem? Or was I just the stranger who crossed Emily’s path a long time ago, not really even noticing she existed till I found out that she didn’t anymore.
I felt guilty. Overwhelmingly guilty! To think that I had interjected what I thought was best for another individual. Who am I to say she hadn’t earned the right to kill herself. I certainly hadn’t done anything to earn the right to stop her.
I acted in selfishness. I persuaded her to stop, not because I thought her life was worth living, but because I didn’t want to watch her die. And so that’s what I was. A tourist; watching.
I now wonder if she saw me. The peak of my egotistical thinking, but I really do wonder if she could have seen me. Dazed and powerless. Known that the brief and horrible instance in which our lives crossed didn’t make me hate her, but instead well up with a kind of love for a stranger I still can’t explain. I don’t want to lose anyone. Even those people who’ve broken my heart. It’s deeply comforting to think that we might run into each other one day and see how much we’ve all grown. Maybe even share a laugh about how things were.
But I’ve already lost some of those people, and lost hope for that meeting. I couldn’t save her, not for my selfish reasons, nor for all those people in her life who deeply loved her (which there were, there always are). It isn’t my place to write much of her experience, and so I’m writing of my own. Of my fictional imagination of her world, and my progressive gratitude for having experienced that moment.
She was to me the truth of what had felt so glamorized and conditioned in my culture. The un-sexy reality of pain, and just how empty it is.
I empathized and got to honestly see where my empathy ended and sympathy began. I don’t understand her struggle, but I saw it, and for that I’m grateful.
To be alive, and to share this life with all of you is a blessing.
9/26/22
Where the Zinnias Grow
I’m at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens. It’s quite hot … everywhere I suppose. It’s beautiful, but I’m really getting bit up by these bugs.
I’m a rare food for them. A prey that lingers.
Just as the food of humans is docile and passive, I too am docile and passive to these mosquitos.
A tourist in their dirty village.
Like Gulliver, only with less sympathy.
I would smash them into a red mist for doing only what is natural in their own home.
How very un-American of me. Or perhaps very American, depending on your leanings.
My feet are dirty. Wearing sandals in the forest was a mistake. This is not the beach.
The forest is very comfortable relative to the boiling city. The canopy of trees and light breeze keep this place naturally cool.
But how many forests have we cut down to power our air conditioners? All for what? So, we wouldn’t have to get bit by a few mosquitos?
I took off my sandals, but I’m afraid to keep my feet on the ground. I fear being attacked, like some tiny worm or ant will tear into me out of revenge for the many atrocities I have knowingly and unknowingly committed upon its peoples.
To them, I am an enemy as old as time immemorial. Like Hades was to the ancient Greeks and Satan is to the modern Christians.
A dreadfully evil god, or perhaps just a force of nature, unaware of my own tragic footprint … from their perspective. I believe for something to be truly evil it must have within it a sliver of good. How else could it understand how to act so evilly?
So, am I evil, or just a force of nature? Fire does not regret what it burns. To burn is its nature, and if it should burn you, your own nature would see it put out.
A natural law so simple as to be the foundation of all life. To survive you must at least harm others. But there also exists a hidden truth most people refuse to acknowledge about life: To be comfortable, you must kill.
But what is comfortable is subjective, malleable even. Can you be comfortable with just living?
Such a life might make you wish you were dead.
How else could you feel any sense of progress in your life?
By wealth or at least the lack of poverty.
By health, or the means to be unburdened by its limitations.
By knowledge and the leisure to pursue it.
These are such basic comforts, but they all come at a lethal cost to others.
Life is not free and you can never repay all its costs. You are in infinite debt to the universe, but for what purpose?
“Just to exist.” But for all your existence you fret over this debt and scheme up ways to pay it off once and for all.
You say to yourself, “For this thing I have done, long after I am dead, I will be remembered as a positive force for change in the world!”
Only to be remembered for the absolute worst things you’ve ever done, and soon enough forgotten altogether.
For all our talk, we will never allow anyone to repay their debt in full.
Perhaps that is why it is called a “lease on life,” because you can never afford to own it.
Believe no one who tells you they have figured out some great grand purpose of it all.
For what purpose does the gardener plant Zinnias each year?
They grow from a seed in spring, bloom in summer, just to wilt and die through fall and winter.
But the gardener still plants them each year, simply to watch them grow.
7/29/22
Platitudes of The Broken Youth
We feel a deep urge to be unaware of our lives until forced by necessity to course correct it. And in those moments when we must make a change, if we feel inept to do so, we default to the worst of our coping mechanisms and pray that there is indeed a rock-bottom to bounce upward from.
We hope for a sedated death when it is too much of a bother to struggle for a hard-lived life.
We blindly fear the root of all meaning just to hopelessly commiserate under the guise of rooting out “what it all means”.
It’s not who we must become to bear the burden of our responsibilities we fear, but rather we fear the idea of responsibility itself.
Foolishness is a game we often play for others, but we also play it for ourselves. We feign ignorance to the ultimate cause of our troubles because life is not a game we wish to win.
We build our own paper dragons to slay and always keep a few in the back pocket just in case. The many very real and very hungry wolves feel tolerable under the shadow of such imaginary monsters.
We worry for others as a way to express our deepest worries of ourselves.
We protest against evil chiefly to be seen protesting against it.
We fear no one will grieve us when we are dead and yet it is the grief of others that motivates us not to die.
We are broken but beautiful. You just need a sense of humor to see it.
6/5/22
It Ends Here
Hurt people hurt people hurt people hurt people. Suffering snowballs through our lives as we hurt others when we are hurt, but so does kindness as we pass on the love that was shown to us. Loved people love people love people love people. This is not a justification for those who traumatize us, nor a reduction of the weight of kindness; It’s merely an observable pattern that we each have an influence over the flow of good and evil choices made by all people everywhere. However, the most beautiful thing about this underlying pattern is in its exceptions. Though there exists loved people who still hurt people, ingratitude is not a very exceptional quality in a human being. It is those hurt people who still manage to love that are the exceptional ones.
They burden themselves with the creation of what it means to love in the ways they were not shown and so must create the blueprints themselves. In doing so, they often fail and misfire their well-meaning intentions and decidedly take the failures to be further proof of their undeserving nature. But when they are successful, they find their inner demons quiet. In that moment of peace they have overcome their destiny to perpetuate the evil given to them and so lay to rest the angry ghosts of their traumas. We all live in a world saturated with pain, but with the means to transform what was a vicious cycle of hurt into an upward spiral of love. Though, this is much easier said than done, as all things worth doing are.
I believe this perspective is neither radical nor inapplicable to the rigid world of ‘regular people.’ In fact, it is in the world of ‘regular people’ where we have the greatest opportunity to maintain this perspective. Some hurts are too deep to ever be forgiven, and it is not our responsibility to forgive them all, but in a world of little explosions and unexcused meanness, this is the path to being better. Let us save our darker pains for a world where the abused children within us can be free to speak unashamed. Holding back your road rage for a scared student driver or honestly congratulating the person who got the promotion you were passed up for is more than enough. Showing love in some shape or form can transform a day that feels irredeemably bad into something meaningful. The magnitude of the kindness and the prior pain are irrelevant; It is in the practice of redeeming hurt for love that we learn to live gracefully.
We have all hurt and have been hurt in the various moments of our lives, and so cannot claim pure victimhood nor villainy. And yet, we always have the opportunity to exhibit this exceptionalness; To give love when it is least expected of us. There have been a million chances we can each recount before, and there will be a million more to come. Allow yourself to be defined by those moments where you are exceptionally loving and you will surely continue to be so. There is an end to hurting, it ends here.
4/24/22
A Very Punk Rock Drama
My name is Erin, and this is Adin. We were married for 16 years and happy for 8. We escaped religion and death but both found us in the end. We grew up together, in the middle of nowhere, and with nothing of our own. We were taught to believe that everything was for God, but we lived to see many of those around us use God to excuse their Greed. Now I know that that’s just the way cults work.
He was a radical and I was a fighter. I’d been sent to the reformation school at least a dozen times and nearly exiled a dozen more. But, since I came from one of the well-known families of the community, I was always 'forgiven' in the end and sent right back to hell. I thought I was doomed to be a prisoner by fortune for the rest of my life, at least until I met Adin that is. He gave me a way through I had not seen before. To burn the whole damn thing down from the inside and walk away from its ashes when the job was done. My love for him grew on pace with my hate for my home. I kept silent for those first eight years and together we worked our way through the ranks. Conspiring and splintering the foundations of the house; Till that day when we become the keepers of the community. In our very first moments of royalty, we smashed the whole sick dream to pieces. It was beautiful, the chaos and truth surging through our idyllic prison. We drank wine and enjoyed our great work coming to fruition.
Then we left the ashes, just as we had always planned to. This was the peak, the highest of our highs. But having done away with our mutual past, we searched in need of a future together. I thought we should seek out others like ourselves and work to set them free, but he wanted to enter the normal society and live as everyone else does. I listened to my heart and followed him. He became like the other men of the world and I like the other women. Perhaps it was good, but everything still felt false to me. I had a burning urge to set fires where there was wood. So in secret, I did. He walked away from our ‘indecent’ past and found work in the government. I thought it a strange job for a revolutionary, but he said he had always been a builder at heart, demolition was just half the job for him. I let time pass and took leave of my senses. Simple comforts are distracting.
Adin was successful and loved his work. I hated it. I hated even hearing about it. He would complain about the disagreers and anarchists as if he had never been one. As if he had forgotten why I loved him in the first place. When I tried to elicit empathy and showed him how his little revolutionaries were not so different from what he and I had been in our younger days, he took to the defense. He began to argue that perhaps some of the barbarisms we escaped from were ‘actually good for us, even if we didn’t like them.’ I slapped him, hoping I could beat the fool out of him. I will always be a fighter. He left and didn’t come back. I found out through some mutual associates that he had begun staying at the local church of God. He knew just how to infuriate me.
I joined in with the atheist, nihilist, anarchist coalition and led the young revolutionaries for some many years. Adin became a bishop. He and his flock disgusted me. They were the plague I had fought so long to cure. I only spoke to Adin once more before my death. My time lighting fires had burned my lungs and I found myself facing an early grave. He came to my hospital room and sat by my bedside. We didn’t say much. He said I had killed myself in my pursuit of idealities and I said that he had died long ago. We smiled then, amused by our long unspoken words and their mirror polish. He a hypocrite and I the martyr, though I was the revolutionary and he God’s follower. He left without offering me a blessing and I cried to know that he had not forgotten me so completely.
4/10/22
The Words of a Dead Friend
A Quora question by an anonymous poster:
"Is it just me or do you wish you were just dead at least 4 times a week, but then you’re glad you're still alive?"
A Quora response written by my friend Caleb:
Hey buddy,
I have felt like this my whole high school, college, and graduate years in California. I am a young man, who may seem to have things going for me at least in college, having youth on my side and my health, and a few good friends. But I get it, those moments of crippling meaninglessness and fear of the unknown. After years of struggling with depression I finally believe and have a faith in the unseen. I don't necessarily believe that my higher power is a literal God, but I want some meaning.
The covid crisis in the U.S-and pretty much the entire world-is crippling to many people, and with the solitude of those whose family members or loved ones have lost their lives, it's ok to be depressed and feel like disappearing from this grief-stricken world. Just remember that a boat continues to float even when surrounded by water, just as long as the water doesn’t get inside of it. We may be in the storm, but as long as we remember that we are protected by God at all times, the storm cannot get inside of us and we can continue to walk through.
I totally get it if you don't want to hear religion, but you gotta believe something. I am happy to be alive. I deal with mental illness but never the less I am glad I am here and there's no place I'd rather be until I've lived a full life and given everything I got to this world to make it a better place!
Stay blessed!
Caleb's life and death reveal a lot about what we show and what we don't. The Quora poster described near constant desires to be dead, but with an underlying gratitude for life nevertheless. This can be taken to mean that they are simply fickle in their attitude towards continuing their life, but it could also perhaps be seen as reflection of what they feel on an outer level versus what they feel deep in their heart. They may find a million reasons each day to say that life is not worth living, and yet in their heart they hope to be wrong-and have all but assumed that they must be wrong-as they continue to go on doing just that-living. In contrast to this, Caleb's response shows a very positive and loving exterior and yet the events that followed reveal a deep seed of misery. At first it confused me how he could write such a wonderful response only a short time before he passed, but after some more thought I've come to find some meaning in it. This 'irony' of sorts reminds me to never assume that there exists anyone who is without suffering, no matter how they portray themselves. We sometimes talk up our own happiness so much, hoping that if we can convince others of it, then perhaps we can convince ourselves (social media in a nutshell). This irony also reminds me to be more honest with those around me when it matters, even if it's inconvenient. Maybe no one will really listen, but maybe someone will. I don't believe we can save anyone, not really, but we can make it easier for them to save themselves.
Dear Caleb,
I miss you dearly and though we lost touch before you passed, know that I hold a great deal of love for you and always will. I know all too well what led you down the path you took, but I believe that your life and death will have had meaning. I remember the pain in you as well, not what everyone saw, but the real pain that you held onto under a mask of cruelty and shame. But I believe God will see you to an eternal heaven where perhaps one day I can see you again, happy and laughing as I have chosen to remember you.
Sincerely, your Friend.
2/14/2022
Wedding Toast
When do you peak? Was it in high school when you finally won that great big race or when you summoned the courage to ask out the most amazing person you’d ever met to go out on a date with you and they actually said yes? Was it on your 6th birthday when your parents pretended to have forgotten your birthday only to buy you a Lego set so big you couldn’t see over the top of the box? Was it the day you graduated from college and began the first day of your independent adult life and stepped into a world of new responsibilities, but with the wonderful knowledge that they were truly yours to be discovered and learned from?
That’s about as far as I’ve gotten in my life, but perhaps you have made it a bit farther and can see the pattern I’m trying to paint here. The idea of peaking at any one point in your life is a strange illusion that is painted for us due to not only our limited foresight, but by the one’s we love the most in our life.
When you’re just a child, you see your parents and all the adults around you driving big cars and going to their grown-up jobs and think to yourself how much better it would be if you could just grow up already and get a head start on all of that stuff. You finally work up the nerve to tell your parents that you absolutely refuse to go to preschool anymore because it’s absolutely beneath you. You’re ready to grow up and be like them: an adult. They give you the all too well-known speech about how “life only gets worse from here on,” how “you’ll understand when you get older and wish you had spent more time enjoying the age you are at right now,” and finally the good old “these are the best years of your life, trust me I know.”
Then you grow into a teenager and find yourself perpetually oppressed by your parents and their watchful gaze. You express your discontent with glaring silence and purposeful slights of disrespect as if to say, “I would be so much better off without you.” You complain to them how unbearable your life is and the aches your heart faces day in and out. How they could never understand. They snap and yell at you for your utter blindness. They tell you how much they love you, but how absolutely insane you sound. They tell you how much they envy your life and the freedoms you have open to you as a young adult growing into a more complete human being, still so malleable and gorgeously so. They tell you that you should be more grateful and aware because “these are the best years of your life, and if you don’t pay attention, then you’ll miss it.”
You grow into an adult of sorts. Getting ‘what passes for an education these days’ as your dad would say from an out of state college. Your parents visit twice a year, and you visit them just as often. You struggle to find your purpose in life and escape the existential burden through the many new liberties ripely available to you in your dirtbag college life. But when you sober up and visit your parents, they ask how you’ve been, and you confess to them how aimless and distraught you’ve been feeling these past couple years. They show you profound compassion, the likes of which you can tell come from real understanding and empathy, but still, they repeat to you that same slogan they always have. They explain to you that though it may seem confusing to you now, that this search for meaning and the adventures you will find yourself captivated by in its process are the most wonderful and beautiful experiences you will ever have. That “these are the best years of your life.”
Finding a groove and a routine in life you soon find love for another, but love for yourself is still as elusive as ever. You marry this other person and pass through the honeymoon, the fights, and the make-ups with a growing sense of unease and distrust in your own fate. You resent your parents a bit for the mistakes they made in raising you and blame them for their hand in making you an ‘inferior product’ of human reproduction, but still cannot help but love them even more, even if it is from a necessary distance. They see in you a nostalgic reflection of how far they have come from the first time they held you as a baby and what kind of people they had been then. They laugh a little to see you writhe and struggle for more control as you pass through the uncontrolled struggles of middle-aged life just as they had. And when you finally go to them as you always do to seek their wisdom and what do they tell you but that same old line! They tell you to look at the bright side, that you don’t have any kids and are still completely free to live your life just as you want to and even better have a wonderfully complex person to share it all with. They put the cherry on top and tell you to see that you are living the dream you have been dreaming for so many years now. That “these are the best years of your life.”
And when you have kids they’ll tell it to you again because at least the kids aren’t old enough to have stupid opinions and treat you with the kind of disrespect they had to deal with when you were a kid.
And when the kids do get older, they’ll tell it to you again because you’re beyond lucky that you still get to see them every single day and don’t have to deal with the return of the existential dread you thought you had left long behind in your college days come right back to you in the shape of empty nest syndrome or a mid-life crisis.
And when the kids move onto their own lives they’ll undoubtably say it to you again, “these are the best years of your life” because now you’ve done it all. These years ahead of you are for you to rejuvenate that life of yours that you had put on pause the day your children were born. And this time, you don’t have to eat shitty food or scrounge around for untrustworthy relationships. You are a real adult now with savings and a community of loving family and friends. You have the best of both worlds and it’s time to really enjoy it for what it’s worth.
When you finally retire and your parents, if they are still alive, move in with you because they can no longer take adequate care of themselves, you’ll ask them for a bit more wisdom and they’ll finally be stumped. It’s not that they don’t have the answers you’re looking for, but how you still haven’t gotten the picture blows their mind. At this point, you’re just a couple decades off their age, and their advice is probably just the same as yours if someone had asked you what you asked them.
They tell you “We’re sorry we’ve been pulling your leg this whole time, it’s just the way it goes.” You’re pretty confused undoubtably, but they settle the matter. “We’ve been lying to you about all this ‘best time of your life’ stuff. The truth is, it’s just what our parents told us every time we asked them those questions and so that’s what we told you. It helped us get through it and it seems like it has helped you too.”
You feel a bit shaken at this, but then again, you’ve gotten quite good at telling this lie over the years yourself, and so you kinda get it. The point was to be present. At all points in your life, you had the ability to choose how you saw your life and every time you were reassured that “these are the best years of your life,” you were being blinded to the future just long enough to see your present in a better light. It hurts to know that you needed blinders to drive straight, but so do beautiful horses and so maybe it wasn’t so bad a thing to have.
While it may be the case that the greatest moments of adulthood are merely cloudy reflections of things you felt as a child, the same things that brought you those feelings may not bring them to you now. A ring pop from your crush means a hell of a lot more when you're six than it does when you’re well into your thirties. For that matter, you come to find yourself enjoying impossibly strange activities such as furniture shopping and talking about whether the city is planning on creating a new parking lot in your neighborhood shopping center far more than you ever thought you could when you were a child. All the feelings you get are the same as the ones you got from those things you did as a child, but now they come with strange twists and flavors you had no ability to grasp back then. Though they often feel a bit duller, it’s not always true that the strength of a feeling is what’s most important. After all, just adding more salt to terribly seasoned food doesn’t make it taste any better.
And so perhaps the goal is simply to be more present and make whatever phase of our lives we exist in “the best years of our life,” because they are. They all are. Humans aren’t quite capable of internalizing that and so we need to compare and contrast this time from that to feel accomplished and driven, but we can still hold deep within our hearts, the truth of this great big, beautiful lie. When things are really hard and life feels impossible, we can acknowledge the great victories and heartbreaks we have lived through already and those to come to see that this impossible time is just one of many that you must struggle through and will one day reminisce of.
2/13/2022
Dancing at the Bus Stop
The music starts
I heat up and look around again
Away from everyone's eyes, to the flowers
They were there ten minutes ago, but I only notice them now
The sun shines on them bright
Their yellow centers look to me
The petals are winking
The wind takes a deep breath in, but doesn't blow out yet
It holds.
Everything still and the flowers so upright
I'm standing now
A cloud passes over the sun and there is shadow
The wind blows out and the sun comes back to the flowers
3/27/2022
Fake Fairy Tale
“Do you want to hear a story?”
Children loved to hear stories; It helps them fall asleep faster. Though perhaps that meant children actually hated hearing stories since they bored them so terribly, that they would rather give themselves to sleep just to escape having to hear more. An unknowable question, but it matters not. This is no ordinary story to put children to sleep. This story is complex and impossible to let fade into the far reaches of one’s mind.
Although, I should perhaps save it for another day. After all, he really does need some sleep. A shorter story then. For now.
“There was once a boy who loved to cry. He would cry every day, and no one could get him to stop. Not his mamma, nor his papa, though they were no longer there to try. He would only ever stop crying to start lying. He loved to lie so much that he would spend nights on end imagining his tall tales. They say that you could smell the scent of cooking coming from his hovel on those cold nights when he would lock himself away to scheme his next great big lie. Although, looking at his bone-thin body, most would assume he had never eaten a proper meal in his life.
But how proudly he would appear the next morning, when he had finally finished his lie and how bravely he would strut around the village telling all the world his magnificent new truth. Till one by one, crack and splinter would form in the wooden fabric. Till eventually the whole mess tumbled down upon his head, far too broken to be repaired. Then he would again start to cry. Right there in the middle of the square, between the horses’ water troughs and the smithy’s quenching water. He would melt away all his confidence and cry his hot tears into the little bodies of water. The boy would have gone on like this without end if not for the villagers’ kindness. They would gather around him and suddenly pretend they now believed his silly lies just to cheer him up. Though all knew it was fake, even the boy. But the kindness was true and so he would return to his hovel unbroken and begin again his long work to perfect a grand lie so complete, that even he could forget its untruthful origin.”
“Why would anyone cheer up a liar? They should just throw him out of the village!”
“Settle down dummy. I haven’t even gotten to the good part of the story yet. Don’t go jumping to any ideas. And that said, no jumping! Lay back down right now or I’ll be going to sleeping without finishing this story for you.”
“But—Oh aight! Finish the stupid story already.”
“Thank you. Now where was I? Ah yes, the plague.”
“Plague—?”
“Yes plague, now listen! One day the boy’s village was hit with a deadly plague. Not just his village, but the whole world in fact. But the boy knew nothing of all that. He had only ever seen his little village and that was all he had ever cared for. He feebly walked through his little world to see the state of it all. He saw kindness and hope burn bright against the tide of death at its shores, but their fire was burning too hot. They would not have survived this long if it didn’t burn as hot as it did, but even he—a child—could see clearly, the lamp’s oil was running shallow and now the wick had begun to burn.
He too was quite sick, and especially feeble for how he had been starved all his life, but he did not cry this time. He consumed it. He filled himself full of all the reality he could take into himself and left to his hovel with all he had seen and felt. There he cooked a feast. A masterpiece of illusion. He had created a new existence; one anyone could experience if only they heard his story. He took his creation and went to the village. Standing upon the village crier’s box, he spread his great lie. All knew it was a lie, but there were no holes this time. No splinters nor cracks.
A lie so complete that it became something more. A choice.
He offered his people the chance to see all the world anew. To relieve themselves of their highest held assumptions and humble themselves to a new reality, false and untrue, but no more so than the one they now so wearily held onto. To free themselves of their plague. Many took the chance and followed him into this new world, and many still stayed behind.”
“So, then where'd all these people who followed the boy go?”
“Nowhere really. But it's just a fairy tale; It's all symbolism and stuff.”
“So, what's the point of it then?”
“To share an important lesson!”
“But I didn't get it. What's it supposed to teach me?”
“The same thing all fairy tales are supposed to teach. To choose wisely.”
1/2/2022
Tinder
Thursday, 2/3/22, 4:15 PM
...
Thursday, 2/3/22, 8:20 PM
So ... would you maybe wanna go out sometime? Just a walking around talking type of date :)
Yeah! That sounds nice. I've been enjoying our talking so far :)
Aight, bet! Are ya free on Sunday, around noon?
Totally free, where do you wanna go?
Let's meet at that park I told you about. It should be good for walkin around lol
Alright, sounds good to me
Friday, 2/4/22, 2:01 PM
Ugh, just got off work. Whatchu upto?
Sunday, 2/6/22, 8:58 AM
Hey, are we still on for today? Just haven't heard back from you for a minute ...
Saturday, 2/12/22, 1:18 AM
Heyyy
Saturday, 2/12/22, 8:14 AM
Hi, what happened? I thought we were gonna hangout last week?
Monday, 2/14/22, 11:30 PM
Hey listen, I really enjoyed talking to you too. Honestly, it's been the best conversation I've ever had on here and I get we all have our situations going on, so just lemme know if you wanna find another time to hangout or just keep talking, whatever's good :)
Sunday, 2/15/22, Unknown Time
She Unmatched
3/1/2022
Ghost and Night Owl
I’m sick. Very sick I should say. I’ve been sick for a while, but now it’s gotten really bad. My teeth feel loose, and the lights feel darker. Honestly, my vision is pretty jacked overall. It sorta looks how an old-style TV looks when you put your face real close to it. Just kinda grainy. But the physical numbness just serves to mask how numb my mind feels. I think it’s a coping mechanism or something that the brain uses to deal with impossible situations. Or maybe when your body gives up, this is just what it leaves behind for your mind? A ‘see you on the other side’ type of thing … ?
It’s not all so bad though. Losing clarity in my senses while awake has made my dreams so much more real. It’s kinda like how blind people get good hearing to compensate for their lack of sight. Well, maybe my dreams haven’t really gotten more vivid, but they definitely feel that way in comparison to my reality. The dreams feel like the best moments of my entire life, pre-illness included.
In my dreams I leave the hospital and explore the city. It feels unbelievably real. And I remember it all when I wake up too. The dreamworld is exactly how I remember the world outside the hospital before I was admitted. Only difference is, I’m all alone. The city is completely deserted except for Night Owl. She’s a bit strange though, like someone you know but forgot along the way. I see her every night and we talk as we walk through the city. She asks me questions about myself, and I answer, but when I ask about her, she doesn’t reply.
When I first met her, I was scared and didn’t want to tell her my name, so I just called myself Ghost. Ever since then, that’s all she’s called me. I once asked her why she won’t let me tell her my real name, and all she said was:
“It's a good name for you.”
We walked so much of the city, more than I even knew existed. The dreams were beyond explaining, but they felt so real, walking from town center to a lake to the bridge to a park and everywhere else. Before the dreams, I found night to be oppressively lonely. Like every inch of space between me and the walls screamed with loneliness. But now it was different. The warm night air was like a blanket that simply followed me wherever I wanted to go. I felt so alive in my dreams with Night Owl. I called her that because she wouldn’t tell me her name and since we walked around at night it kinda seemed fitting. Writing it down now it sounds stupid, but in those moments, walking away in my dreams, calling her by that name just fit.
It never felt like she expected anything from me. I once asked her why she spent so much time listening and walking with me at all, and she told me it was because she was bored. Like that’s some kind of acceptable answer or something? It felt so wonderful in those moments. Getting a little angry or peeved at her and for once just caring about something. It was twisted and funny, but I loved it.
There was never any rush to it all. Our walks felt timeless even though they were always bounded by sunrise. The silent consistency was wonderful, but our talks were what I will remember most. I spoke of my dreams, not the asleep sort, but rather my goals and aspirations. I never even knew I had goals and aspirations! Life had felt too short to have such things, but even for someone like me, they were there. My dreams were simply buried within a dream.
I would sometimes just stare at her, unashamed as shame was the first of my human decencies to leave me in my journey through illness. Though, I was always surprised to see her staring back at me, especially with all this wonderful city around us. She would speak then, not quite in answer since I hadn’t asked a question, but in response to my confusion I suppose.
“This is my city and I’ve seen it all. You are everything that is new to me in this place and that’s why I stare at you. You can stare at me if you want, but know that I will never change, only you can do that.”
I can’t say how many nights we spent like this, but eventually things started to change. I could feel the dream fading a bit. It seemed that the night was getting shorter, and I was waking up sooner. On my final night there, we just sat and talked in the hospital room. She was right here, sitting in the chair beside my bed. We had never just sat and talked before. All those other nights it felt like we were walking towards something, getting closer and closer, but tonight was different. She sat at my bedside and saw me as I was. Not the body I walked and lived with in those dreams, but rather the one I was dying with in reality.
I finally noticed her eyes. They were dark brown with and tired. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me.
“The sun is coming up.”
I could see the sunrise looming at the edge of the curtains. It looked strangely clear and powerful as I hadn’t seen daytime with such clarity in months. She reached for my hand and pressed it tight.
“You have to wake up.”
I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay with her, walking the streets every night alone but still warm and peacefully quiet. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t a ghost. I held on tight for another moment, then I let go of her hand and looked back to the window.
Soon a car passed and then a few cyclists. The nurse came rushing in as the machines began beeping in concert. I just kept staring out the window, refusing to turn back. Even now I still walk the city on nights when I can. Just to remember those dreams and all of what they mean to me. I can feel her walking right beside me, just as before, in company with the beautiful night.
2/26/2022
It's a dream, it means a lot of things.
Back to the Island
It’s my third day on the island. I think today is Friday, though I’ve never been very good at keeping track of things like that. The sun has finally come out for a moment. Yesterday was dark and painfully quiet, but today is too loud. The sun, the people, everything, its all too loud. I want to run away, but coming here was running away, wasn’t it? The trees understand me. Shedding their leaves and passing the time stretching for sunlight. Yet how is it they can go all their lives in the exact same spot, never just getting up and leaving? Yes, they have roots, but what do you do when the roots that were supposed to carry nourishment now carry poison? You must leave! To stay is to choose death. And yet are all trees just so lucky that they have never had to face such poisons?
No. Trees do not fear poisons like these. After all, such a poison is not in the soil, nor the water, and never in the sunlight. Such a poison comes from within. And they do not exist like us. With a “within” and a “without.” They live fixed in their environment, wholly aware that they are not a pure individual as we have been attempting to delude ourselves into believing we are. They have no ego to bound themselves to and so they have nowhere to run. They are all of it at once, from their trunk to their long roots, to the ends of their great branches and leaves. In some ways they are also their seeds and the saplings they let grow under them, and the river that flows down the hill they sit upon. They can recognize that they have a "position' in their ecosystem, but why would they ever believe that their bark marked the barrier between the them and the not them? Not that they have eyes, but if they did like us, their sight would never be limited to the extent of their vision; They simply have to observe themselves to observe everything they ever could. In themselves they can see the slightest change in everything from the atmosphere to the migratory patterns of local fauna and so much more. The slightest of slightest things will have a change in their very composition to some degree.
And what, just because we have legs we are suddenly so different from trees? Sure sure, there's a lot more going on that's different between us and a tree, but in this way, we are the same. Take me for example, I live on this island, completely alone, and yet I am connected with everyone and everything. My phone is right here in my hand, telling me about my world, my people, and myself. It is always transmitting something, saying something. It won’t fucking shut up! How can I live in such isolation and yet carry the weight of an entire world in my head? It's insanity! So, what should I do? Disconnect the phone? Throw it into the water? Smash it with a great big rock? No, to do so would be to admit defeat. Defeat in the face of individuality. If I destroy this monstrosity, I will be declaring to all this bright and happening world that I was never in fact an individual. That I exist without any true identity or barrier between what is “within” and “without.” That I have no source of protection between my own mind and the minds of all those connected and intertwined with mine. That I have a thin and brittle skin that needs constant treatment. How can anyone say such a thing, admit such a weakness?
They'll tell it to you, right to your face, "that it's your choice to take it that way" for all those miserable and terrible things you unnecessarily burden yourself with. But where is the choice in it? Is it so privileged to say that the suffering around you causes you suffering? A crime to believe that you have no control? Or insanity to think that you have complete control?
No one in their right mind would admit that they are not an individual, to themselves nor to the world at large. It is so against all that we have strived for as a humanity in our idealistic egalitarianism and meritocracy. To claim responsibility and burden for the lives and life of everything in your environment is somehow both too selfish and yet too unattached to be allowed by our society. How could one possibly be so big-headed as to think that they are the center, or rather, that they are the entirety of the world and of all existence? On the other hand, how could someone be so disconnected from themselves to put all responsibility for their bad moods and shitty existence solely upon their environment? Isn't there a you in there, somewhere deep in there, that deserves at least some of the blame?
But whatever, I'm on my little island, away from our great society and its fundamental laws of motion. I claim to you and to all the world that can hear me for these last few moments, I am everything. I feel your pain, because it is mine. I claim your flaws, because they are mine. For this final instant I am the world and all the people who exist upon it. It is wholly breathtaking and quickly disappointing. I say good morning and goodbye one last time before I destroy this phone. I give you all your precious separation from me and my slowly drifting world. But perhaps one day … I can return and see what has become of you, because after all, no man is an island.
1/21/2022
Contact:
bftgrave@gmail.com