Life, and all its little traumas.

Another post snippet, but this time this was a little more premeditated. I'd been thinking about the term trauma for a little bit last night, and somehow it came up as if it'd been waiting for the thought to flower. As if it needed a little prompting to come out.

I don't know if I'm right, but lately I've been feeling like...maybe we've made the term a little overheavy. Maybe it would help us put our lives together better if we thought of things a little differently. Maybe...maybe it's just food for thought.

 

Let me tell you something pretty ridiculous. Like fantastically ridiculous. When I was young, not super young, but maybe like 8 or 10 or so...we were going to go on a family visit to see our cousins up north. I was so excited. I don't know why, I just really was excited to go see them. There's six of us in our family (or was before my dad passed away) four of us kids and two parents, I'm the youngest (and the most spoiled).

Anyway, for days, maybe even a week we'd been preparing for this journey - just really four hours drive, not long by North American standards but enough with a brood in the car. The day comes when we were to go, I'm all packed and ready, just waiting for things to get going. Time starts to pass. I know my dad prefers to go early to make the drive easier but it's not nearly midday yet, so I'm okay, if anything I'm getting more excited. It starts to get later. Midday starts to come and I feel a little anxious, though I don't know why. It's cold outside, sure, but I don't know why we haven't gone yet. The day is almost gone, it feels like.

A while drifts by. My siblings have been doing things, sometimes playing together in the background as I start out the front room window, sometimes upstairs keeping themselves occupied. I'm not that interested. To me it's not half as fun as what things will be like when we get there. It'll be so exciting, so much fun. My kid brain doesn't know why but I'm always like this, always excited to be around more people, even though my family is big and great and more than enough, I just...love it.

The time starts to pass more slowly. I realise something is not quite right. Perhaps something is wrong. Are we...maybe not...? I watch through the window at the car, my breath fogging the window pane. And slowly, like the stir of molasses, I start to see it. Something white, fluttery, light, falling from the sky.

It's snow.

Surely that doesn't mean-- But it does, it fantastically does. Those few small flakes, barely a spattering, have shuttered all the expectations I had. Maybe we can wait, maybe it’ll get better, I think. I even try to convince my dad, almost pleading for him to take us.

But he calls it. We decide not to go. He telephones my uncle, his brother, and tells him.

I watch out the window, looking at the flakes that have already started to dissipate, and something inside me quietly dies.

My siblings have tried to console me, briefly. They know I'm a little upset but what kind of person would be more than that? Why would it mean so much more? They don't know why I was so excited, it's just me. I don't know why I was so excited.

And slowly, I decide, somewhere in that child's brain, that they're right. That makes sense. Why should I be so upset at not being able to go. Even if my child brain doesn't understand why the decision was made, why a few flakes here meant ice and danger on the roads out of the city, I still trust my parents, I still know they made the decision for a good reason.

And slowly, I learn a lesson further than I was meant to. I decide I should not get so excited for these things. Moreover, I probably shouldn't get excited for them at all. I mean they're never as good as I expect them to be - well except those few times that were - but still, those must be the outliers, right? And after all, if it means feeling like this, then what's the point?

I mean...if I have to feel like this, why should I be excited at all?

 

Today, I'm something of a writer. Something, because I haven't actually finished anything. I've tried a few, some are on the shelves for later, some have been left at the wayside, but I do have one. One that I've been sitting on, near completion, for more than four years. It's not amazing. It's fun, and has heart, and that's me. It's fine, and I have better things to write, but I still love it.

But more than all of that, I want to finish it. I want to throw it out into the world and know I finally did something in my life. Maybe not amazing or grand, but *something*. Just this one thing that I know I can do.

But you know, for the life of me, I can't get excited about that. I'm so close to the end that I can taste it, but the energy it needs to write it? Won't manifest as excitement, because in my brain I've learned the lesson all those years ago, thirty years of this planet, that it will turn to ashes in my hands. The excitement of having the power to change my life at my fingertips, in my hands, my shot as it were, is contained so tightly by this rigorous structure of held feelings that I don't even know how to let it fly any more. I don't know how to not be afraid, how to not let go, how to set my soul free.

I don't know how to live. In the way that I most believe in, most endure for, most look forward to.

 

Why have I gone on about all this? It's simply for this reason, trauma isn't always trauma. Sometimes it's just life. Sometimes it's just learning the wrong thing, or the right thing wrongly, or missing it completely. Sometimes it's not being spanked by your parents, or not let out late, or not having your own room, sometimes it's just snowflakes...landing on a windowsill.

Sometimes it's just how you feel.

Post Snippet; Density

Not to be a cliché but I feel about love the same way I kind of feel about destiny. I don't like fate, I reject it because I don't like the idea of something happening regardless of what you do, but destiny...destiny is about something you can fulfil. And I can sit here and think my destiny will come to me but the reality is it doesn't work that way. It's a life quest, and I have to do a whole bunch of things to get anywhere near that - whether I do that sitting here at my desk or flying through the air doesn't really matter, as long as I'm doing it.

That's a bit of a tangent but my feeling is that...it's not supposed to be easy when you're looking for what you really want. Sometimes it's elusive, sometimes you have to track it down, and yeah, sometimes you have to be picky. If you're not finding what you want, that's not your fault or anything, but romance is like the science of an art. You have to feel the wind, feel the energy in the air, follow the flow along its course. It winds and curves like a living thing, because it is. The heartbeat of millions of souls creating pulses full of happiness and anguish, weaving together the beauty of wings with the shackles that bind. Following though that path is no easy feat, and yet we do it in so many ways all the time.

Why should it be surprising that love, that thing that can so rarely be defined, is one of the hardest things to find? Harder still to bind, torturous to let flower, excruciating to let live. And so joyous that it can mean everything. How can we treat that as if it is nothing, when we know it moves the world? When it's the one thing we can point to and say if there's anything left at all, of our doomed destructive race when it's all over, let this one thing that transcends all things, remain.

You can have love, you will have love, even if you never find a partner. Because you'll never be alone.

None of us are.

Post Snippet; Not Aunt

I know it's been a while, not that I particularly have anybody to account to except myself, but for anyone else reading this, I'm going to be shameful and just put a couple of posts up of...yes, posts, that I made elsewhere.

I don't think it's super relevant to anything, aside from the interesting idea that sometimes the only noteworthy writing I do for long stretches seems to just be talking to people. I sometimes wonder if things would have been different if I wrote for a newspaper or something like that, but for some reason I never thought that was an actual thing I could do.

Even now I feel like...it's probably more work than I can handle or that I'm not accomplished enough or something, which is an interesting thing to think of oneself. Mental blocks being what they are, I don't think I've ever thought that writing positions constituted an actual job that I could earn money from, and even writing books is more for the love of the story than anything else.

That's a weird one, isn't it? To have the feeling that the arts cannot be a job, even though we have arts jobs everywhere. An idea that somehow, doing something you're passionate about cannot be something you get paid for. That you're just telling stories or expressing your heart or feeling the wonder of the world, why would earn material, worldly goods from that?

Which is nonsense of course. People in professions considered far more practical have through time also been those with creative hearts and passions, and we need do no more than walk our streets to see that. So I have no idea why I hold this unreasoned view.

Perhaps if you hold it too, the only thing I would say to you is...don't. Just live, and be the wonder that your heart wants you to be.

It feels, at least, that you have a supportive partner-friend and a current living situation that, while not ideal, at least isn't too negative to deal with. It sounds like a tough situation that you're in but it does seem like one that can - and probably will - get better. It's kind of difficult at this age - at least for me - to feel things changing about my self and my appearance and still feeling static in where I'm going or have gotten. I'm never going to be this age again. And that's sad because I haven't done a whole lot with the years behind me. But somehow I just can't shake this little bit of hope that I have. It's almost gnawing, always telling me not to give up, that even if I've given up with my hands I can't give up with my heart.

Full disclosure, I just had a sandwich. A pretty simple one, and one I've probably been eating for decades in one form or another. I genuinely wasn't expecting it to kick as much ass as it did. That was a good sandwich, and it really had no right to be, with mediocre meat between mediocre bread, it shouldn't have moved me at all. But it did. It's probably why I'm posting here right now (even though I don't know if this will be welcome or not), and it's helped turn my brain on a little.

How does that help? Simply this, today a sandwich made my day better. Tomorrow something else will. And even though I'm a little lost in the void too, I know every little stone on the path helps me move forward. Eventually the work will pay off, usually sooner than we think because the world is a wild wild place, full of unexpected twists and turns, and when we're down sometimes it throws us a line to keep us in the race.

I don't know why.

Somehow I think it's meant to.

No Carbon

I'm on a dating site. Have been for several years now, but I don't do much more than answer questions and occasionally tweak my profile, hoping that somehow the right person will reach out to me.

I know life doesn't work that way.

That person doesn't know me, they only know a picture and a few words. Words they can only try to construct into an idea of me. But they can't tell if they'd hate my voice, find me overbearing, or be incensed by my living situation. They only have those words to work from.

But that's why we meet, right? We play the numbers game and hope that the next one will be someone we can get excited about, someone we wouldn't feel like we were settling for, someone who might make the world a little more palatable to us.

And then there's sex, along with the animal passions that play to obscure the mind and soul.

And who wouldn't be swayed? Stepping close to someone whose mere presence quickens your heart, the rising flush you can feel beneath the skin, the brush and then taste of another human, a beautiful creature of strength and grace, lightning shackled by earth, governed by a flow as strong and deep as the oceans.

And yet those passions and desires don't help nearly as much as we want them to. The beast growls in its insatiable hunger, but it is not discerning in how it is sated, or by whom. It just wants.

We just want.

I don't know. I just have this feeling that this is all backwards.

I believe in love at first sight. I've always felt that I could walk into a room and know who I would like, who I'm attracted to, who vibrates on my wavelength - whether friend or something more. But that's how I'm built. It's what I like. It's how I process and explore. Seeing someone's character written in their face, their grace, their voice.

But even with that affinity, I can't always know. People are complex and wild and so so mysterious and that's what makes humans so interesting. That the magnificence of their sky can't be seen on their face, in their smile, or even in their eyes.

Unless they show it.

That's why we love all those actors, those singers, those artists. Because the act of bearing your soul is an act of sharing, an opening of a gate that throbs with emotion, with the base and pure need to be seen as you are and to be accepted for it. Because acceptance is love. Not romantic love, but the kind of love that the world shelters us with every day.

The kind of love that moves the universe.

And the reason this all feels backwards is...love isn't just about people selecting each other. It's about the world binding itself, interlacing and creating a future, not just for them, but for everything they know.

Moving that to a check box feels like it's doing the human race a disservice. It's taking away all the angles of love and affection and robbing us of those moments and connections that bind the world together. The connections that make the world work.

I don't know. I just feel like we've made a mistake in distilling our experiences, and not realising that the ones and zeros strip back the beauty of life as well.

Because it makes me wonder what that other world looks like. The one where we created all those spaces to live and breathe and exist with each other, so we could find each other, connect with each other, love each other.

Because that one. That one feels like a world worth living for.

Pocketwatch

It's so strange. I don't know why but somehow today writing this - purely self-indulgent thing - is hitting me hard. Writing about the moments when two people are looking at each other, so full of feelings that their skin is tingling, but each thinking the other holds them in no regard...

That gulf between cuts too close to the bone, I think. The countless times I've looked at someone and thought...you and I, we would...you and I, will never...

It's like a memory of a life that never happened. A door that existed so briefly before it blinked out of existence. That thick, yearning melancholy that was the possibility of a burning world full of passion before it vanished.

I love that the world can be so full of those threads. And that it hurts to be in that moment. A moment that wasn't anything at all, except two worlds colliding...in a glance.

Trees

This is something I tapped out a while ago and found again today. The original reason why I wrote it is blowing in the wind, and it didn't really say what I was trying to get it to.

But in a strange way, I almost think that's what makes it more important to share or chronicle...because I think in missing the point, there may have been something else there worthwhile. The road twisted away from my destination but where I ended up wasn't a wasted journey, somehow.


I think reading a book is a little like seeing a tree. You see one, you go "Ooh that's a tree!" and you've got it. You see a few more you think "ooh okay, so this is how they can be different," and you nod to yourself and think...I know what a tree is, I could probably plant and raise one of my own.

So you take an acorn, any old acorn, and you put it in the soil in your garden. You water it and a while passes. A month, then a couple of seasons. You forget about the acorn for a while and figure in time it'll work itself out. Occasionally, you try to water it a little more but nothing like the care you gave it in the beginning.

One day you just get frustrated at why you're spending effort on a stupid tree anyway, and that's it. For a while.

Some time passes. It's not too long until summer swings around and you want something new to do. A friend drops by and talks about this big wonderful tree they saw, and you snort and roll your eyes a little. You could grow a tree, easy.

Except you didn't. And now you're curious.

So you take a walk. It's a long walk, and there may or may not have been a bus in between, but eventually you come to a park. And this is a park unlike any you've seen. The trees here are large, huge! Of many different types and many different different colours, some with leaves shining brightly, some crooked and spooky in the undergrowth. It's like a library of trees, and you can't get enough.

Eventually you head home, your head full of leaves and your hands full of acorns. You're inspired and uplifted, and you tell yourself that surely a tree will grow now.

But now you want an orchard.

You plant your trees and they take root, they spring under your care and guidance and start tilting upwards to the sun in little saplings. You have trees, you have all the trees. You have the best trees.

A neighbour passes a while later, and pauses to admire your trees. They're growing well, at least some of them, the ones that took root. It's a few but you're proud. You talk trees with your new friend and they point out a few things that could help the trees, while they also ask you about how you kept your lovely trees healthy. You talk, swapping ideas, and nod thoughtfully. You've learned there are many things you could do to improve them, and you're happy about that. You want your trees to grow well, and in all honesty, sometimes it just seemed too hard to take care of them properly.

Then the neighbour mentions having seen a mango tree nearby. Now this is intriguing. You've had mango, of course, but never seen the trees they came from. Indeed, you didn't even think about those trees at all. Your neighbour talks about how delicious the fruit was and how healthy the tree was, and you decide you have to go and see the tree for yourself.

The next day you hurry off, eager to have a look at this new tree. When you get to the little gardens you are blown away. It's a single tree in the gardens, not quite as tall as the trees you hope to grow your acorns into, but it's wonderfully lush and the fruits dangle healthily from their thin stalks. "Mango tree," you breathe, and sneak a bite of its fruit.

You hmm a little at the taste, it's not quite what you expected, but that's okay. You're glad you got to see the tree and taste the fruit, but you think maybe your oaks are more your style. Besides, you could happily play with acorns all day long.

The years pass and your acorns turn into spritely little trees, coming nicely into their own. They're not exactly what you envisioned, but they give you a lot of pleasure and bring a smile to your face and, you notice, the passers by, too.

One day a thoughtful stranger takes a walk down your road. They see your trees and are intrigued, and after talking to you for a while they tell you they really like your trees but point out that your front yard, much larger and spacious, could also do well with some trees. Some big ones.

You smile at the thought and it gets you thinking, but you shrug a little and feel like you like your trees as they are and that's probably enough. Also in the back of your mind you feel like you really have as much trees as anyone should have. They're not large or very visible but they're pretty and cute and you love them.

And that's the end of that, really.

Until one day, someone comes by and asks if you've ever seen a Redwood. You have no idea what a Redwood is, so you ask and they smile as they talk about the tallest trees they'd ever seen, in a beautiful forest they used to wander in. Now that's a new word to you. You nod and chat and you get the gist of what a forest is, and as the stranger moves on, you smile and wave at them.

But you chuckle to yourself as you watch them go. Why would you need to see a forest?

Why indeed.

S|ending

I saw the finale of an old show today and I realised that there are some endings I just don't like. Not because they're poorly thought out or somehow unrealistic, but because they hit the note of things being over. Just...done. And that leaves me in mourning over what's been lost.

I know things change and the world moves on, but when you take a cast of characters, people who've been through thick and thin, and you just...disband them, it's like saying "this time will never come again".

Every part of me seems to rebel against that simple reality. It's a timeless constant of the universe that moments once experienced, will never be repeated. There is no groundhog day, no replay of yesterday, and yet every time I delve into the unknown to bring forth something from my imagination, it's with the intent of bringing people together, through excitement and adventure and peril, to forge bonds, connections that will last, no matter what may come.

And when my stories do end, they end with an open door, a new frontier, a lifetime of adventure waiting.

I think in some part this is why my casts are often small. If I gather up four or six people it's hardly an ensemble, and if a pair of those characters end up together it rarely feels like a breaking when it's all over.

This feels like a strange revelation to me though. I've known for a while that what I really wish for is to have my loved ones close, to be in a time and space where all my friends are near and it would be a simple matter to meet up to do something, or simply chat. And all my endeavours, on some basic level, are towards the hope of achieving that.

But I wonder if that's simply a refusal of reality. Moreover, I wonder if that's the reason for some of my most dearly held ideals. The notion that the human race could achieve great things if it came together may still originate from this deep seated need to gather, to bond, to share and explore and build.

And I wonder if that's stupid, and childish, and immature. And that I need to wake up to the realities of the world and say "goodbye!" to yesterday and these deeply etched wounds on my heart.

...

I think...I think my answer is no.

Or maybe I just don't care.

If I am a child living as a man, then so be it. Because that child within believes in a world where everything good and joyful and wonderful can be manifest. Where we can build beyond our skies into our dreams, and find all those things we could never allow ourselves to believe in, waiting for us. Where we can wake up and look around and be at one with the world and all that dwells within it.

Where I can have a world where I don't have to say goodbye. Except for the hand of nature, or evil, or the smallness of hate.

And where one day, far in the future, perhaps those last two won't have to be counted.

Bumbling

I haven't been working on my nearly completed novel much at all, trying to figure out the ending is taking a while, and I've no real stomach for it. I'm distracted by the bright summer lights of my other stories but I desperately want to finish something, and I'm nearly done now. Hopefully Camp Nano will be the finisher.

Anyway, in lieu of being productive I've been writing steamy romance shorts (emphasis on the steam), and as always getting skooled by my characters. 

Kat led them along a series of corridors, moving a little slower compared to the frenzied pace they had pursued before. They stopped often to peer through the walls, usually into empty rooms but now and again there was a guest retiring from the party interspersed amongst them. As the rooms began to thin out and cobweb began to appear they entered what seemed to be a disused area of the manor, and the rooms became much more interesting. A few times they stumbled into nooks that appeared to be made for spying, and once even found a room replete with a large bed, its purpose quite clear.

“My my,” Kat said as she eyed the moth-eaten covers. “This manor has quite a history, it seems.”

“It must have been hard back then - not really being able to see who you want, be with who you wanted,” Tare said thoughtfully.

Kat laughed. “Not for the owner of this though.” Then her face turned a little sad. “But do you really think it’s so different for us?” she asked, reaching out to run her fingers along the bedstead. “Seeing what we want, but never being able to touch it. You must have felt the same, Tare.”

A lump formed in Tare’s throat as he thought about Claire. So many times he had wanted to reach out, but never could. “No,” he said gently, surprising himself. “We are free. Free to fail, free to lose, free to lack courage. All of these things, but free to love, most of all.” His hand moved to Kat’s shoulder. “I could have told her any time, but the time was never right. Maybe there was a reason for that. At least...I would like to think so.”

Kat turned and smiled softly at him. “What a fool she was to never see you.”

Tare blushed, his tanned skin turning a deep red. “Now that’s just the drink talking.”

“You think so, hmm?” Kat almost hummed the word before taking his hand again. “Let’s go, before I start sneezing.”