will i ever be okay?
will i ever be wanted?
loved
seen
felt
by someone,
else
cover them up with soft slippers, with incomplete smiles and wasted tears in the back of my mind. walk it off, walk it behind. i am alone.
me and my slippers and my sugar coated words and unbelieving eyes.
_______________
She sits in the cold weather again, sheltered by rafters and saved by herself.
"we will never be the change to the weather and the sea and you knew that"
it is all you know.
color your world in black, not mine.
"oh I loved you with the good and the careless of me, but it all goes back"
She sits typing in the dark, she's not feeling well but it's not her health it's her heart and it's barely beating.
"last year to learn, you were the boat that bridged in the tale of Conrad" - Ben Howard, Conrad
The Tale - Joseph Conrad:
from plot summary: The commander is suspicious because the other ship did not make itself known, and had the power to sail away. The other ship’s captain (who appears to have been drinking) claims that he does not know where he is. The commander increasingly feels he is being confronted by a huge lie, and yet he has no proof of anything amiss. The captain pleads that he is only engaged on the journey because he owns the ship and needs the money.
The English commander orders the Northman to take his ship out of the cove, and gives him false directions which take him onto rocks, where the ship sinks, with the loss of all on board. The commander – who has been talking about himself – does not know if he has condemned innocent or guilty men to death
If left abandoned, love turns to hate. It turns to effort and trying but not surviving. Words are loud but actions are louder and cut deeper than the empty depths of any word spoken or unspoken. Her feet were amidst the straw, the mud and the piss but her back broke, her skin darkened and her aroma was tarnished. The music was unheard, the cold unfeeling, and her drink put down. She wiped her tears, caught her breath and walked away. He asked her to smile and forget them but she could only pretend and she was so overwhelmingly done with pretending. He bought her a Sedgewick brandy - it tasted like horse-feed to her. A taste that the dead horse would have appreciated, should he have been able to swallow it. She felt dead so she drank it for the animal. She said goodbye to her distraction and with sore feet she walked towards the destruction. Without much conviction she grabbed her friend and removed them both from the devilish bar. It all became a blur. Her eyes did not focus on what she was looking for so she closed them and danced her feet from raw to numbness. At the end of the blurred night she crept into her bed, the utmost edge of it and cried herself to sleep.
_______________
I want to say I have given up again. I want to say that I know I really should. But I wont, not after I have promised to your family and to myself. I don't want to be the English Commander in The Tale that doesn't know if he condemns innocent or guilty. That guilt would kill me faster than any of your actions... or lack of actions. I won't give you false direction or true direction that lead you to rocks or to me. I will however retreat slowly and see if there is any initiative, any reason to stay, to carry on. But your world is black, not mine, and I, unlike you with your self hate, love myself enough to save myself. Enough to cry myself to sleep, enough to feel and to take responsibility. I love myself enough to sincerely hold my friends hand and put down a tent while you smoke a bong with strangers. I love myself enough to bring you home to your unconditionally loving mother, and enough to go home and let you be.
I don't pity you, although the fact that I just wrote those words may mean that I do in some way. However at this moment the only thing I pity is my likeness to that dead horse on the side of the road. After not only been hit down, it had been beheaded. Battered beyond recognition, used up and left for others to feed off it, broken down piece by piece. I feel like I am that horse and you are the road, the car, the panga, the heartlessness of it all.
will i ever be okay?
will i ever be wanted?
loved
seen
felt
by someone,
will I ever be saved before it's too late?
______
Should you ever want direction,
It is within you. It is always your choice.
"He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them... He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended."
"It might be that his dreams and his longing, and his outlets for that matter, made him feel unworthy, drove him sometimes whining into the hills. Tom was a nice mixture of savagery and gentleness."
"They condemn themselves before they are charged, and this makes them defensive always."
"He daydreamed out his life, and his mother loved him more than the others because she thought he was helpless. Actually he was the least helpless, because he got exactly what he wanted with minimum effort. Joe was the darling of the family."
"His father reversed himself. "I was testing you" - "You're a man and a soldier, my boy."
"Adam thought how a man doing an ugly or a brutal thing has hurt himself and must punish someone for the hurt."
"A man afraid is a dangerous animal."
"He had learned so much about woman that he did not trust one for a second. And since he deeply loved Catherine and love requires trust, he was torn to quivering fragments by his emotion."
"What must I fight for and what must I fight against?"
"The individual mind and spirit of a man."
"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world... And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual."
"Maybe we have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong."
"Well, a man's mind can't stay in time the way his body does."
"But a man can't entirely rest when he knows it could be richer."
"There was a wall against learning. A man wanted children to read, to figure, and that was enough. More might make them dissatisfied and flighty."
"You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect."
"But it's nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world."
"I believe when you come to that responsibility the hugeness and you are alone to make your choice. On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other - cold, lonely greatness. There you make a choice. I'm glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other?"
"A father to want his son condemned to greatness! What selfishness that must be."
"Everyone gets well if he waits around."
"If it troubles us it must be that we find the trouble in ourselves."
"My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from thy face shall I hid. And I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass that everyone that findeth me shall slay me."
"And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden."
"And oh, Lord! I had forgotten how dreadful it is - no single tone of encouragement."
"No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us."
"If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen... a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting - only the deeply personal and familiar."
"The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears."
"Couldn't some pains and insanities be rooted out if the causes were known?"
"I'm glad you came" he said. "There's a weight off me."
"That kind of energy is gone out of me" - "don't think it will ever die... Don't expect it. Are you better than other men? I tell you it won't ever die until you do."
"Only Tom had never got started. Samuel told Adam Trask that Tom was arguing with greatness. And the father watched his son and could feel the drive and the fear, the advance and the retreat, because he could feel it in himself."
"But you could feel Tom when you came near to him - you could feel strength and warmth and iron integrity. And under all of this was a shrinking - a shy shrinking. He could be as gay as father, and suddenly in the middle it would be cut the way you would cut a violin string, and you could watch Tom go whirling into darkness."
"Sometimes Tom took me fishing."
"Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in batterns of cowardice."
"Tom was quavering over greatness, trying to decide whether he could take the cold responsibility. Samuel knew his son's quality and felt the potential of violence, and it frightened him."
"Violence and shyness - Tom's loins needed women and at the same time he did not think himself worthy of a woman."
"It is probable that his father stood between Tom and the sun."
"And then Dessie fell in love... I do not know any details of the love affair- ...All I know is that it was a hopeless thing, gray and terrible."
"After a year of of it the joy was all drained out of Dessie and the laughter ceased."
"He might get old as midday maybe, but sweet God! the evening cannot come, and the night -? sweet God, no!"
"He told me how a man, a real man, had no right to let sorrow destroy him."
"We know from the inside of ourselves."
"Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids."
"And the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash."
"Samuel would run wild - she would have to watch him. She never lost her feeling that he was young and helpless. It was a good thing that she did not know what went on in his mind, and, through his mind, what happened to his body."
"It's funny - a kind of excitement is coming over me."... "That's good", said Samuel. "Maybe that's the best of all good things that can happen to a human."
"It was a promise that Cain would conquer sin."
"Thou mayest'. Thou mayest rule over sin."
"Thou mayest' - that gives a choice. It may be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open."
"Thou mayest'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth... he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win."
"The glory of the choice! That makes a man."
"But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul... It is always attacked and never destroyed - because Thou mayest'."
"Show me the man who isn't interested in discussing himself."
"Thou mayest' rule over sin... I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles - only the winners are remembered."
"And I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible."
"There is more beauty in the truth even if it is a dreadful beauty."
"Dessie was not beautiful. Perhaps she wasn't even pretty, but she had the glow that makes men follow a woman in the hope of reflecting a little of it."
"Tom's cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men. His violence balanced his tenderness, and himself was a pitted battlefield of his own forces."
"A dragon killer, he was, a rescuer of damsels, and his small sins seemed so great to him that he felt unfit and unseemly. She wished her father were here. Her father had felt greatness in Tom. Perhaps he would know how to release it out of its darkness and let if fly free."
"He must have been eaten with doubt and hungry for reassurance."
"In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love."
"I trust you, son" said Adam."
"Adam's recognition brought a ferment of happiness to Cal. He walked on the balls of his feet. He smiled more often than he frowned, and the secret darkness was seldom on him."
"Timshel... I said that word carried a man's greatness if he wanted to take advantage of it"... "It gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man"... "That's lonely"..."All great and precious things are lonely."
"Timshel - thou mayest'"
"Aron, who had not known he had a home, was nauseatingly home-sick."
"He could admit the mistake but as yet he could not reverse himself."
"To Cal the day was endless. He wanted to leave the house and couldn't."
"Did you ever think of yourself as a snot-nose-kid - mean sometimes, incredibly generous sometimes? Dirty in your habits, and curiously pure in your mind?"
"Lately I never felt good enough. I always wanted to explain to him that I was not good."
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
"Are you ever afraid?"... "Sure", she said. "I was afraid of you after you said I wet my pants.".... "That was mean," he said. "I wonder why I did it," and suddenly he was silent."
"Timshel!"
East of Eden - John Steinbach
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