Coffee Shop Text

I’m growing hard and cold in this tribal world. I don’t think you could say I am happy. With this constant chatter of unrest delving to rest inside my head; they are putting up camp, I can tell, they can say. There’s this perpetual expectance from society of what to be, how to say and why to live. I don’t know if I can ever grow to understand this type of living. I grip Excalibur inside the fist of my hand; it hangs loosely from a silver cord around my neck, claiming to have been pulled from the formidable rock where no one else stood to understand that it takes grace and patience, not sure strength. It’s as if I’m waiting to be saved, to be sure of protection from all of this pounding energy—consuming, eating away my vitality. Who’s ever really sure of their existence? I want to be told I am okay, I am going to make it through the day, that I am good enough. I want to be held and be seen as true. I’ve been thrown out, no packed bags but the clothes on my back. I have no home now, left to wander through tempos unheard of. It’s weird how people look at you, like they know where you stand. People have forgotten the language of telepathy, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t communicate, wordless. We aren’t ever really alone, because in some sense or another, people always know what you are feeling. They meet you--sad, betrayed, this deep seed of resentment and label you as unhappy, depressed. No one can explain how they know specifically, they just do. It’s too much for the comprehension of words. I don’t know how I feel about that. I could easily leave this barren place, with people who feed jealousy and fight for the funniest funny, an attack on the weakest link, but I wonder if it would change anything. Would the people really be different, would I make friends and feel content? Maybe green really is my color, and that is what I needed to realize. I guess I am just tired of feeling below the rest of society, when I think so much too. No one seems to understand my need to be at one of those colleges where thinking is revered, books a well sought-after perfume. I want to sit in those grand libraries; you know one of those brick, home-in-front-of-a-warm-crackling-fire ones? I want to live there. Create a home there. Drink my coffee, study and sleep there. Modern isn’t my thing. Ironic, when journalism is on its last limb, surviving by the newest new—the search for obliterating human communication. Give me a typewriter and that will do. Storytelling must never die. Faces must never fade.

I think confrontation is needed. To go out and be okay with falling down, once, twice or numerous times, you know. We must be open to meeting so many people, even if we don’t necessarily talk to them. To just interact with their energy is good enough. To sit in the open, alone, is the bravest of all. Because you are telling the world, I am okay by myself. I am okay meeting you. We may all be suffering, but I am still okay.  I love this feeling of essential rebellion.

A farewell to nobility in loneliness

The leaping woman arrives in an ambulance of starlight. Take heed young warrior, wanderlust vagabond—these stars burn for only so long; they can fall and die en masse of clouded fire, its grip reaching for a death experienced together, not alone like everyone else. Make a wish, or this search will be your downfall; see there, light-years scrape across battered and bruised skies encased in flaming trails of golden chariots. They didn't race ahead, star-bright, to fall in vain. Once, only once in a lifetime, myths braced for the constellation of gods splattered among the cosmos. Oh, see it pass you by now. Adrift a torrent of wind and sea and deserted dust storms, that leaping woman bathed in starlight felt as if she was rusting as burnt and red as iron. She was no "holy city," so she looked to the moon and waited for its milky cradle, a boat in a rather black, brash sea—a sailor’s friend in Poseidon’s tidal pull. Waves of stars took its shot, they rose up and hit like a tsunami's sucker punch until she clung to the orbit of impermanence. Her family always told her about the principles of practice, but what did they do other than call her a kind of lazy susan, waiting for the heavens to guide her home. So she leapt and she fell, and she snagged and cracked with each broken branch, until she lay still, very still, most like those monastic monks, waiting for the brush of enlightenment and the tongue of its tempters beneath a tree and its grassy roots. She was on the roof of the world, her name known only as Ngari, the remains of a celebrated and ruined kingdom, a place for the rather vast and few. Magical, divine—a final state of nirvana—a place to pilgrimage and find what all those stars lost, alone "to fly high and never fall." No need for another emergency call, this was her final search for home.