I wrote a poem with that title a few years ago, but the problem has changed slightly. I don’t quite remember what the previous problem was, but it seems like it was about how lonely it is. And that’s still true, on some days. But lonely is its own kind of beautiful, and it can be appreciated, too, which makes it shift into something closer to town…a sadness that’s more content because it can see the neighbors and knows that if worse comes to worse, I can walk that far.
I’m enlightened now, but even so, the next time I go a bit further I’ll feel like I’m being enlightened for the first time. But that’s how truth feels - sorta like a pussy slap. HeyOuchWaitNoThatFeelsFuckingGreat.
So anyway. I’m enlightened now.
I felt a wrenching a week or so back. And today felt like a confirmation of what I’ve known to be true for a long time. I want to describe the tearing but can’t, except to say that it felt communicated to me through the universe…not through the person that I feel torn away from. I feel discarded, but not in a hated kind of way. Like in a way where you have to pretend not to like something that you really do like, because it just makes life too hard. There are too many possible consequences to the truth.
The worlds in my head where I spent most of my life were installed to avoid my reality, where who I am was not okay. Well, now that I’ve remembered the truth I can just entertain all real scenarios as if they are just one of my fake worlds. In other words, just be myself and watch how it plays out. Nothing fucking matters anyway, so why not just see what happens?
Enlightenment brings nihilism in waves.
Not everybody gets poetry. And not everybody gets me. But somehow my poetry helps me feel like maybe certain people will get me – people who understand how impossible it is to truly understand yourself let alone another person. It doesn’t matter who I am, as long as I can be. I’m just really on my own, now. No confidante. I’m pretty good company, so I’ll make the best of loneliness while it’s what I’ve got. I’ll enjoy my own company until sexyheroman appears. Or I’ll die without knowing what it’s like for a man to love all of me. Whichever, I guess. I’m just living moment to moment now, trusting that the universe has me headed in some sort of plausible direction towards some favorable outcomes.
And in the meantime, I’ll write. And be completely grossed out by much of it and myself later. Turns out I’m maybe much better at poetry because I’m allowed to write about me with a large amount of artistic license, which is how I live. I want to write about whatever I’m experiencing, but you can’t write about enlightenment without sounding like a complete douchebag, except with poetry. And even then it has the very distinct possibility of being the worst thing you’ve ever written, because you’re trying to use words to describe a fundamental experience. I tried it earlier today with a post about feeling disgusted with humanity…like a feeling of anger but with too much apathy to work up any real momentum. I say humanity but it was mostly the male gender.
I’m annoyed by men right now. Sometimes men are just complete dicks. The reason it’s so fucking hurtful is because that same characteristic on a much lower level is sexy. Women are attracted to that, when it’s just a hint of it. But then when we see it’s really you? You are really and truly sometimes a total fucking asshole? There’s nothing sexy about a guy actually being a complete prick.
I know, I’m capable of being a cunt. But not right now. Right now I’m just a good girl trying to experience all I am and feeling tears to mess that up because men are assholes, sometimes.
I can say that I appreciate men more than any other woman I’ve ever met. I love men. I love that men will let me be smart at different things, and that they know how to have some fucking fun. I love that they approach the same conclusion from the opposite direction and that often times we meet at a perfect masculine/feminine balance. I love that men don’t understand emotions like I do and that it’s something I can give them for giving so much to me.
I love that men break things down to make them quantifiable. There’s something very satisfying about lists and numbers, when everything around you feels completely out of your control. I make lists too, when I need to ride something out without feeling the emotion of what I know is taking place in my reality. Categorizing and sorting settles agitation into a meditation. I regularly feel the pull of Manly Order and Reason, which is an excellent numbing agent.
I appreciate men. And men appreciate me. Until they don’t. I know how that part goes. I appreciate men, until I don’t. Like today, I feel done. I feel like men aren’t worth it, because they aren’t count-on-able. Except, they’re completely count-on-able. Like, 100%. Just don’t count on them to do what you wish they would do, count on them to do what they’re going to do. Because they always fucking do. And women do, too. This is getting very rhyme-y, although I did not intend for that to be the case. But there’s something rhyme-y in the concept I’m trying to present, I guess.
Today I’m not feeling my masculine side. I’m just feminine and quiet and shy and annoyed with a week spent making lists that don’t matter to anything in order to avoid the feeling of being torn apart. Nihilism tidal wave.
I deleted the apathetic-angry-hurt-sad post from earlier today, because once I put a feeling like that into words, it loses its essence and I get a bit disgusted with myself.
I once had a job where I wrote training manuals for a grocery store chain. Somewhere in the process of writing the bakery manual, I remember a technical writing prompt that said: Describe the taste of chocolate.
Uh, it tastes like chocolate, mofo.
Every human who would possibly have occasion to read that manual knows what chocolate tastes like. How am I supposed to describe the taste of chocolate literally and technically, without resorting to poetry?
Chocolate tastes likes that one birthday party where you and your best friend have the exact same six friends and nobody is fighting and your birthdays are three days apart and your mamas are letting you eat whatever you want today so there’s a kitchen full of food and you’re allowed to play music in the basement and dance as sexy as you want because the god you believe in downstairs loves dancing to Paula Abdul even more than you.
That’s why I resort to poetry. Because everybody knows what chocolate tastes like.
And everybody knows what enlightenment feels like. But all of us forget, and I have to remember that nobody wants to read about the literal experience of enlightenment because if they aren’t in that place it’s just frustrating. When you change the technical thing to poetry, everybody can participate. Everybody has moments of risky-and-forbidden-but-safe-right-now-because-you-have-permission to remind them how chocolate tastes.
But it’s harder with enlightenment. Ironic, I know. And frustrating. The easiest and simplest truth that we all have inside us is the hardest thing to describe, which is maybe why it has been oft reduced to ‘I am.” And while that is very close to describing enlightenment, it’s no good for a writer. We need words.
If I can’t describe it with words, I’m not a writer.
Oh, wait. I’m not a writer. I’m not a poet. I’m not anyword.
I am.
I am, but it’s hard to let me be.