Posts tagged with "realization"

Praise The Night

Oh, and lis­ten to this.

Sometimes you wish your friends lived far away so you could dri­ve home for­ev­er, and sing off-key into the dark­ness.

But at some point you have to come home and undress, you have to stop the pres­sure of the water run­ning down your back and step out of the show­er, you have to go to bed for the sake of your colon, you have to put aside your thoughts for anoth­er day.

There was some­thing about his expres­sion that made you believe that you’re bet­ter now. You’re safer. Maybe the real­iza­tion that your mis­takes are your own to make. That you’re stronger now than you ever were, and that peo­ple care about you, enough to tell you the truth when it’s the last thing you want to hear.

Praise the night, for this would­n’t be pos­si­ble any oth­er time.

Pain Is Better Than Emptiness

I’ve come to real­ize that I cling to pain and yearn­ing because they give me inspi­ra­tion. They may not be the sole source, but cer­tain­ly a great deal. I always lis­ten to Leonard Cohen and Elliot Smith dur­ing such moods, as they have the abil­i­ty to inten­si­fy and deep­en the sad­ness.

I can tell it’s some­thing of a destruc­tive habit. It’s almost like I sub­con­scious­ly choose to dwell on things that have been resolved for the sake of some­thing to write about.

It makes me think of the last lines from King Missile’s song Ed:

“Yes, this is the answer. This is the end­ing. I shall keep on run­ning, because a body in motion tends to stay emo­tion­al, and it’s bet­ter to feel. Pain is bet­ter than empti­ness, empti­ness is bet­ter than noth­ing, and noth­ing is bet­ter than this.”

Is this how I feel alive, a way of bring­ing sig­nif­i­cance to my life? Or is this the way I tru­ly feel, and I’m sim­ply a slow heal­er, and too much of a thinker?

Or per­haps the bet­ter ques­tion is this: does hap­pi­ness inspire me just as much?

Deuteragonist

I’m the au pair with the jazz tapes, telling him to use Davis and Coltrane on the first date. The hero’s child­hood bud­dy, who dies in mor­tar fire dur­ing their ser­vice in the Second World War. The awk­ward friend who isn’t attrac­tive enough to play the lead. The sib­ling con­fi­dante, who con­tra­dicts the pro­tag­o­nist with cyn­i­cism, only to be proven wrong in a sat­is­fy­ing fit of glo­ry.

All my life, I dreamed of great­ness, of being the main char­ac­ter in some quixot­ic sto­ry.

But I’m slow­ly real­iz­ing that I’m only a deuter­ag­o­nist.

I wrote this entry about four or five months ago, but nev­er pub­lished it. I held off because I was­n’t sure if it would be true a week after I wrote it. Weeks turned into months, until the sud­den real­iza­tion that I don’t feel this way now.

I regret not pub­lish­ing it at the time. Even though it holds no rel­e­vance any­more, at the very least, it would have been a time stamp of how I felt in the moment. There are so many fleet­ing mem­o­ries and emo­tions that change here, part of my ephemer­al nature. But part of me thinks that it took this real­iza­tion to give me the strength to say it.

Maybe I’m start­ing to believe in myself.

Love is a Rebellious Bird

L’amour est un oiseau rebelle
que nul ne peut apprivois­er,
et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’ap­pelle,
s’il lui con­vient de refuser

Suddenly, he came upon the real­iza­tion that her beau­ty unin­ten­tion­al­ly entraps men, who are then led to their down­fall by their own mis­guid­ed ideas of love, and that he was sim­ply anoth­er one of many. Not that it mat­tered any­way; to force such things is futile.

So enough about love, he said, for love is often fick­le and unre­quit­ed.

Tu ne l’at­tends plus, il est là!