The irony of a brain dump lies in the fact that it is my search for my brain that leads me to want to dump what distracts me from its use. Distraction creeps up, sometimes slowly with warning, but sometimes with devilish bravado unseating my senses and leaving me gasping for reality.
Reality has never been a friend of mine. Each time I thought we were getting along, it slapped me in my face with a boulder. Not even a rock. As if a need to prove to me that living life in full measures means that life can only ever respond in kind. Kind. Now there’s a quaint notion that I hope to experience at some point.
I find myself caught at the curious juncture of being invisible while simultaneously lacking the benefit of anonymity. It means that I can do nothing worth noting without my efforts being dismissed, while having a keen focus on everything I do that may be judged to be lacking. It echoes in terse tones my relationship with society for almost half a century.
Someone guessed my age recently. They assumed me to be 30, instead of 50. Perhaps I did experience a kindness after all. But, they weren’t significant to the outcome of my life, so their generous gesture was lost against the rumbling of the thunder that was beckoning the next storm that threatened to roll over me.
Crescendos of joy quickly obliterate the years of struggle. And the years of struggle return in anguished chants, mocking my half-smiles when that joy is unceremoniously ripped away. The vagueness of expression, at least, appears to offer me the comforts of an old friend. Pathetically, my oldest friend is a writing tool and not a being.
Self-deprecation is such a luxury. I marvel at the possibility of being able to abandon life while indulging my self-loathing, oblivious to the unfulfilled duties and privileges that others have claimed. My fixation on fulfilling the same has left little room for claiming what I need. Even when I do, my attempts are so feeble that it lacks any convincing.
The lock down has tested my philosophies and my resolve. Both have passed, despite neither serving me. It only ever serves others whom I cherish, but never me. I suspect I need to rethink my belief that the purpose of life is to serve others, and in such servitude we shall find joy. I think I missed something important in that. Of course, it’s difficult to convince myself of this being an erroneous philosophy because the joy I’ve experienced in serving that elusive significant other has rewarded me with a joy so divinely sublime, its fleeting moments serve to torment me for the rest of my life. Each expired second since it flitted by has in itself been a lifetime of torture.
Love is for fools who have hope, live with hope, and believe in hope. Guilty on all counts. Only, when you live as precariously as I do, interpreting a love such as this becomes a mystery of its own. It’s the kind that cherishes deeply, loves intensely, holds endearingly, but releases gently. It’s the release that I need to work on. Perhaps if I didn’t make it so comfortable I may have more than a fleeting moment of divinely sublime joy.
Divinely sublime. The divinity and the sublimation both beyond the view of the one who offers it. It’s a twisted tale of contorted cynicism that life has heaved at me in buckets, or more likely troughs. It is my grasp on the subtlety of beauty, or the hints of romance that breathe between her pauses and between her aches that horror has imposed. My subject of beauty focused on the horror, while I, in my romantic notions, caress with care the breaths and the pauses, seeing in her the divine where she only sees the pain.
It’s a dance with destiny, with two left feet. Me being ill-footed while destiny laughs mockingly at my attempts to courts its lustrous beauty. I recede, full of angst, full of despair, but filled with joy in a conflicting sway of emotional upheaval that celebrates my ability to connect with the beauty that is so well hidden, while succumbing to the demands of the one who hides it.
A brain dump, or a heart dump. The two are so intricately woven into the being of me that attempting to discern between them is as foolhardy as my hope of fully embracing the beauty that I see. Just there. Within my grasp, but out of reach. Like a mirage, it demands that I revisit moments past, not retracting my hand, fear driving my reach, while hope connecting my sight. Until it is in hand, it remains elusive. A mirage. But so real that letting go is impossible, while holding on is prohibited.
As I slide further down this slope that extends from the recesses of my being, my efforts to dump that which clutters my thoughts only reveals the beautiful prose of life that it harbours. My contempt for it yet again misplaced, as I realise that I grew loathsome towards it for distracting me from my purposeful endeavours, while denying the reality that such endeavours were the distractions I needed to cope with the absence of what I buried so deeply.
Once allowed into that haloed space, it can never be released. Only peered at quietly and solemnly in secret. It will only ever again be revealed to the one who reached its alcove without even knowing. Such is the miracle of two, cut from one. So natural is their embrace that the ease with which it satiates the thirst of the souls leaves no scarring, or evidence of its visit. Only the quiet confidence it instils in empowering the hesitant decisions that have long since lost relevance. But relevance is defined by what is yet to be reconciled. It is in such reconciliation of the hurts of the past that the present in discarded, and the future laid to waste.
But hope. If not for hope harboured by the jaded fool who courts its pleasures far beyond its graveyards of happiness, the discarded gifts would forever leave the future wasted, and the past honoured. It is the jaded fool that disregards such constructs of nature. It is the jaded fool that seeks the divinely sublime, despite the backdrop of horror that threatens to disembowel any attempts to be glorious beyond the measures of the past. It is the jaded fool that resurrects the romance that love courts, or the love that romance beckons. If not for this fool, much will be spent in futility.
Some believe this to be the words of a writer. One who is perhaps endowed with the ability to express what others struggle to contemplate. However, it is more truthful to note that these words are of the one who pains to express clearly the lyrics of his soul, in the hope that its mate will pause for long enough to see the truth of what can be.
[If you’ve read all the way to this point, I am duly impressed and saddened. For anyone to connect with these words, you must first connect with my pain. Blessed be the gentle ones who love too fiercely, accept too easily, and hope with futility.]