Deej, I Totally Miss You

I haven’t been writing much lately.

Intended Hallucinations

Do you have a head-voice? Thoughts, that is; but more like the wordsman of thoughts. As if thoughts are like colors where the head-voice is the light that illuminates color. Do you have this? Or am I the only one?

 

Is it schizophrenia, having this head-voice? I don’t even have just one, I have many. Memories swirl around the puddle of my mind and if I listen closely enough, I can hear the sound of laughter, or a voice that belongs to, say, my sister, and I’m not hearing it, but it is there. If I were hearing it, it would be like someone talking on the other side of the wall: where you can’t understand what they’re saying, but you know they are speaking English.

 

My mind is a busy room where there are many different conversations happening at once. I can concentrate on one at a time (the closest ones to me) and understand what they are saying, but there are lapses sometimes when the voices closest to me aren’t speaking and I can hear the other voices of the busy room that is my mind and they sound like gibberish. Sounds like incomplete sentences. Like I just jumped into a novel halfway through without reading the beginning. I have these thoughts, this head-voice, that sounds like that.

 

How well do you visualize? If I were to say:

 

“Imagine a stairwell. With ten steps. And there is water at the bottom of the stairs. And the water is light blue and inviting.”

 

…what else do you see? What does your mind paint for you that I didn’t describe? That I didn’t tell it to paint?

 

I, personally, have a hard time visualizing. I have to put the words down first. The visualization comes from the words. I cannot really visualize in the abstract realm without first expressing it.

 

For example, when I draw, I cannot first visualize what I want to draw and then have the pencil manifest that visual. I just can’t. I see only the blank piece of paper. Instead, I have to begin drawing. Let the pencil do the visualizing for me.

 

I don’t know if you are that way.

 

Probably not.

 

Imagine you took the first step down the stairwell. You are feeling apprehensive, but you don’t know why. It feels like you are a school-kid again, waiting for the bus to come and take you there. You’re nervous, but what is there to be nervous about?

 

You realize that you are intensely aware of the moment. As if the world became, or was always and has ever been, only this.

 

The white walls with plaster for texture, the one light and its dim illumination, the creaking oak floorboards on the stairs, and the shimmering blue water, like the ocean in Greece.

 

For some reason, you are indoors, but you don’t have to be. This is just how my words have decided it so.

 

You take the third step. Where did that second step go? You don’t remember taking it, but you did. And so you must have been too busy noticing everything.

 

The fourth step. You can see things swimming in the water and it feels like you shouldn’t be going in it. Like a child feels when approaching the ocean for the first time. You won’t even do it, except that the door behind you, at the top of the stairs, is closed and locked. You forgot that it locked when it closed, but what was on the other side of the door? You don’t know. Or, rather, you simply don’t wish to remember. There isonly this. Only has there ever been this.

 

You take the sixth step. Seventh, eighth, and on the ninth your toes touch the water. It is shallow here on the ninth step and the water is surprisingly warm. Inviting. Yes. But what are the things that are nipping at your toes? They are not fish. They are little children. The size of fish, but with human anatomy.

 

The tenth step is the last one. After that is a drop off into the water. You hesitate here on the last step, but the water seems to just pull you in. And there you go, into the warm submersion. Into that which is unknown and apprehensive. But that which is warm and inviting. And you see the endlessness of the ocean. It is clear before and there are sunrays broken from the thickness of the water.

 

It’s beautiful.

 

I just gave you that. I led you to visualizing that. And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing. I gave you something. I hypnotized you into seeing what I see. Into thinking as I think. But the beauty doesn’t end there: you saw all of this completely different than I did. You painted a whole new world that has never before been painted in the minds of man (or anything else!). That was you. The real and original you. The words are the same, just as reality is the same for everyone, but the way we read them and the things we see in between them will always be new. Will always be you.

 

Rejoice in that.

 

 

 

Love

Where is the love that I seem to have forgotten how to fall in to?

 

I cannot find it in a book or in music. It isn’t in these words or in my guitar. I’ve looked. Sometimes I find love in drawing, but it isn’t where I left it last. It’s gone!

 

Love, come back to me. You are all I need. And you, it seems, are all I can’t find.

 

I could use you in the shape of a woman, or in the material of a story. I could use you as the way sunlight plays with water, or the way a sentence plays with this page.

 

But I can’t find you.

 

Where is the love that keeps me from melting, spilling the essence of who I am now all along the floorboards? I woke up feeling an intense desire, which is the sudden absence of love. A craving for love. And sleep left me abandoned. Maybe that’s where love is: asleep. Maybe I am that love’s dream, though I, myself, am awake.

 

I step into the world of sleepy people, careful not to make sudden noises or have harsh contact. This sharp world with its light and sound, so unlike the soft edges of sleep. I eat, though there’s a hunger that goes deeper than my stomach.

 

I do what I resort to doing… I resort to doing what I would resort to doing if I found myself trapped, lost, in a dream. If I found myself in purgatory, or woke up in a coma, I’d resort to what I do now.

 

I write.

 

I’m all write.

 

There’s nothing left, but write.

 

Write on, I say, though my fingers bleed.

 

Love on, I whisper, though it feels fake.

 

That’s where love is. It is hiding there next to confidence. I see you two, crouched in the shadows of my mind. I see that you are just two children, hiding from the watchful eyes of an adult, playing your games of pretense until the game feels real and what’s real feels fake.