2009: A Collection of Failures

As time wears on, you lose parts of yourself. You are consumed and you move with arrows pointed ever forward. Depositing innocence in childhood, leaving behind the safety of home to venture somewhere, to meet someone even though the destination was never set. This year has to be the hardest I've ever faced. It held a mirror up to myself, and showed me my limitations, my downfalls, the things I truly cared about and how not to care about them in a meaningful way, in a way that makes a difference. It shattered a faith in something that I had clung to since adolescence; like a dwindling flame from a candle held between my shaking fingers finally evaporating in the air. Then my little room grows dark. Silence ensues. My flight away from myself was folly; it only brought me closer to realizing I cannot escape myself. I'm stuck here, and here's everywhere.

Focused on one thing and one thing alone, I set off to preserve the flame at all costs. It shined so bright, it touched a part of me like nothing else had before. For the first time, I dozed peacefully without care. Wind blew through my hair for the first time and the hand clasped within mine brought a smile to my face. I was so scared of losing it, I guarded myself against it. I had purchased a ring to symbolize a bright new future for "us" and wore it. Every time I stared at it, I was frightened by happiness. My inner fortress eventually fell under the weight of fear and I returned from battle, wearied and scarred. The ring was seemingly lost. Why was I fighting? For peace and love? It made no sense. Being left alone for with nothing but a hound and a cat for company, a(nother) fissure appeared in my psyche. One that's in the process of a lengthy and complex repair. One night I crept around my apartment, lost and confused. 2AM. A shot of Jagermeister. 4AM. A Beer. Eventually the sun rose at 7AM and it felt like the walls were collapsing in and around me. A lone tear streaked down my face. I knew it was the end of something but the beginning of nothing. "Oh," I muttered under my breath to passing joggers and nervous workers in the morning twilight, "nothing seems right." But then again, what did? What will?

Although there was a lot of good done and so many tears shed for the near departed and for my own departure, it doesn't act as a counter to what I have lost, so irrecoverably. Its a loss that was so total and so complete, only the memory of what I once felt remains and not the feeling itself. Rationally, how long can you beat yourself over the head with it? Minutes? Hours? Until your final breath? Distract yourself with something of no consequence? Redefine what's important? Deconstruct and reconstruct your perceptions ad nauseam for some great reward? Thoughts come without repentance; in my case they flood and break down the banks of an otherwise decent mind, leaving me in a heap of nerves.

Perhaps I can steel myself against what the world throws at me. I can stand at a window and watch shadows lengthen in the sun before the moon's pale light emerges and touches silvery leaves at night. I can do it until I can sigh no more. Just pick up your things and carry on with everything. Its all the rage at the moment.

When I sleep and dream, I dream of lesions forming on my body and blood spilling out. They open up everywhere; I'm stunned into position and I cannot move. I figure its my unconscious telling me that the wounds are still fresh and that I am still alive, I still feel, I still breathe. Perhaps one day they will turn to scars and the haunting will stop. It reminds me to believe in nothing, that the preservation of self will only lead to a wooden box or a copper urn on a mantelpiece - from stars we are born, to stars we shall one day become again.

With each success, I feel nothing. With failure brings defeat and emptiness, but familiarity. There's a map with failure written across it and a territory that doesn't mean anything when you turn your back on it. With success, I feel alone and scorned, waiting for the day it all comes down. No amount of riches or fame or "success" by any measure would salve me; I would never feel satisfied. Something would be missing and I'd search high and low to plug the void - even though what wasn't there was benign to begin with; it was a fictitious concern at best. There were more earthly and pressing matters to attend to. I can see that now. Now all I feel is the hot sting of being told I'm second, third, fourth best after an effort to prove my worth. I can empty my pockets and strip myself of clothes and the only wealth I'll seek will be the touch of another and the sound of a forgiving voice in the dead of night; even then, I will still feel poor and wretched.

I would cast me out into a great cold distance too if I had to live with me, so I can understand the reasoning behind the decisions that were made by and for me all those months ago. It's fine, really. I am an observer, not a participant; I write the stories down and try to make sense of them, even though I never ever will. The struggle isn't to elicit the words of care and love, to preserve them in the fabric of time; the struggle is to act in their spirit, day after day. I do; she's gone and happy. In a perverse and seething way, buried under fear, anxiety, hate, despair and remorse, I am glad she is. I'll take everything on face value; don't worry about it.

So I, like you, move on from another year into the next, and then from that, another. Why? Its impossible to tell. Will it unleash another fresh hell from my mind's eye or a pit me in a quest for an unattainable heaven? The ultimate tension between the two creates that void in the pit of my being; once filled with a light that's now gone. May it one day return under a different guise. It doesn't matter who lights it. It became starkly apparent this year that it doesn't matter who does it, it just has to be done.

The limits of my search were defined and promptly conquered. It feels like I've returned from the frontier and found nothing. I just feel like apologizing to everyone concerned and slinking off in any given direction. Then I'll sit myself down at a bar, smoke cigarettes, sip whiskey and say nothing. I will delude myself that people will ask me why I am there, what I am doing; but no one will ever talk to me. The boiling pulse of anger will rise within and evaporate as sweat taking each earthen-colored drink from the bartender. The color of my money will be the wrong shade, the whites of my eyes streaked with red, the dark circles around them growing in strength with every passing hour.

Potentialities abound but none of them seem like they have purpose. I can't see the wood for the trees; I can't even see why the trees are there in the first place. For all the books I read, the trials of academia and knowledge I cultivate, I still feel like a god damned fool. Driving up the highway with a bad transmission, carrying a raving lunatic in the passenger seat and trunk full of garbage with one thought on my mind.

Not all is lost. Nothing can be all lost; I have succeeded and failed - done both, and neither. Whoever showed me that; I am in your debt. But I cannot pay you, you are gone now. I was of no consequence to you and shall remain that way. I feel as I was of no consequence to myself. Sitting up in bed smoking a cigarette, confessing the sins of my being. It's a sobering and sad thought. Like an unwitting clown that doesn't remember telling any jokes but finds himself being laughed at all the same.

Goodbye old year, goodbye. It still feels that things need to be done, therefore I will do them as best as I can. There's a freedom in that; there's none in idleness and despair. Onward into battle my friends, onward and upward.

The love for life once bright
(Out of sight)
A burning fuse
The only flame I have
Fate's spiral down this curve
(Shall only serve)
The seeds growing my misery
These wounds kill time
My struggle sublime
Idle the blood
A black state of mind

All dreams left behind

Katatonia - Idle Blood