#lame nerd writes
Its complicated.
Maybe you are making it complicated but nonetheless it is complicated.
The chasm between what you want to be and what you think you are is vast. The valley between what you are and what you can be is subjective. The place between your hands, the space there, is yours to make.
There’s a love story to life, a genre to the thread you are walking and you are the author. Maybe its with life at large, this love story. Maybe it’s a story of friends or family or maybe it’s the feel of a lover’s embrace.
There’s a tragedy to life, a coiled muscle at your back as you gaze upon what is done to you by the world and what you do to the world. It’s the grinning skull of humanity, of life, as it sits in the hands of many. Authority waging war and war wielding authority.
There’s a starving wraith creaking into the space you left behind, or maybe its nothing at all and simply the ghost of what could have been.
Come now, unreliable narrator, put the ice between your teeth and learn to chew.
She recognizes me based on my knock. The door hurts the knuckles, the rattle of bone under skin against a green door.
Maybe she shouldn’t have been paying that close of attention, but she is. Maybe if the knock was more of a boom, less rapid, less known, then I could go back to a place where my voice didn’t ache, and silence was welcomed.
Strange, alien, other; maybe the knock can raddle the thoughts out of my head so she may pick them up and see them for herself. I collect them like a magpie, these thoughts, and build my nest of reality around them, with them. Maybe if she saw them she would know it wasn’t worth paying attention to, worth knowing a knock.
Maybe our worlds would not brush together.
But I know her as well. I know her by the shift in her seat, by color of her eyes, by the slope of her shoulders. I collect the glimpses I see of her world, the portraits I paint, and remember them so I may piece them together like pieces of a puzzle to see the world through her eyes. And maybe she’s the same, looking at me and watching, knowing me by my knock at her door alone.
What a wonder it is, to be known.
To speak emphatically, to speak without hesitation, to understand oneself and one’s intentions so clearly so that the words never stutter as they pass your lips is a blessing as it is a curse. Because the world was never so black and white and dogmatic.
You are a villain, you are a hero, you are a bystander to something great and the one who wrought it all the same. The realities blur and the unreliable narrator stutters out another word they say is emphatic, they learn to be emphatic, they must be to survive.
One day soon may you develop a stutter, where words don’t fit in your mouth and your mind runs with possibility.
There’s a space behind the eyes, you see it when you pass your gaze over another’s. It holds Dandelions, suborn and tall. Sometimes it holds them out like a child, sometimes it keeps them close to its chest, but everyone has them in the space behind their eyes. The flowers are sometimes many, sometimes few, but ultimately these flowers are theirs’ and theirs’ alone.
It’s not your place to lean forward, eyes crossing as you approach. It’s not your place to blow, however gently you may, and cast the seeds to the wind.
It’s not your wish to make, after all, but sometimes you do it anyway.
You know it hurts, maybe you as much as them, when you see the seeds drifting in the wind. You hope it was worth it, the wish, and maybe it was.
But really, was the risk ever yours to take.
To be an unreliable narrator is a bit like crunching ice between your teeth. You know it’s there, the sharp slide across your tongue, a crunch like bone between your molars. And then when it melts and your left with something smaller and duller, a numb mouth and hallow pain, you know it’s time to start again. To be undone by your own hands and come back with something new, ice clenched between your teeth.
To describe oneself, knowing you could never find the truth, is a bit like catching chickens. You say ‘I am strong,’ look into your own eyes as you gaze into a mirror and you know. You know many times you are weak, but the admission never leaves the back of your throat resting there as it rasps with your every word. You lunge for the chicken; it flutters between your hands and scurries to a corner. You say you are less when you know that, for you, there may never be more. The chicken looks up at you, its beady eyes gleaming as you shuffle forward hands outstretched. You do the same thing every day, walking the same well-worn path, wearing the same clothes, with the same look in your eyes. You drag a hand through your hair and breath through your nose as the chicken stares and stares and stares and you call it prey but really, maybe it’s you.
To judge the world, to look at it and sort it like you wish you could, is a bit like trying to leave the chicken behind, the ice between your teeth, the chicken’s eyes on your back, as you wander through the woods. You look around and you apply to it what you apply to yourself. The morals you have picked up like stones from the path. You ignore the reality, their reality, pushing against yours and force your view unto them but the only thing around you are trees.
You call it wise, a wise tree.
And maybe it is wise, but there is ice between your teeth and the chicken at your heels, the tree leans with the breath of the mountain and you are alone so does the wisdom matter?
Your mouth is numb, your teeth ache, the chicken pecks at the ground just out of reach and the tree, the tree says nothing.
You are alone.
The mountain lets out a breath it was holding and the tree topples, are you enough of a person for it to have made a sound?
That is for the chicken to judge.
