Core Sometimes I get lonely too. Other people can be clingy. Were all clingy.

Id hold on for longer than I should if there was ever any stimulus to leave. Its that last look back, the glance over the shoulder to check if theyre still looking at where your face was or if theyve turned their back hoping that you have too. We enter and leave so many times, if we kept track, it would be pathetic how much it added up to, because I think that the leaving would be more. Or it would feel like more because by my quick calculations, in order to leave you have to have entered first, so its all in our heads. It always is, it always feels like more than maybe it is. You put on this weight before you leave, you take on someone elses burden and when you leave you have to find someone to help you take it off and then you enter that and you start over. I think thats why marriage doesnt work so often. People are often so used to putting on and taking off with someone else. Clothes, emotions, masks, coats, performances. We all have put something on and then the habit is for us to have someone else help us take that off, someone other than the person who helped us put it on. We say for better or for worse, sickness or health, and etc. but we forget for burden or free. Because theres always a burden, whether or not we are proud enough or strong enough to successful carry it is always the question. All goals are burdens in their own way, not necessarily being negative in that fact; religion, and love and freedom and prosperity and the pursuit of happiness and whatever other ideal you want to insert in this sentence to make you connect, to make you feel like youre not the only one. Not the only one whos ever had these thoughts in those fleeting moments and pushed it out as quickly as it came uninvited into the bustling expanse of your conscious. As I write this, I know Im not the only one. Not the only one to have ever put this down, I know that there are others who felt like me. But I feel like theyre once in a generation, or at least once in a good 100-mile radius, because Ive only met a few in my teen years. There mustve been someone great who bore my burden, the burden of great thought and ambition with not enough time. Knowing there wasnt enough time, like when you hear that you have 5 minutes left on a test and youre not going to get a perfect score but you try to finish as many as you can and get as many right as possible. But at the same time, you dont worry, you just move forward and you correct later, you dont analyze it in the moment. I live recklessly more nowadays than ever, but not too much because I want to continue living relatively recklessly and that means I want to keep all of my body intact and working properly so I dont participate in half the half-cocked activities that my close friends do. Thats the strange thing about close friends, theyre never really that close, you have to pull them in, and theyre there for while you really need them and want them simultaneously, and then they stand a safe distance away, reserved to themselves but still being the same loud or still outwardly quiet people that they are. Returning to my most recent analogy, I would go so far as to say that were all standing a good 7 feet away from each other, talking in fluctuating volumes depending on the time and convincing ourselves that we are moving closer together but in reality, or in the reality of the analogy, its like the dream that you have where youre running or falling or flying and you keep blinking and youd swear that you were getting closer to whatever destination, but youre not and youre just that same distance away, with the illusion of velocity keeping you safely motivated and perfectly stationary. And thats especially bold or cowardly of me to say because Im one of the most motivated people I know, one of the most ambitious and inwardly brave that I think Ill ever meet yet still this one thought plagues me. But I think thats truly the way its meant to be. I think that this idea of reaching 1

goals is just about chasing something. I say something because its always something, unless you choose to quit the chase, in which case youre chasing a boring peace, a peace that you will never know because it is literally in us to always be in motion until the day we die. Death isnt too much of a somber thought, but its the know-it-all inside of us that knows we dont know what it really is although we postulate on it all day long, so we ignore it because it doesnt agree with us. Have you ever thought about infinity? I think God mightve put a mental block there, to keep us from really understanding it. Whenever I think about infinity, I see an angel, not a true angel but the angel from the Christian storybooks that I used to repeatedly indoctrinate myself with as a child. The angel is holding a trumpet, and he isnt making any sound with it, or I couldnt tell at least because the mental image is swept hastily away before I can further analyze it. And when the image is swept away, there are no thoughts at all. In fact, I find myself with an absolutely blank mind directly following the trumpetholding angel, struggling to recover the process that I had been going on before I had tumbled off the edge of the universe in my own mind. Thats a long digress. Its becoming one of my worst and best habits as I become an adult. I dont believe in ever becoming an adult, because that suggests in itself that youre done growing, and if youve read closely at all up to this point then you know that youre never done growing. I believe that this is the strangest thing Ive ever done, putting my deepest thoughts into a book. Many do this, but few do in the way that I do now. Storytellers hide behind characters and narratives and parables and themes and every other fairly useless thing that were ever taught in English and Literature classes. Not to be rude or dismissive of the art of literature, the English language, or my past English teachers. Philosophers hide behind their ornate truth, creating an ideal or apocalyptic world and then putting it next to the actual world, and then putting themselves safely behind the illusion like the Wizard of Oz. Poets, or in the more modern and accurately used term rappers, put their life into coherent words and force the listener and readers to decode and take whatever they want from it. This is why many artists are misunderstood, because there is no truth there, only something that one person made and saw as one thing but can be perceived as another by any other person in the world, should he or she please. For all we know, Jonathan Swifts A Modern Proposal was an honest, brazen attempt to solve the poverty issue of Englands Ireland by eating Irish babies rather than a masterpiece of satire. Thats the beauty of art; its everything and nothing at all. But thats more philosophic than anything and I honestly despise philosophers to an extent because they claim ownership of a knowledge which can never be absolute of mans own capacities to understand. I speak in many absolutes, and so do some of my idols, so were all our own philosophers. This occupation becomes dangerous when we attempt to be the philosopher for another. This isnt to dismiss religion, because Im a religious person myself and have been so since birth, although I havent truly understood religion until about the past year or so. Religion is about faith and philosophy is about predicted and projected knowledge of human behavior and the universe and everything in between, so I side with religion because I figure that since I know Im right and there i s no way to prove this, no one can ever tell me otherwise.

Absentee 2

Things are moving faster than ever nowadays. Every sensory experience Ive ever taken in has led me inevitably to the present, and they always end up coming to serve a purpose in some strange and expectedly unexpected way. I subscribe to the idea that since our brains process our present at a slightly delayed rate than the speed at which things are actually happening. It gives me a chance to process, to be content in being in second but always feel that Im close enough to eventually come in first. Were always chasing our dreams, and subsequently our waking nightmares, if you choose to see it that way. Either way you choose to see it, life is only as you take it. Whether you see yourself as living exactly in the present or an irrelevant fraction of a second behind it, you must make the choice to stay engaged in whatever version of the present you accept. Otherwise, youre irrevocably behind and not content or rushing things and similarly displeased as things come before their due time. In my present, Im making a late night run to the store. The kind of late that you dont feel like you should be anywhere but home, but still late was my thing in a way. I like being on time to events and such, but taking things in my own slowed stride was a part of me. I even walked slightly slowly, especially when I was alone. I had to go to the bathroom as soon as we arrived at the store, so I went and upon entering stared at the immaculate bathroom for a moment. It was very clean for the kind of store this was, or its reputation. Having hosted so many uncaged yet still so highly demanded Black Friday brawls and other spectacles of the lower class, the bathroom looked surprising very good, and smelled good. I noticed the promise to the customers to keep the bathroom clean and to maintain a quality standard on the wall opposite the mirror. I assumed that everyone notices these in every bathroom, clean or dirty, and usually I would ignore it but this time it kept its promise so I was glad to do my business knowing that I wouldnt be flooded by the reminder that other men had relieved themselves without any type of quality standard in this same room many times that day. I finished and looked at myself in the mirror, about 4 feet from the sink, and scrutinized the lack of cosmetic value that the lackluster lighting might add to ones face given the specific contour and shape. I always looked at myself like a patient in a doctors office when I went to the bathroom. I didnt care if anyone noticed, because theyd assume that I was looking for an escaping blemish, which I wouldnt be because no matter what my diet or amount of times that I had rubbed my face, I never struggled with acne or anything of the sort. I used to be ugly, and there was always that creeping suspicion that I would look in the mirror one day and see the return of this quality and I wouldnt be mad, I would just continue my day remembering what it was like to be ugly and move along with the present. That isnt for people to read and then proceed to see me with a pity of a past myself which I have successfully left long behind and comfort it with a shallow compliment that they would suppose would go a long way with someone of low self-esteem like me. Im actually highly confident and have what I would like to think are many friends, or at least a good amount of close friends and many endeared acquaintances. Im also very considerate, or think myself to be, and I wouldnt waste one of my close friends nor acquaintances time by reading to them from the deep annals of my mind what Im now putting down for someone to willingly pick up and read when they are willingly wasting their time. So I walked out and found my father again, who had already finished picking up what we needed, and we proceeded to the checkout. The lines that were serviced by actual employees were all closed, but half the self-checkout lanes were open so we went to stand in line for these few and the one which had an employee behind another desk helping other customers. There was a couple in front of us, white and typical-looking. Not typical for white, just typical for late-night shoppers in a middle-sized town. I just then noticed how quiet and empty the store seemed then. It was like the quiet after the mad rush of 3

shoppers going to buy necessities that were not actually necessities following the snowstorm our town had just had, except everything was still very well stocked and neat. The couple in front of us was talking in happy tones and I finally noticed them after snapping out of my own dry amusement at the empty store. The man was kind and smiling, talking to his wife about things that surely no one else cared about but also things that he didnt care if anyone knew. This is precisely the reason why I cant remember what exactly what they were talking about now, so maybe this was a third property of their conversation. I noticed something signature in their voice, something rare especially in these dimming days of the rush of everything. Their voices sounded like Christmas. I havent met many normal people who dont like Christmas. It provides an opportunity for all, for many different things, and whether or not we take advantage of opportunity, we enjoy it nonetheless. I just stood there and continued to appear absentminded as I listened to their acceptably mundane conversation because I loved Christmas and I wanted to hear it in someone. It was one week till Christmas and it still felt nothing like this. The womans cheeks were moderately red and she was smiling. The man had picked up something from his cart and upon being pleased with it (like someone would do after tasting a very good drink or taking a hit of a strong blunt, supposedly, because I cant have ever actually witnessed this or my reputation as a good kid would be ruined and I couldnt go on pretending that I was that) and noticed that it needed batteries.