Passages, May 2021

I Write Passages So I May Make My Own

I can picture it now. I shout at you, a jumbled mess of the songs you played when I was younger and the words that went missing somewhere across time. Or perhaps we are silent, a nod and a door left closed. I prefer the former, if only for the finality of the moment. Our dance will stop, and I’d prefer for you to stumble before I do. And so you stumble, pushed by some ghost towards me as I reach for the door. Your piercing glare and cutting words slash at me, and it is then I rejoice that you never really knew me. You miss my heart by inches, and I take off.

↫ ⧜ ↬

I hope I understand our dance’s complexity as it reaches its end. When there are no sentences to serve at the end of a served sentence, I feel a need to know. When I’ve paid my debts, who did I borrow from? Who set you and I on this collision course? I just hope it isn’t me. Even if I know it isn’t, knowing is never enough when believing is all I have left. At every step I pay a bit back. I stand for something more and sit down because of it, snatching what wheels I can. As I learn what you could not teach me he is wheeled into the hospital. As I trace loops unbroken, his mind twists and turns in the madness of the day before the day we die, and if he is to be believed, he flies away from the blood-red dirt that held him down with such tightness that you forgive each time he pulled you down in his futile attempts to escape it. He’s in the ground now. So be it.

↫ ⧜ ↬

It’s time for a change. I’m almost halfway through the time I felt I had to count down. I will still be writing these letters, just not necessarily putting them on paper. In my mind, I spin and spin, no one but me knowing the meaning I’ve spun around spinning. Maybe we understand each other better by now, as I hope we do. I could not and cannot tell you the whole truth, so I hope this was enough. My winter hope for you to only ever almost know has melted away. It’s spring in my heart, a more brilliant green than any caged gem could ever hope to be, shading me from the sun and growing strong from the dead I’ve buried under it. Here’s my summer truth to you.

↫ ⧜ ↬

I’d like to think I’m on the edge of understanding what actually needs to change about me and what is best left as a morning-mirror agitation. Finally, I fight back just a little bit. When I was younger, and when I looked in the mirror just a month ago, and when I heard friends’ encompassing statements that do not point north, I thought my change was simple. I thought that to shake off this repetitive angry-man-ness I could not be a man at all. I thought that my task was truly impossible. But now, I believe each word written is something grand. You cannot change who you are, or who you fear you will become, just by growing your hair and looking away from your reflection’s gaze. You have to decide what to be, and go be it. Be what you want to become. Be defiantly. Be something you need to exist. I will be a man, whatever I make that mean. I will never accept their definition of the word. It’s mine. They’ve never written it all out, and so it belongs to me. I will never let it go.

Once I spent my time playing tough guy scenes,

But I was living in a world of childish dreams,

Someday these childish dreams must end,

To become a man and grow up to dream again,

Now I believe in the end;