Being here, by Mark Garry, thread pins, beads
don’t say no if you don’t know. it’s the biggest mistake you can make. i’d rather feel a sting than nothing at all. failure is finite and lasts as long as you let it. never knowing is a kind of ghost that will haunt you forever.
nail a dollar bill to your wall and let it tell you what time it is. leave those hours and minutes lost in couch cushions. wake up and wonder what happened to your life.
the winter of my guts. the spring of my mind. an internal twilight. a reverse zombie — all brain, no appetite.
as i’m getting older i think more and more about the way i used to be. this happens more, i imagine, because the more years you’re alive, the more memories you carry (ones that you can actually remember) and there’s more to compare. as a teenager i felt that i was in a natural arc — yes, i thought about these things — i could see a clear connection between my childhood and the awkward thing that i had become. i dreamt of the day when i would see that arc snap and i would just run, free as a different person, free as a transformed butterfly, an adult, a completely brand new thing.
it happened and it didn’t. it happened in that the arc snapped. i now view my childhood self as a phantom limb — as something that once acted by my command, but now does not anymore. it’s now a preserved thing — something finished, but carried still. i have to keep it so long as there is life in my limbs and a brain in my head. it is a bittersweet weight.
it didn’t happen in the sense that nothing transformed automatically. i couldn’t just sleep my way to wonderful wrapped in some cottony armor that hung on the elbow of a branch. i had to get out of bed and move. i had to wear the change on my body and become a freakish half-thing, girl/woman, and make those public, loud, fragmented mistakes that half-things do. and then you must construct a sense of purpose and direction and identity all by yourself, out of whatever bits that you are given, whether you know how to put it all together or not. human beings have invisible cocoons and wide-eyed hibernations. it is strange and it is good and it is the equal of us all.
i am not so different than a fleck of colored glass that tumbles and paints its way around the rolling eye of a kaleidoscope. i too am tossed around a spinning thing. i too want nothing more than a little light. i too make nothing more than noisy, moving pictures.
