Orchid

For some reason, I had never obtained or listened to Opeth's debut album, Orchid.

It is so beautiful.

More later, perhaps.

A Plateau

Sometimes, I dig up the past. And with it comes up tangled the pasts of others. Some were not in my past, but in my present, but still their memories mingle with mine and muddy the water so that we cannot see through to the next moment. Some were in my past, but are not in my present, and their rotting teeth threaten the now, desiring so desperately to cling onto my now uprooted memories. And unseen, the monsters of the future lie in wait, ready to entwine themselves with the rest of use, and choke what potentiality remains there. To those who were there all along:

This is desolation. All that could have been. I have killed so many possibilities, I have shown no mercy to a multitude of presents and futures. And the past shows me no mercy.

These eyes are so big and hollow. Gaping in desperation - they wish to be fed.

Conscience

Hovering on the edge of madness, it feels like being sick. Every sound is close, hammering on the inside of your skull and every smell is a headache that tries to escape in vomit. Faces and lightbulbs shimmer, vibrating with fever and you wish you hadn't waited until the end to make your reconciliation. All your memories are on fire, threatening to explode if spoken, so why not just let them be your ash pit...

This is the lethargy of summer, and the premonition of painful reawakening. What demons of guilt await the mind that has been lulled to sleep? That the demons should never come is the greater fear, for their absence would signify the fundamental rupture with oneself. We keep the past alive, secretly longing for that night of vast sufferings, when the wolves will rend limb from heart the justifications that soothed the uneasy rest of sloth. Howling as they consume the poisonous flesh, our attempts and endurance and eternity reveal their mocking mortality, delighting in their status as victims of time. What will remain when they have stripped us of all we thought was our creation? Human thought is but a mass grave.

Click Clock

There it goes, the time.

I am a wasteland of hours, years and months.
All their accumulated garbage in a great stinking pile
that refuses to decompose,
to become something else, better
A bowl of rice the future can eat.

But it just grows, the past.
Bigger, taller, dirtier, fouler
Sinks deeper into its own slime
Bits and pieces and memories get more indistinguishable
but never recede.

Up here, the air is bright
and the future shimmers like heat.
I would never make it that far though -
this landfill is endless
and I have too many treasures here.

I don't understand

One day I hope
I will be able to show you
why
I am alive.

The difficulty is thick,
clods of dirty ice
I long to smash from our hearts.

Mostly
I do not understand it myself.
And then it bursts upon me like April!
in a single moment which cloisters itself
in my breast.
- a deep and timid secret, it fearfully hates
the callous human intercourse -

It is like being stabbed,
as the hot blood rushes to my face
and pools in my chest.

The small upturned face asks,
"Why are you beautiful?"
And I want to cry:
I am too weak to say,
"Because I love you."

(Cupping your cold heart,
I gently part my lips
and breathe softly,
until I weep with exhaustion.)

Rejection

Standing outside the club, I handed the security guard my driver's license. She handed it back to me, saying, "Den kann ich nicht akzeptieren." I asked "Warum nicht? Mein Geburtstagsdatum steht schon d'rauf. Ich bin 21! Lassen Sie mich rein!"

She responded only more cooly, "Ich kann nur deutsche Ausweise akzeptieren."

Suddenly I had everyone's attention. People stopped dancing to crowd around the entrance of the club, trying to look at me, wanting desperately to hear what I had to say. People on the street stook awestruck as I began to shout -

"I know - Ich weiss dass ich keine Deutsche bin! Ich bin nur diese einsame, alleine Amerikanerin, und du - " I began to sob and scream - "DU! Du hast mich nicht angenommen, nicht hereingelassen!"

I took a deep breath. Now I would tell them. And they were all listening. I would make them understand, in a grand soliloquy, the depth of my loneliness. Then, they would fall into madness and exalt me as a goddess.

Opening my mouth to begin, rejection became something from which I did not want to repent. So my soliloquy became a choked cry, as I ran outside and disappeared into the black shadow of the Cathedral in front of me.

Thoughts on Sarajevo - 11/8/08

I was cleaning my desk and found this scrap of paper, where I had scrawled the following during the train trip described in the previous post:

Sarajevo turned out to be a very interesting city, beautiful, sad, hopeful and unforgettable, and I am glad to have visited it. One the one hand, it reminded me of Ecuador, with its trash-lined streets, the grayness of its buildings where people's private lives hang in the open windows, and the vendors haggling in the streets and watching over their wares everyday for endless hours. But the grayness of cities has many sources.

Unlike in Ecuador, the face of war still hangs grimacing over Sarajevo. Some buildings have been entirely rebuilt, but most are still riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel marks. The post-war standard seems to be, "repair it to usefulness; attractiveness can come later." So, windows have been replaced and doors rebuilt, but everything else remains as it was when the shooting stopped 13 years ago.

Buildings deemed beyond repair have not been torn down, but stand as empty, ruinous reminders of a time when death lurked in every corner. The people of Bosnia have no need yet for post hoc memorials - the streets themselves, covered in shrapnel scars, remind everyone of what went before. Gaping windows tell us of a life lost. And even if you might begin to forget, the graffiti sprayed on every gray wall will tell you of your sin.