this or that

“The completeness of the ultimacy of intersectional partiality with compliance and implementation of both autotypes and female agency should make such platforms so complete,  they become redundant.”
The sort of incomprehensible statement that seems to define us today… 

I suppose it is my fault for liking shock and awe pages. For giving into that feel good feeling that comes with reading a overly simplistic  set of articles that claim to involve occurrances of bigotry, misogyny, body shaming, and how they were put rather finally down, killed off. Or a set of cute cats, turtles, baby humans, or small acts of kindness involving money and notes and possibly a meal and how we all are people after all in such meaninglessly presented ways.  There is this fundamental act of making a POINT. Like how x shared a lengthy post about how x doesn’t do this or that or let her or his children do this or that, when this or that is a widely accepted thing to do. There is a basic level of simple inspiration, except the language and thought process of the news page or viral news or whatever is not present, all there is is a desire for shocking headlines and clicks and money…Or there is a moral simplification… Feminism is feminism and there’s only one way to think about it, and thus only stories that prove this one way will be reported on. We will either report on your cute cat or human rights, there’s nothing else worth talking about because we make the social simplication that the shallow fun loving cool kids used to because we, like them, want to be popular widely. The language is so basic and so minimal, its like we all forgot how to speak, its like we don’t care about words anymore or their mystical power, we don’t care about un reality or imagination or all the things we cannot perceive, all the wistfulness inside our heads…

Most “inspirational” stories spread widely online are sickening because of their overbearingness or simplified or unempatheticness or black and whiteness or silly or preachy or holier-than-thou or look-at-me or arrogant-humbleness or show-offy or wordy or bubble worldness or lack of reality or lack of any literary respect for language by the writer of the stories or blind followingness of their proponents/readers or the almost-religious-like way they are spouted by almost every other person today as the “truth” or their rigidness or their claim not just to rightness but also to being the only right way,  or the fact there is just something so awful and materialistic about selling and buying inspiration, which is almost done by everybody today…

I will despise you if reading self-help books is your idea of literature…

If any of those italic things in the second paragraph occur, many news agencies seem to flock to it like the small brown chemical-ly ants that dart after any artficially sweetened mango juice set on table tops…

What happened to the wild and the free, the sense that the truth is so deep and justice isn’t shallow or easy, what happened to depth and sadness and feelings and peopleness, 

What happened to the nockity monster or the Oura or the Oau, 

What happened to non-conformity and being different?

What about the eerie and the odd and the strange and the mad? What about life and soul and the small things that really matter? 

Why are we all so inhuman in our clicks?

Its all about money.

I am NOT making a POINT. I am sick of the internet doing that.

the lab

So you’re working in straight white clothes, your lab coats so neat and starched, you are always on time, all the time, and there’s a smile, a humble one, on your face,

Just bordering on a self-satisfied smirk, every word you say comes out perfect,

Every word you try to say helpfully comes across as a little bit eager, a little bit happy, just the right amounts, but you- all of you- are part of that “clique”, that clique of success, where your lives are so smooth and fine, and everythings going your way- you make sure of that. Your world is your friends, you’re always cheerful-sometimes callously so, and you don’t see how much they hurt around you, you don’t see their hearts or their compassion- all you see is their outward and not what’s inside, all you see is the fairground elite, 

All you see is that failing grade or the dirt stain on that shirt or the messy hair or the smelly socks,

All you straight edged white coated lab-bers,

All you all saw was the stain on the dress, the messy, curly, spilling hair, the smelly socks, the fat-ting stomach, the falling grades, and the eerie wordlessness, that complete lack of speech accompanied by a rather desperate frightened look in the eyes, 

That look that you seemed to detest, that drew you in with your mockery,

You never looked any deeper, or you never felt any higher than your own damn fixation of what real should look like.

Look at me now. Look at you now.

new girl

The feeling of being almost half-real, where every experience no longer has that continuity of

all the years of time that carried a consciousness that somehow streamed, slowly writhing through the world you lived and made inside, leading and flowing and ebbing and swaying, as it passed through those years, carrying you, and yet you changed continuously, letting strips of your self float and writhe and become something else, until

it forms you as you are now, but in another nanosecond

you have changed again,

and now, you don’t really carry that feeling of being formed by years,

now you are new, you are just born, you are unchained, and unconnected with the past, your past,

so everything that your consciousness floats through, such as time and space and other such unreal things, feels so different and new and exciting again, because you are new, and bursting with it; its not that you have forgotten your past self, you just don’t really focus on her or remember in your old ways anymore, its like

that girl who walked along the drain wall, feeling like she was a rotting worm being sucked into the soil

or that girl who waited in the sudden burst of detached yellow leaves, from the old trees, as the winds of the storm rose up like a pounding, roaring drum through her body,

or the one that slid into a pit after having knowing, and knowing too much,

or the girl who ran through the safe ways, as she had thoughts of living in that pit again,

are other people, are someone else, are movies, are old  black and white films, are crumbled books from the middle ages, are rocks from the stone caves, are stardust bits, from eons ago,

while now you are new, the air tastes different, you feel like you are blanketed in something warm and fuzzy always, and you feel graceful, and light,

like a girl again.

the new girl.

next

So I go through the motions and move through the thoughts but there is something missing, something more because inside I feel so blank and empty and devoid, in a vast devoid-ness, of something that I can only remember. I know my thoughts had a greater affinity with words, my mind was much more busy and alive, and I wasn’t frozen like I am now. There is ice where there should be words and there is fire on their edges, forming a bulwark against being something more.
Could I cry? Could you cry?

I remember being alive, ten times more alive than my normal self, I remember being free and full of wonder as my brain whirled through the brittle whittled galaxies, I remember caring much more about other than my self. 

Now I tire. 

How alive my life used to be when my mind was alive! And now I feel soggy and lumpy and worn out and not truly alive. What happens next? 

I want to go to Nowhere* again.

*From Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones.

Orange Mountains

Every hot wind carrying ancient dust that blows in our faces hears us out as we swear that we won’t be like the others, we won’t be like the rest. Our hearts rise and fall in waves in ebbs and flows and foamy hot seas, our longing for something more swirls around us and holds us transfixed. All we can do is think of the other even as we search for nebulae in our backyards and right now I hang adrift.

I am scared.

We walk along the ocean shore, my hand trailing in yours and you smile so young and warm and I wonder where I left it all behind, when I left it all adrift, why I became all unglued at the seams, how I am walking on nothing now. Could we go there if we sought it enough, could we go where no one knows us, could we go to the place of the orange mountains and red valleys and find the places where the wind begins or the places where the waves began? Could we travel to the ends of the universe on the back of the force of the waves and winds, could we meet our voices from decades ago floating on the edge of the ether? Didn’t we ponder over that on that cool evening next to the sea as my eyes met yours? They contained the sun and the universe in them. 

Would we know why, would we never cease to wonder? Could we fly? We believed in it so much, so much. 

The sun was setting.

Oh what made life so unique and alive and wonderful when so much of what we think and do is repitition? Motions, wants, sensations, movement. Something intangible, something that cannot be defined and yet it makes life worth living every moment there is. Every breath we have.

inside the lake

It was the middle of ’04, and you could call it summer, except it was perpetually summer there. We sat in a circle in the grass and laughed at every little blade of grass, feeling that startlingly enchanted feeling of friendship fill us up like licorice balls and fries. My writing was illegible even then, as I wrote what friends meant to me in the lines of the torn out paper from someones biology notebook.

It was so at odds with what I feel now- the mantra on my lips now of “I hate life sometimes, I love life, sometimes.”

We dumped our notes into an old yellow ice cream bowl that one of us had randomly rescued from the trash, and filled it up with leaves and rocks and sunk it to the bottom of the lake. It would stay there forever.

I wonder if its still there, that ice cream bowl full of notes of what friendship meant to us all those years ago, at the bottom of the grimy green algae-filled lake where only the hardest fish can swim, the most concrete like be-gilled creatures.

We grew older and we grew apart. It was strange to me how the others were so wonderful back then, and how I detest them on some level now. One of us never talked after we graduated from school, because, she stated so frimly, she didn’t beleive in friends forever after school ended. One of us talked way too much, that she overrode what any one else had to say and never ever listened properly. One of us hurt others, and was hard and cold and unforgiving and never apologised even when she hurt others. She hurt me every time we met, without fail. And last there was me, the judger, the quiet one, and the one who couldn’t forgive any of the slightest of slights, even when I was at fault too.

Because I didn’t keep in touch, I didn’t talk and I hurt them too.

contrary things

They promised that they would live to a song of their own making when they could sing and make music. It would be like a patch of grass, that song, floating on the ocean, on an endless wave. There would be a toy house and toy flowers and a half moon overhead and a cloud overhead and underneath and a sense of sorrow in the music that told her tale and a sense of hope that told his.
High notes would simmer with drum beats and low notes with the ocean waves. There would be a spoonful of freedom and a cup of wildness in it and some of the song would be for the people and some of it only they would know. There would be something spicy about their song and something bittersweet  and nostalgic and scary. There would be warmth and this would swirl up in a cacophony of simmering sound until their souls feel like they could fill the sky or the sky could fill them and there would be a breeziness and a swift rise and fall of notes as the song swelled and came to an end. They would live one day, they promised, to that song.