Our culture is melancholy for the days that were never theirs, nostalgia dripping from every perfectly diminished Polaroid picture. Our culture wants to live the life of luxury, fame, wealth, but we crave the life of love and two bit camera tricks. We want the world to mean so much more than it does -- a 500 Days of Summer syndrome between nature and humanity.
We want summer nights driving in the car to the soft melodies of star's music, looking up to the pitch black sky to try and find the source of such longing. We live between the happy moments and the sad, the calm and the adventure, somehow between yet not accomplishing either.
Our culture longs for the things they don't have. The warm nights with lovers never quite lovely enough for the taste of a romantic, too intimate for the independent. Where is the line drawn? It surely must be dotted because we've fallen through the cracks without a map to lead us home again. The minotaur knows no sorrow compared to the labyrinth we must maneuver to reach our goal. The sphinx knows no riddle like that of the human condition.
We are contradictory. We leave behind that which is meaningful in order to feel meaning, yet desire those we've left or lost. We want to feel the anchor drop upon finding the photo of a long lost friend, the edges frayed, the filtered photo fading away, losing its inhabitants. Yet no such photo exists. It never has. Our photos are yet incomplete, and that is the feeling we are in search of. To feel incomplete. To be alive, to be loving, to be lost and lonely and craving, to be wishful, is to be incomplete.
Our culture is lustful
Our culture is lost
Our culture is longing
We are joyous
We are wistful
We are found
We are gone
We are between.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Monday, July 15, 2013
To A Dearest Friend
Yearning. It's one of the most complex creations. It begins in the feeling of desire, branching across nostalgia and melancholy to rest in its conclusion at the new flower buds created at the branch's tip. Yearning is a tree that sprouts quickly and is forever rooted, deep in the core of your chest. It feeds off of your fears, your hopes, desires, the spiders that crawl in your limbs and the sun that shines through your eyes.
Yearning appears and suddenly you're lost in memory. The years on the sand; the whispers in a dim-lit volvo; the afternoons of tea and hospitality. Then can never be now and now can never then, but with the right tune and a quiet mind you can bring back those moments with such clarity that sometimes your yearning is satiated. You've fed the beast and woke the melancholic monster hiding deeper within, and that's a monster best dealt with from a distance.
Yearning is forgotten during daylight hours. It is a vampire of the mind, sheltering itself from the comfort of sunlight and calling out to its lovers as the clock strikes midnight. Its in those late moments that yearning leaves its desire irreplaceable. A placebo here bears no warmth of ignorance. The lack of medicine burns as the infection spreads until no friends could ease the pain of yearning for that closest friend. Yet upon waking in the morning the infection has cleared, the memory erased. The vow to call is lost, or if remembered becomes the glint of electronic words sent into the air.
Yearning becomes a blog post in the late evening hours. It becomes a tree of nostalgia. It becomes a picture of silhouettes in the fading evening light. A vow to call. A letter crafted with weary eyes addressed
To A Dearest Friend,
and what was intended as just a stylistic flair in an over stylized attempt to communicate an aspect of human-ness becomes something more literal. An actual letter, slowly losing style and gaining only friendship and longing, reading:
I miss you, dearly. Though it never seems we meet for long enough, I have found you to be one of the few people I miss when I'm away, wholly and truly. I am absolutely honored and joyful to be able to call you my friend, and someone who I can rely on. Someone I can joke with, have fun with, drink tea with; someone I can be honest with, talk about deep complexities of life with, or debate symbolism with. I have no other friend nearly like you. And I am failing right now at describing what I mean completely. But as is said, these words are futile devices.
and the letter, leaving with a simple
See you soon
left so much left to be said with no way to say it, and left the yearning, the memories, the melancholy for another night, when the daylight waned again.
Yearning appears and suddenly you're lost in memory. The years on the sand; the whispers in a dim-lit volvo; the afternoons of tea and hospitality. Then can never be now and now can never then, but with the right tune and a quiet mind you can bring back those moments with such clarity that sometimes your yearning is satiated. You've fed the beast and woke the melancholic monster hiding deeper within, and that's a monster best dealt with from a distance.
Yearning is forgotten during daylight hours. It is a vampire of the mind, sheltering itself from the comfort of sunlight and calling out to its lovers as the clock strikes midnight. Its in those late moments that yearning leaves its desire irreplaceable. A placebo here bears no warmth of ignorance. The lack of medicine burns as the infection spreads until no friends could ease the pain of yearning for that closest friend. Yet upon waking in the morning the infection has cleared, the memory erased. The vow to call is lost, or if remembered becomes the glint of electronic words sent into the air.
Yearning becomes a blog post in the late evening hours. It becomes a tree of nostalgia. It becomes a picture of silhouettes in the fading evening light. A vow to call. A letter crafted with weary eyes addressed
To A Dearest Friend,
and what was intended as just a stylistic flair in an over stylized attempt to communicate an aspect of human-ness becomes something more literal. An actual letter, slowly losing style and gaining only friendship and longing, reading:
I miss you, dearly. Though it never seems we meet for long enough, I have found you to be one of the few people I miss when I'm away, wholly and truly. I am absolutely honored and joyful to be able to call you my friend, and someone who I can rely on. Someone I can joke with, have fun with, drink tea with; someone I can be honest with, talk about deep complexities of life with, or debate symbolism with. I have no other friend nearly like you. And I am failing right now at describing what I mean completely. But as is said, these words are futile devices.
and the letter, leaving with a simple
See you soon
left so much left to be said with no way to say it, and left the yearning, the memories, the melancholy for another night, when the daylight waned again.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Never Lovers Lost in the Sea
The wind whipped through the half-rolled window of the bronze jeep and wrestled his dark hair from its mold. As he drove down the overgrown road creatures of all sizes leapt from the brush that was shoved aside by the grumbling vehicle, this foreign being in the world of instincts. With reckless abandon, the beast and its inhabitants reformed the long forgotten road, a path to the edge of existence - the edge of thought and the edge of reason. When they set out on this journey, they searched for a place to get lost, though not physically. They sought a place to be lost in an absolute, lost in a nothingness. To forget about existence entirely.
This is the night they found what they were looking for.
The team alternated driving and resting, rarely settling down for long in any one location. To settle is to have found. So they slept on the road. Faith drove most often, though she was not the one to have discovered their location. It was Sane's Jeep they drove, but he was commonly found asleep in the back seat. In fact, Sane, Faith, and the third companion Rose were all asleep when the beast growled down the path. But the driver knew the way.
When the Jeep began to draw tracks in the sand, dusk was making its arrival. The creatures of day were settling into themselves for the night, while the darker unknowns hid just out of sight of prying eyes, always in the peripheral. They meant no harm. The passengers awoke as the beast shuddered to sleep, reluctant to settle into itself and see nothing to be found. Unlike the other creatures, this beast was alone.
Faith was the first to sink her toes into the sand. She walked a short distance away and sprawled herself on the cooling sand, her soft blonde hair reflecting the ideals of the sunset and her eyes closed to the world. Rose came and sat next to her, looking out over the sea and watching as the tide repeated its endless cycle, too timid to reach up to these new visitors and too interested to leave completely. Sane stood behind them, looking up at the changing sky, watching as the stars and the sun intermingled, destined to be acquainted but never lovers. The driver was the last from the vehicle. He left the keys in the ignition, and walked over to his friends, his strangers, his lovers. He let them be for a while, soaking in their existence, before saying with a smile
"Lets go"
The group looked at each other and quietly smiled. They took each others hands and were lovers on their walk to the tide's edge. As their grips loosened and their hands fell from each other they found themselves as strangers, yet strangers with impossible knowledge. They stripped from their clothes, leaving the denim, the cotton, the polyester to the creatures who made their home in the night. As Sane looked back one last time, the road they travelled down was no more, swallowed by the forest, swallowed by the darkness, swallowed by the found. The bronze beast was gone as well, its tracks leading to an absence. But that was of no concern. Nothing was of concern any longer.
They stepped out into the sea, leaving the beach behind them with their past. All that was left for them was to move forward, go farther into the ocean. And so they went.
As the sun disappeared behind the horizon, so did they. They were no longer to be seen, no longer to exist or not exist. They simply vanished on the other side of the edge, lost in the sea. Lost together.
This is the night they found what they were looking for.
The team alternated driving and resting, rarely settling down for long in any one location. To settle is to have found. So they slept on the road. Faith drove most often, though she was not the one to have discovered their location. It was Sane's Jeep they drove, but he was commonly found asleep in the back seat. In fact, Sane, Faith, and the third companion Rose were all asleep when the beast growled down the path. But the driver knew the way.
When the Jeep began to draw tracks in the sand, dusk was making its arrival. The creatures of day were settling into themselves for the night, while the darker unknowns hid just out of sight of prying eyes, always in the peripheral. They meant no harm. The passengers awoke as the beast shuddered to sleep, reluctant to settle into itself and see nothing to be found. Unlike the other creatures, this beast was alone.
Faith was the first to sink her toes into the sand. She walked a short distance away and sprawled herself on the cooling sand, her soft blonde hair reflecting the ideals of the sunset and her eyes closed to the world. Rose came and sat next to her, looking out over the sea and watching as the tide repeated its endless cycle, too timid to reach up to these new visitors and too interested to leave completely. Sane stood behind them, looking up at the changing sky, watching as the stars and the sun intermingled, destined to be acquainted but never lovers. The driver was the last from the vehicle. He left the keys in the ignition, and walked over to his friends, his strangers, his lovers. He let them be for a while, soaking in their existence, before saying with a smile
"Lets go"
The group looked at each other and quietly smiled. They took each others hands and were lovers on their walk to the tide's edge. As their grips loosened and their hands fell from each other they found themselves as strangers, yet strangers with impossible knowledge. They stripped from their clothes, leaving the denim, the cotton, the polyester to the creatures who made their home in the night. As Sane looked back one last time, the road they travelled down was no more, swallowed by the forest, swallowed by the darkness, swallowed by the found. The bronze beast was gone as well, its tracks leading to an absence. But that was of no concern. Nothing was of concern any longer.
They stepped out into the sea, leaving the beach behind them with their past. All that was left for them was to move forward, go farther into the ocean. And so they went.
As the sun disappeared behind the horizon, so did they. They were no longer to be seen, no longer to exist or not exist. They simply vanished on the other side of the edge, lost in the sea. Lost together.
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