From the Heart of My Mind

Things fall apart; things fall into place. 

It’s remarkable that it takes nothing more than a moment—a minute, a second—for one to occur, while the other is slow, gradual, progressive, like a reaction as it goes to equilibrium. Yesterday while you and I sat together, a friend mentioned that at the start of the year, he kept thinking that you reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t think of who it was, until he finally remembered: me. 

You and me, us and we. We have chemistry; like any good equation we are two separate reactants that combine to form a more stable, more cohesive product.

All along, day by day, step by step, I’ve been slowly approaching the romantic Rubicon without fully realizing it. It’s a journey some travel only once, some travel many times, some travel continuously without finding their endpoint. 

I count myself lucky: no chasing shadows, no running after fairy lights. All it took was a step in the right direction after a particularly painful fall—an arm around a receptive waist on a too-cold-to-be-reasonable summer night—and the rest was a cascade of college experiences that resound in memory after memory with delightful harmony. A reaction catalyzed by a kiss on a palatial playground, and things fell into place. 

Things fell into place. We crossed the threshold and kept on going. And we go on like that. 

Probably the most useful thing I’ve learned so far this week is that sex is the best study break, period. Tomorrow morning I review eigenvectors and matrices and improper integrals and all this calculus shit before my final in the evening, because I haven’t studied jack shit yet.

Now you know why my writing has been laughably nonexistent: procrastinating on studying.

fromtheheartofmymind:

Every second that trickles by
in slipshod creation
is nothing more than
a drop in the ocean;
nothing on its own,
yet when brought together
combining to form something
tremendous and imposing.

Seconds turn to minutes
turn to hours turn to days,
which I spend in little more
than a half-awake daze
drifting from moment to moment
like some poor misguided shade.

And so I turn with them:
the seconds, minutes, hours, days
showing little demarcations as
I progressively slip into routines
that carry on without purpose. 

Every second that trickles by
in slipshod creation
is nothing more than
a drop in the ocean;
nothing on its own,
yet when brought together
combining to form something
tremendous and imposing.

Seconds turn to minutes
turn to hours turn to days,
which I spend in little more
than a half-awake daze
drifting from moment to moment
like some poor misguided shade.

And so I turn with them:
the seconds, minutes, hours, days
showing little demarcations as
I progressively slip into routines
that carry on without purpose. 

fromtheheartofmymind:

I will not be a pebble,
swept away by a powerful torrent
and kept submerged in silence.

I will not be a sparrow,
wings clipped, plucked, and mangled,
grounded for all of time.

I will not be a storybook
gifted and placed on the bookshelf,
a permanent prison for pages.

I will not be a mouse,
lured out by bit and crumbs
and squashed by angry fear.

I will not be many a thing,
for what I am will come
in time.

I will not be a pebble,
swept away by a powerful torrent
and kept submerged in silence.

I will not be a sparrow,
wings clipped, plucked, and mangled,
grounded for all of time.

I will not be a storybook
gifted and placed on the bookshelf,
a permanent prison for pages.

I will not be a mouse,
lured out by bits and crumbs
and squashed by angry fear.

I will not be many a thing,
for what I am will come
in time.

I have never more than now wished to simply become lost in the world. I want to wander, to fade into the darkness with soft-scuffling footsteps and shallow breaths. I want time to be irrelevant for just an hour, or two, or three; I want contradictions to lead me away when all I should do is remain under loose sheets. I want to reclaim the feeling of rose stem pinpricks in my chest when I put pen to paper. Bleeding has never been the hard part—allowing it to escape has always been the challenge. I often wish for a return to the past, if only because when the world was so complex I could greater feel the urgency of the challenge. Everything is too soft now, and yet pierces even more deeply than the sharpest pain from before. I can’t console myself with pity nor find comfort in despair; shoulders once leaned on feel foreign and occupied. 

So maybe I do need to be lost for a time. Maybe I need to feel a chilly ache in my bones to be reminded of all that pain had driven me towards before, all that sadness had strengthened me for. 

It’s just a pair of shoes and a jacket away. 

Maybe I’ll start a daily blog detailing my college (non)exploits, saying what happened and why to my peers and myself.

Would you read that shit?

I am profound in ways I don’t mean to be, and typical in likely every other. I feel as if I’m an uninvited guest to my own potential, as if others can see it but I’m too lazy at this point to get around to it, as if at this moment everyone around me (myself included) can identify talent within me, and I’m just saying “eh.”

But I don’t just squander time, not anymore. Because whereas before I used to put off everything I needed to do because I hated starting, now I simply feel as if I have better things to do at any given moment. I was never very good at balancing.