Resignation from the Absurdly Literary Position
Dear Dick,
I hope this letter finds you in a state of literary grace and grammatical correctness. It is with a heavy heart and a dictionary of synonyms that I tender my resignation from my position as Chief Wordsmith Extraordinaire, effective immediately.
Please understand that this decision was not reached lightly. It’s just that after spending countless hours crafting metaphors, similes, and puns, I’ve come to the conclusion that my true calling lies in the lucrative world of competitive Scrabble. I feel that my talents are better suited to arranging tiles on a board than rearranging words in a document.
I will fondly remember the days spent debating the Oxford comma, arguing over the pronunciation of “gif,” and trying to sneak “onomatopoeia” into every memo. However, my ambitions now lie beyond the confines of this office, where the only punctuation I’ll be worrying about is whether or not the triple word score was worth sacrificing all my vowels.
I assure you, this decision is not a reflection of the stimulating workplace environment or the copious amounts of coffee provided. It’s simply that I’ve grown tired of searching for the perfect synonym for “exhausted” and yearn for a challenge that involves more than just battling writer’s block.
I appreciate the opportunities for growth and creativity that this position has afforded me, and I will always cherish the memories of our team’s literary shenanigans. Please know that I leave with the utmost respect for you and the entire team, and I wish everyone continued success in all their future endeavors.
Thank you for your understanding, and may the pen forever be mightier than the sword (unless we’re playing Scrabble).
Yours literarily,
Mamba
To sit in silence is to face oneself. A break in conversation to hear what the other has to say. The other: your feet. The other: your organs. The other: the pain in your back whose cries are stifled by social anxieties each day when you leave the house. A locking door to an empty room, a place of silence. A place of overwhelming complaints, of longings, of terrible, horrible things. To sit in silence is to sit in chaos.
To sit in silence is to reflect into the mirror that is the undistracted heart. When the room floods, what is it that rises to the surface? What sinks? And which will you remember to move to a higher shelf? Do not fret though. The sunken and forgotten with age will become treasure that will be most novel to rediscover. By someone else of course, not you. The next tenant, hypothetical grandchildren, or a sparrow to use for their nest. To sit in silence is to scramble to the top of the trash heap.
To sit in silence is to gaze into the crystal ball you have spent your life creating. To revel and to mourn. To anticipate and predict. To worry and to dread. To sit in silence is to be assured that all is factual that is broadcasted from you and if the forecast is dire, you need to take shelter soon.
To sit in silence is to levitate in a spacious moment. At the counter between customers when the store is empty. On the near-empty bus late at night between stops. On a walk as the battery on your phone finally runs out. To sit in silence is not to sit at all.
To sit in silence is to squirm uncomfortably in your chair, in your clothes, in your skin. To sit in silence is to notice you are physically alone, and to realize the music, the podcasts, the radio are not your friends after all. To sit in silence is to notice silence. To sit in silence is to remember how untethered you are. Levitating, cartwheeling, sleeping, gliding, landing and launching. All you do to feel as though you are going somewhere, reaching something, reaching someone. To watch time pass and feel it pass to always arrive at the same place. To sit in silence is to face oneself.
Eight of Swords
How tight are the cloths bound along my hands?
Are they even tied at all?
I stand on the shore, salty water pooling beneath my feet. The sand gives way. I feel the coolness of a blade on my heel. I panic. Flail.
Fall.
Weeping maiden, trapped.
Am I?
The air only smells of the sea.
Are my captors lying in wait?
Or have they left me to my misery, knowing I would keep myself?
Luctor et Emergo
Here come the
restlessness
Here comes the
ache
Here comes the
urge
Along with a little
guilt and shame.
Always
in these days
in this
Life After
I fight
myself
the Master
Just my brain
think
and things
will change.
But there are
thoughts
hiding
behind thoughts
hiding
all the time
inside my mind
that is not really
mine.
Wrestling with
this host
to get out
from under me.
Can't help but
fight what is
fighting me.
and I've got
this wrong sense
that inhabits me,
rent free.
A blank sheet, or a blank slate?
Sometimes I sit at my desk after work and stare at the city lights. I see the people walking around living their lives. Where'd I go wrong? How'd I end up here? Wasn't I made for better? Common questions racing through their minds and mine. The only thing we have in common is that we don't feel we belong. Every day I put my hands on the keys and try to type. I pour my soul into the paper and it remains blank. A reminder of potential squandered. Is each blank page an opportunity or just time wasted? I don't know. Night after night I sit and wait. Watch and listen. Write and dream but the page remains blank. I wish I could dream but that means I close my eyes. Close your eyes and find the world's passed you by. Now I sit at my desk and stare at the city's lights.
Behind my typewriter
My fingers hover above the keys. There is nothing to say. It's all been said before. What was I thinking? What's the point of words if they're never new? Why say what's been said over and over before? I do not know what to write.
I could write about love. But my love is long gone. I am not made for love. I have tried time and time again but I cannot love. I am too cold, too distant. My heart cannot be one with another person's.
I could write about family. But I have never had one of those. No one wants to hear about a family torn apart by hatred and misery. The screaming, the shattered plates, the slammed doors are my burden.
I could write about life. But I don't have a life. Work has consumed me. I am just a machine, automated. I am nothing but a puppet and capitalism holds my strings, making me dance to its wicked song.
They say write what you know, but I know nothing. Today is another blank page. There is once more nothing to be said. I have lost myself and the words that my soul held.
Visibly Invisible
The world passes by as she sits by the coffee shop and stares through the window. She watches as a mother scolds her son to tie his shoelaces, she watches a young couple kiss and blush, and she watches as a homeless man sits by the pavement, hope long sucked out of his eyes.
Her heart blossoms with a strange feeling, a feeling of lingering longing. Longing for a time when her problems used to be taken care of by someone else, today her problems are her own. nobody is fighting her battles for her today. She curses herself for, ever wishing to grow up fast, to leave the safety of her mother's scarf behind. She wishes she could hide behind that scarf where all her worries would be drowned away by the warmth and love it holds. A single piece of cloth that could take her back to a time when the world used to be different and her biggest worry used to be 'What if my sister eats my ice cream.'
She sighs and looks into her coffee mug, the warmth it held long gone. It sits there cold and unwanted. These days she feels as if her life is a movie, the people are just characters passing by, and she has no control over anything. It had begun to feel like someone else was directing the movie that is her life. All semblance of control was lost to the director. Every night in her dreams she tries to see the person behind the directing chair but each night she gets closer to finding out, she wakes up.
She knows that thinking deeply will not take her anywhere, it never does, all it does is distract her from her pending work. The word work reminds her of all the files kept on her desk in her house that she needs to get back to. The never-ending pile of doom. No matter what she does, it is never enough. It doesn't get the work done, she doesn't sleep peacefully, another night that ends too soon and another morning that descends too fast another day where she has left people disappointed. Sometimes she wonders, is it only her that is so out of it and cannot handle the pressure? how is nobody complaining? She fails to realise that everybody is complaining they are just great actors at hiding it.
She thinks of what she is doing these days, waking up to do meaningless and endless work that puts food on her table at the end of the day. Is it worth doing such a job that you feel disassociated with? no zeal or passion for the subject, doing it just for the sake of doing it. She wishes she could escape the cycle and do something different. She feels deep envy for the people who have been able to achieve and do exactly what they dreamed of doing, those who are happy with their jobs.
She remembers a time when she had a passion and a younger version of her believed that she would be a writer in the future. Writing fiction novels for young adults. She mourns the time when she lost sight of her passion and the other things in her life became so important that it overshadowed her love for writing. She still has documents and WIP folders in her laptop, deep down, buried somewhere among the files of her work, never opened in many years.
No matter how hard life gets, one must never leave behind that which gives one peace. In the hardships of life, we forget that which has helped us through our worst times. Writing used to be her escape from reality, her bomb shelter when the world outside was burning to hell, but it got left behind in the tragedies of life. She made up her mind. She asked the waitress to heat her cold coffee and opened her notebook.
She began writing which hopefully would give her life a new beginning as well, she titled the chapter 'A New Beginning.'
Break the Covenant
A universe inflated like a balloon, still swelling, and our earth within, this impossible speck that by all math should not exist nor the lives in it, we.
Gifted a paradise where true currency is bound to every precious second ticking. It is a countdown.
And I and the countless souls in the city before me, break our minds and trade our souls for money, for a job we began training for as toddlers then a decade and a half of school minimum, so banks can lend us hundreds of thousands for houses with doubling interest, and we pray that all goes well and we can be free 30 years later, when we're old and the countdown nears the end.
And there's no choice. How can we stop?
Each tick tick tick worth more than any prior. Burnout is not mere exhaustion from hard work; it's a symptom of the poisoned soul. An acknowledgement that we spill about our greatest wealth like clumsy children holding cups once runneth over.
Marks for the confidence men, bled dry and thirsty and led across the desert, capable of turning back.
But no. Never.
We keep the path, crawling on glass and sand on bleeding knees and raw palms, our backs steadily whipped.
What a thought that all the universe that came before led to this. I think I'd rather make a go of it on my own. Better to fail and die a hungry death than work another day for someone else to get wealthy off my crippling labor.
Blow the mighty thousand trumpets! Sing you million choirs of angels! God let your voice thundershake the universe, so all, everywhere trembles. And I will belt out the message long lain hidden inside - I am of this earth and no man or woman born has any more right to be here than I. And I will quake the lands and shake the seas with the ferocity at which I ascend my throne, built not on money or power or the labor of others in my employ, but a throne made from my will and my time, and no one else's.
A Middle-Aged Man
He was a man with many aspirations of self-reliance and had lived up to none of them, leaving the impression of not a man but the shell of one. He sat at his desk with his head hanging between slim shoulders, hunched over a computer that was too old to be new, but too new to be thrown away. Perhaps, the man thought, I’ll buy a new computer tomorrow. He’d said that yesterday.
The man’s gaunt and gray hands moved automatically across the keyboard, letter after letter, word after word, paragraph after paragraph. His eyes wandered over the words he’d written, absorbing the letters and not the meaning. There was no meaning, anyway, he thought; I am in the middle of the paper, with no direction and no purpose. No meaning… The middle-aged man had to remind himself what had no meaning – the paper, of course, of course.
The man adjusted his glasses perched on his beaked nose, rubbed the hair on his balding head, and read the same line for the fourth time. Was it the fourth time? Or the hundredth? The man had lost count – he wasn’t counting in the first place anyway.
It was midnight.
"I want a divorce,” his wife said.
He did not register her words yet, marveling at how he used to have to look down at his wife – now it felt like she was staring down at him from a very, very high place. Maybe it was something in her eyes, the man thought.
“What?” He said.
“I want a divorce,” his wife said again. The four words inked themselves into the man’s brain like the four words he’d asked her eighteen years ago when he was young.
It was a quarter past midnight. He sat there, hunched and empty, on a bed that was no longer theirs but his. She’d tried to close the front door behind her quietly but the click had echoed through the empty house – empty because he was no longer a man but a shell. Maybe he never was a man.
Was it last week? The day he’d walked out of his office and saw his wife with a man who kissed her like how a husband would kiss his wife. The woman kissed him back. Young, the middle-aged man thought. The young man and woman walked up the steps to a young and beautiful house and closed the door behind them. Click.
The click reverberated through his bones. It resounded in his head. The man stepped into their – no – his closet and closed the door behind him. Click. He pulled open his drawer and took out a gun he’d bought to kill intruders. But maybe the only person who didn’t belong was himself.
The tip of the gun pressed against the side of his head. He cocked the gun. The click of the hammer on the revolver clicked like the click when the woman closed the door on the empty house. He cocked the gun again, just to hear the click. He thought for a second about the paper he’d left unfinished, the one he was still in the middle of – but it was meaningless anyway. What was meaningless? No, not his paper – his life.
It was half past midnight.
This is the end, he said. Laughed.
The middle-aged man was still crying when
Big body streams
Hard to find the words to describe how life's tribulations degradingly betray us. Fight rather than make peace. Speaking, rather than doing. Exclusive destruction feels good, construction of myself only does for a while.
Life goes backwards, forwards, right and center. Non-linear in the horrifically grotesque image of realism, not a potpourri smelling hippy at his 15th festival this year talking about time.
Staying in one place is too much for me to bear as I sweat beads of boredom. A few years makes the last six months a place of monotonous cocksuckery and melancholy suicidal ideation that brings me right back to the places and people and things which cause my beads to turn to stress and frustration and fear.
Currently I am obsessed with the concept of duality, because there is so much of it in my own life.
I have very little insight into other people's lives since my own is all consuming like a raging inferno at a Texas fraternity's bonfire.
I like my writing and I don't. Others like it, I wonder if they're lying to appease and placate. Adjectives? TOO MANY I suppose. Fuck you that is how I write you can throw this fucking book in the nearest garbage bin, and then jump on in.
Time spent appeasing people is time spent by the weak and miserable. I don't even know you. You're just dumb enough to buy my book. Be strong and miserable. Be dangerous and harmless. Be an asshole and a saint.
Be confident and vulnerably insecure to the point you leave yourself open to immense pain and suffering that permeates a majority of your memories and feelings towards on a daily basis until you are so fucking dead inside that you don't want to kill yourself anymore unless it would make you feel alive and not completely gone as your pride consumes you, what you once felt you can't even feel in your chest.
It's you.