4 February

Simon.

Ah, this black night. Ah, these stirred up entrails of mine. Ah, these bleary eyes that will not shut; that work ferociously and that look at what I am and hate it. hate it for being so small. So o’erburdened with fear and sloth and with foolish wavering.

And I want this bitter and biting wind. And I want the fierce and frigid cold. And I want the sharp edges of the filed and glinting stars. And I want the air – gathered up and smashed down and stuffed into a yellow sack – the air and all the infintessimal particles of the vast and endless sky that separate myself from itself. That separate my heart from God’s. and I come to see, to know, or at least, to admit, that all of that air, all of that sack of sickly hue crammed full of space and infinity, that all of that is just me. Nothing but this puling soul, this howling ocean of pretense and nothingness. This complex mechanism designed for nothing else, save keeping it from its one true end.

The echoes of what I might be if I were braver, or more determined, or better appointed; these echoes are a torment tonight. And if you knew. God, if you only knew.

And yet, one has to endure. There are these moments, at the precipice where the wind, with wild and whirling voice, rips at the heart, and whips the soul to shreds. And yet. Yet, we remain. And there is another moment, when this one has passed. And another after that. And another and another all in unbearable succession. And somehow we must be in them. Alike as in this.

And how to do that. To go on, with ravaged innards. To make use of a heart that hangs in shreds from the bars of a splintered ribcage.

To be ever and ever and everlastingly less. Less than what you mean to be. less than what you are, by genetic imprint, by divine inspiration, by will and intention.

And on nights like tonight I feel that I am something other than human. That I belong streaking the heavens like a comet, that I ought to be somewhere, - anywhere – other than inside this shoddy frame. That my skin and organs and bones and tissue are all just a well-constructed trap. A cage. A prison for something else entirely.

And I want to be everywhere. And to understand what it is to be other than myself. To know how it could be that someone else might have a different relationship with the world, with this tree, with that song, with this glazed and dripping window pane than do i. to and to know what it might be. to feel that. To understand another mind.

So that, by understanding I might be enriched. And so that I might know what it is to be another.

But. As I have not yet found the alchemy to turn my body into ether, I sit. Here. knitting like a fiend. Letting the music swirl its slow waltz of devastation inside my chest. Blind eyes, black to the world. And only lit up to what is not.

So that’s where I’ll be tonight. Blazing in the outer circles of this multiversed, unknowable, impossible night. Just in case you were wondering.