cold and tired. at this moment, i float. people are always at two levels. on the one hand, everything rises up to the surface, to show the "google earth" satellites something good and happy... but on the other hand, there is something deep and unseen and mysterious going on, maybe something at odds with the surface. me, at times, underneath, there is something heavy going on, a churning and thrashing, like treading water with this concrete weight tied to my ankle... i don't know how much longer i can keep it up.
i remember swim practices at rec. center 1, and how we would have to tread water in the deep section with our hands above our heads, while the coach walked at the periphery and waited to deck one of us with his slipper if he saw us slip under... i remember being very young at sandy beach, and how the wind was so strong it was whipping the sand up and stinging my skin and my eyes, and how i wandered too close to the waves and was pounded and turned end over end under the water, and how when i briefly surfaced, all scared and gasping, the only sound i heard was my family laughing... and when i got my bearings, and my feet and hands crawled in the soupy sand, how the water gradually drew back and back and back, and i realized that it was all going to happen again, and how everyone just sat back and waited for the next part of the comedy show...
there is a point where a person just gives up. the conditions of the game have been set up such that you can't win. and what they want is to see you struggle, to see you make an ass of yourself. i didn't want to play. so i just gave up. i learned how to sink, and then how to float.
it takes too much strength to hate. that wasn't what i wanted to do or feel... i just wanted, i don't know, to be taken seriously...
relevant.
not a joke.
the odd thing was, i learned precisely how to be a joke (to not be taken seriously) in order, ironically, to BE taken seriously (or rather, to be "serious"). the world wants to beat me down into something that it doesn't have to consider, a non-threat; i never wanted to be a threat to begin with, for me, the game was something and somewhere else entirely... the game was about something else. and pretending to be a "sucker" and lose was the most efficient way to get up and get out of the game... "okay, hahaha, now here's what i want to do..."
... but... is it the world that beats me down, or do i do it to myself? because, even without its influence, i feel this heaviness within, this tendency to implode. and the "jokes" i tell, these words i write, they are all, they all feel like, distractions from the inevitable... something, maybe "me," though it doesn't feel like me, is waiting in the dark, waiting for me to sink and drown, so that it can snicker: "didn't you know? this is where you belong."
i couldn't save my sister. no, let me amend that, it sounds too certain, and it isn't. but what is certain: i didn't save my sister... and now, all my efforts are motivated to prove that something i do CAN make a difference in this world, something i do CAN keep the world afloat, keep it from imploding and sinking (as i feel myself do)... to "keep hope alive"...
... i just want to know that you're okay, you're all okay... and then, i wouldn't mind, i wouldn't mind falling asleep.
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