Unrest

-You tell yourself, you’ve come so far and overcome much but then you close your eyes and when you open them you find yourself a retrograde. In a shell you sometimes overcome, but only in brief instances. Each time it’s like an awakening. A new breath. When your lungs collapse upon themselves, you’re once again crushed within the small confines of that shell. You ask yourself, why each breath is so short, why each awakening is only momentary. In the haze of smoke, you start thinking about the blue pill, the one you took in college. The one that didn’t do much but alleviate the suffering while you read page upon page of Carver, but then after, once you put the book down, what then? There was less thought but the suffering was still there. Perhaps not to the point of tears as it often is now, but it was there, like a cut after the sting of the alcohol has subsided. It’s always been there.
There’s that pestering desire to reconnect. To come in touch with a moment in your past, that will make you whole. There’s the nagging in the idealistic part of you that encourages your search for that lost fragment of time and of yourself. Finding it, you think, might end the failure of your life. You can’t come to terms with it. No, you won’t come to accept that destiny never held a charmed life for you. There exists somewhere in you, though at times dulled by the tears, that enflamed wick of hope that this isn’t your life. Not this way and not fraught with so much sorrow. It’s not your life that you’re living and in time you’ll find the one that belongs to you. This is perhaps, the thought that keeps you going and it’s been so long you don’t even hear it any longer. Not in the auditory nerve of your brain. It’s shriveled in the reverberations of the self and become that tiny cry in the dark, in the back of your mind. It is, the now, almost inaudible sound that in the midst of sobs will force a half smile, only to be washed off your face in the downpour. That ironic smile, of cynicism and faith struggling to force a decision from you, but you can’t. You can’t decide, not now, not in the midst of suffering, and not in the face of so many awakenings-momentary as they may have been.
So you float through the daily routines of life, expecting a moment to reveal itself to you. A turning of fate. Something that will change life, into what has always been the fiber of dreams, and away from the background of every morning. But leaves only find their final resting place and you fear that may be the only thing awaiting you, a tomb. Is there anything more frightening than persevering through suffering to simply receive an ending from it and not a new beginning? Your eyes burn red as the thought persists and life nearly drains from you. The only motion you can sustain is your elbow bending toward the next inhalation of smoke, the only substance that reflects your existence. A billowing dark cloud floating through each day, the dark spot that will soon be removed and dispersed into the seeds of that which is not you. It’s all a cycle and you’ve fallen to the gray area that must exist to annoy perfection.
The question resounds as you lay, your head on your dampened pillow, calling out to god, to some greater existence. ‘Why my thorn, why my bleeding side?’ It is without a purpose other than suffering, you think. When those words were written, he who wrote them was referring to something specific, something with reason, and why do you repeat them, other then that you understand the pain. Then again the question. This time, followed by the moments of consciousness in which you aspired to greatness and purpose. You saw yourself a leader, the leader you would become, if not for the bleeding thorn on your side.