02.22.01 - 15:38:11

i didn't sleep well last night. it was a wakeful stretch of time, though the wakefulness is confused with the odd stretches of sleep that sizzle and snap through your neurons, blinding little flashes of this or that or something else that seem as real as any of it, at the time.

it's rather like diving through a black, viscous pool and finding some dynamic, illogical world on the other side, through the glass, darkly, slip-sliding across some essential, essentially invisible barrier for the briefest sip of an orange-skyed world.

so my memory of the night is taint by murky car stuff and tossing and turning. i though i would never fall asleep. i though it was impossible to ever be comfortable. i thought my comforter too light a weight upon my skin. perhaps i wanted to drown.

perhaps i wanted to drown like a stone in sleep, and emerge only reluctantly, after some long, healing hibernation, but words are a better refuge, good words used well and lovingly, crafted from the turbulence of all these petty wants and sick little desires and aching regrets. if there was ever someone who wanted to turn back the clock, it's me. or someone who could've been more. or someone. but i don't even know if i want more, if there's more to want, if wanting isn't somehow another tainting earthtie to make me ever-always-incomplete and just a bit hollow.

wonder how Adam felt without a rib, that wound in his side, bleeding wound. the similarity between the wound in christ's side and Adam's missing rib. i bet it aches sometimes to be a mother, something from you outside and nevermore evermore yours. but sleep, sleep, sleep - and dreams, or something. i know no one wants to hear it, but i don't even know what i want, and i am afeared that it is far more domestic than it should be.

so today i am hyperattenuated and alert with shifting memories of sleepless and hours passed turning, turning, turning, staring into some infinite gray cold world where snow dusts the tops of buildings and whitens the gray and distant hills.

all the sidewalks were ice covered, treacherous. it isn't clear where to put your foot. whether the ice will crack beneath you, or whether someone will hold you up.

or whether you need to do it yourself. it isn't bad to be upset sometimes. it just is what and where i am. and who i am. sometimes i need to just cry, in order to regain that equilibrium.

i don't know if that matters. i don't know if that means anything. i don't know what meaning is, except for some string of the internal allowed to bleed into the wide world. like blood, it stains everything it touches, but invisibly. there are special lenses, special lights that allow you to see the traces so long, so long after.

and i wonder about the traces, the little bits of me strewn across the world, the bites of data still lingering here, or there, forlorn. i would like to swallow it all and remake me as me, with the brilliant, sparkling tale of which i am unaware.

i would like a different world, where i could walk into the horizon and be gone unless i wished to return, and only then to those whom i please. but the cracks, the breaks, the imperfections are where we dwell, holy and aching, aching and holy.

This error is the sign of love,
the crack in the ice where the otters breathe,
the tear that saves a man from power,
the puff of smoke blown down the chimney one morning, and the
   widower sighs and gives up his loneliness,
the lines transposed in the will so the widow must scatter
   coins from the cliff instead of ashes and she marries
   again, for love,
the speechlessness of lovers that forces them to leave it alone
   while it sends up its first pale shoot like an onion
   sprouting in the pantry,
this error is the sign of love.