With enough complacency, you can believe that you're happy.

I realized there in that village that all the writers I'd read were harping about the same thing, but never really hitting the target. They were keeping all their points and conclusions as secrets from the reader. For fear that they'd be wrong when it got to the wrong person. Honesty didn't sell. Books were about lies because they were writing to a society that starved for them.
But a novel was a very private thing. They were the means for the right-standing citizens to dream in the land of the taboo and shun those who dwelt in it. And a way for the dwellers to feel alright about what they thought they needed in order to feel okay. And now that I'd found this point, I wanted to trash everything I'd been working on and start it over again. True writing didn't use smoke or mirrors. And it didn't call all the shots and boss you around by making you feel like you know nothing. True writing was these rivers of water, these arteries of blood. It flows as it will, not because there is a reader. It sustains life indirectly, for life has chosen to adapt to it.

She stood up and searched my empty gaze for a reason to forgive me. Finding none, she turned and headed back through the door with her guard-escort. I stayed in the chair and felt all the pieces of the past month swim toward my gut and coalesce into one massive tumor of guilt. And as I left the room and walked through the dingy hallway and passed the guard-turned-comedian who decided he'd make another joke at my expense, the tumor found a vein in my self-respect and began to metastasize.

People used to tell me I didn't know what love was. That I was a kid, and kids couldn't possibly understand something as complex as love.

But as I grow older, I'm starting to realize. My adult self has lost the capacity to love nearly as much as my childhood self could do. I used to listen to all the beautiful notes that my beating heart played for me. Now, just muffles of ecstasy.

And if not for that little bird that keeps me company. The mild denizen of my faceted mind who knocks on its walls and echoes over and over that "Silence is where life hides the truth". If it weren't for those constant reminders, I'd be pulled into the same river of apathy that I swore I hated so much.

The rests and the pauses were what kept Ravel and Debussy up at night, drunk and thinking and writing the path out of hell onto five black lines before they lost the directions.
And though we are not a French Impressionists, the rests and pauses are yours and mine
They keep us banked here, away from the river and under the twinkling night stars.

They keep me dreaming and they keep me aware.
That I love you.

some illusion has been conjured

to live in your place.

 the view of downtown looked strange today
 a firey beacon cut through the fog
 and filled my head with pixy dust.

 i swear I still was dreaming
 when i saw you in that redeeming sky
 when i woke up that morning to your skin smiling back at me
 when we kissed



and now everything is more real
it all tastes and smells and feels
like it's been roused from hibernation

and the memories of each other like smelling salts,
and a touch of caffeine in our veins
we are slumberless beings
swimming through the nirvana that spans the eternity within us.



and as you lay here beside me
after you'd thrown out your garbage
i pondered the thoughts you must have had
to keep such things around.
and if i would one day be one of them.

But you reassured me with your warmth and your words
that the gem growing inside of you
was only ever touched by those who cared enough to see it.
And That, I could live with.

Then, he just laid there with the hazy rain and the cars pounding through it and thought. How silly, he thought. To long for someone you don't even know. How quickly the independence he'd been building had left the scene, to let the crime of her take hold. His mind fell into that wide hole of her temporary absence and laid there as an anchor of stone. Her words were hardly a bed, but he would treat them no other way. Because some masochistic part of him preferred thinking warmer to feeling it. Because he knew she was feeling warmer now instead of just wishing it. Somehow the cold isn't so cold when your own kindness is a replacement for invisible blasts of ice.
It was the risk of death that sustained his new reason for living. And if he could just fend off the hounds of cynicism for one more day, maybe the angel of hope would come to visit him. And maybe just once he could look out at faces he didn't know and be okay with their blankness. And the stories that lay directly behind would never be told, but maybe they were a flame not meant for him.
All her stories. The ones she once experienced and led him through the same. They had once been her own fires, but now ash. No warmth in them save the thought itself. It was their masochism taking hold again, using thoughts as heat ventriloquism. No, they had to fight it and learn to make their own fire. To remember that they had arms and hands and they could do more with them than just crawl up together and feed each other decadent fancies. They could make the cold go away if they tried to.