I spend entire days lost in my own thoughts sometimes, barely capable of wrapping my head around any of them. Cluttered and unsettled, like the stuff that lies at the bottom of a river, always being swept one way or another by the current, so my thoughts drift, emotions no better. What’s mad is that I’ve written novels in my head while sitting on the bus or ordering coffee, but once the noises of everyday life seep back into my ears, I do nothing but overanalyze every glance, movement, word, every pebble of existence because I’m aware of it. I see it all and inhale it with every breath, but the problem is that, once it’s in me, I can’t seem to let it go. A cavern of circumstances echoes in my mind filled with a fortune of human flaws and various perspectives that dance erratically, but there is no grace. I’ve seen it in others, in films, in the way weeping willows sway back and forth, but my thoughts lack the essence of that type of beauty, and as I understand it, grace cannot be taught. So then I suppose I have fooled myself because I fear one cannot be great without it.
It starts as a ripple in your toes and rushes upward until it floods every fiber of what you used to be, pouring out uncontrollably. You stand, frozen, despite the volcanic eruptions bursting from tired eyes, wanting nothing more than to purge yourself of it all in an agonizing howl, like a wounded animal, but you’re choking. So you stand there, sole witness to the destruction of the deepest part of you, as death draws it out of your burning chest and into the bitter night, like a magnet for hopeless dreams and neglected things. Desperate to breathe it back in to where it used to thrive, you inhale and summon up the strength to reach out, but clumsy fingers slice through the ghost of a friendship once solid, and it disintegrates like a mist into a foreign atmosphere. And there is nothing left to do and nowhere left to follow, so you collapse, pummeling the spinning ground for being the platform for yet another set of steps to walk away, leaving only echoes in a distant darkness.
~ D. M.
