In the Pursuit of (?)

I am a burning ball of desire, I want and I want. It doesn’t matter how I feel, I can push through things to grasp at a dream. People burn out and say it’s time to focus on the smaller things. But to me, the small things and the big things are the same, with the same rewards. I want capability. I want the thing in my head to be real, whether it’s making the dresser look how I want, the strength i want to feel in my body, the distance I can climb a corporate ladder, the things I’m able to draw, what I can provide for someone I care for.

Sometimes, this body wants to give up, and I don’t know if it is my rationale or emotion that speaks back. It’s just that if I get to be alive, the greatest prize, to exist rather than not exist, then I would rather experience rather than not experience. I don’t want to be idle if I can help it. I want to choose things, change things, run down a rabbit hole towards things.

Because I kept a lot of diaries, I can watch myself in hundreds of iterations chasing different things. With cinematic clarity, across my diaries, I can see myself go through billions of revisions, changing what to desire. Sometimes I still get a little mixed up over what is important; in the wrong light you mistake one thing for another. I wish I could always recognize and pick out the right thing to love, because to love is to understand. But it’s hard to understand. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to hold on to a dream in the morning, painting a beloved’s portrait but never getting the details right. The concept is not the thing.

I think about how we were ripped out of another body, into a pre-built system of craft and beauty that I can never fully fathom. I am born from the result of all your choices, in this system, into this concept.

So what am I? A cataloging machine for the concepts? I want to log the sunsets, the trees, and I never want to die, and I always want to remember. Am I a machine just for experiencing? What a glorious, bitter job.

Some of the concepts are my own internality, miscalculations and approximations built out of my hopes and fears. Some things are made out of the void in me, where my knowledge has gaps. My knowledge has absences, things that are already gone forever that I’ll never experience again.

So, I spend a lot of time fearing deaths and endings. For example, I am so far away from home. Is there a part of home I’ll never revisit? Is the experience of it over? I only have the things that stick now, containing you, a million yous. In your absence, I am constantly honoring you. I wish I could have catalogued you in your entirety. I would never have had to wonder about your inner mysteries the way I do now, knowing I can never access them. Sometimes I have the key, but you morph into something else, with new locks. I change too, and soon I will be a different person, a new thing. I will have to say goodbye to who I used to be.

With these acknowledgements (prayers?), I cry a lot on my period, typically for no reason. I cry over conjectural sadness that no longer has a home or name, feeling like things are difficult and a lot of effort, feeling far too sealed into a body, too biological, at its pheromonal mercy to attach reasons to later. I think of the woman on the floor that he was holding while he cried silently, wondering if she was dying. (I don’t need to explain, it’s just for me, only I was there).

And I try to verbalize the sadness into what I can’t do, or don’t have. For example, I wish I were never afraid, because what I’m afraid of is where I won’t go, a thing not experienced rather than experienced. Your first step is an event. Your first word is an event. Your fears are dictations for survival, and designate where you walk and what you stay mute on. So… I often wonder how I will fully understand any single system, if there are shadowed spaces I fear to go into.

For now, with my handicapped understanding, with my evolving sandstorm mind, with my limits, I will contribute my understanding, my stories, my art, my mundane work at the office. I wish it could be something more significant, but I will give you everything. I want to give things away. It’s okay, I know already (like a time traveler) that nothing is enough for us, nothing is enough to give, or receive. We are bottomless in our wants and ideals, but trapped in finiteness by flesh and time. And that makes me sad, which is simply one of the flavors of the experience today. I can choose to ignore the flavor and keep drinking.

I can choose to think, this is funny, this is happy, this is pleasing, this is a thing to be thankful about, this is the truth for the day. After all, everything is very beautiful. Everything is so detailed. Everything is so evocative of wonder. I wish I could take something with me into the end, and past it.