mahiwaga

I must admit that I like the fact that the sun is still up when I come home from work. It gives me the illusion that my time off from work is much longer than it actually is. Waking up in the morning sucks big time, though. Nothing makes you want to pull the covers back over your head than waking up to your alarm clock, looking outside the window, and finding it pitch black.

When I was an undergrad, I had this ridiculous notion that if I slept for four hours at a time, and pretended that it was morning whenever I awoke, then I would feel more productive. The idea was that since typical sleep usually encompasses two sleep cycles, if I could just get one in at a time, it would be almost as good. So after class, I’d go to sleep right away before working on my problem sets, or writing my paper, or reading the assigned text. This worked for maybe two days before I would stop waking up in the evening and simply just sleep all the way through until the next morning.

Eventually, I just gave up and came to accept the fact that I really do need at least seven hours of continuous sleep to feel rested. (Add the fact that I usually did way better on tests if I just took it easy the day before instead of trying to cram, and eventually, I decided that adequate sleep was the key to my success.)

Ian Rosales Casocot writes that there is no past, but I got to thinking that, really, the past is all we’ve got. Much like the time delay involved due to speed of light, so that the light we see from the sun is actually 8 minutes old, and the light that we see from the star Sirius is 8 years old, the thoughts that we consciously hold in our head are about events that are already in the past. The raw sensual input gets rapidly converted and processed by the brain, and the actual input, for the most part, gets discarded. The present only intrudes when something happens that cuts directly to the reptilian, emotion-laden part of our brains, bypassing the evolutionary advanced cerebral cortex, like when danger approaches. And the future is almost always just a fantasy resulting from linearly extrapolating the past (which is the reason why we’re so bad at predicting the future.)

Today, I didn’t intend to go to sleep early, but ended passing out around 8:30 p.m. And now, of course, I’m awake, and I can’t go back to sleep. Classic.

not every wound heals
some fester and drip
leaking poison into your blood stream
infiltrating your very being
even sometimes invading the chambers of your wounded heart
hiding in the scars of your memory
or in the pockets of darkness within your soul

some wounds grow worse with time
eating away at flesh
sucking away life
turning you to dust and ash before your eyes
until you lose all sensation
until what was once part of you
is dead, decayed
falling off like the broken stump
of a desiccated umbilical cord
discarded without realization
into the trash bin with yesterday’s leftovers

some wounds demand intervention
require rescue
without which healing is impossible
and if you leave it be
it will only get worse

what was once a tiny scratch
grows to a raw ulcer
consuming flesh, sinews
sometimes eroding as deep as bone

these wounds, sometimes you have to
break the scab open
cut away the decay
until blood flows freely
flay open the wound
and leave it exposed to the world
raw and angry
letting the putrescence evanesce
like some foul miasmatic nightmare
evaporating at the break of dawn

but most wounds, as they say
heal with time
like your mother always told you
never pick at your scabs
let the cut well up with bright, red blood
let the seeping blood crust over
because every time you tear at the wound
will leave a scar
every time you open it up again
creates a new wound
undoes all the healing
and remember,
in the end,
all bleeding stops
eventually

Out of the desert
I am come to thine gates
I bring the emptiness of the wilderness
and the silence of the bitter wind
unlooked for, I crossed that threshold
no one cared whither I went or no
among the teeming masses
I am but one man
alone
voice drowned out by the bazaar
the moneychangers
the tax collectors
the merchants
the con artists
I tread the worn-down road
a million footprints
turning the soil into concrete

Out of the desert
and through the mountain pass
and the river valley rift
where continents collide
and shear and tear
the planets in conjunction on my left
heralding the rising sun
I steal past like a thief
and in that sea of chrome, the halogen headlights
illumining the six lanes ahead
thrumming underneath me
the sound of inevitability

The future becomes present
and predictions are hard coded into the archives
the road ahead
exceeding our wildest fantasies
giving form to the nightmares that crawl and burrow
as they feed on our grey matter
these parasitic atavisms
that remind us we come from primordial slime

and how is it that green goop
came to dream of God?

Where do I go from here? Isn’t that always the question?

It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to think about the future. For the first time in my life, I’m OK with dealing with the present. For the first time in my life, I don’t want these moments to end.

It’s such a strange thought. I’ve spent so much of my life wishing I were somewhere else. “The grass is always greener” syndrome. But what is it that is seizing at my soul these days? Sheer laziness? A sense of resignation? Stasis? Stillness?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t love this place, not by a long shot. There are plenty of other cities that I dig a lot more than this place. But the thing is, nowhere else have I been able to be just myself. For once, I can play make-believe, and do all the things I’ve wanted to do, unfettered by other people’s expectations.

Not that there aren’t expectations. But I got to choose this place, and in a way, I chose to accept those expectations. They weren’t foisted on me from on high, from some painful, self-sacrificial legacy rooted in the agony of a culture that was conquered, nor in the martyrdom of an alien savior from a place half-way around the world. Despite all the disappointments and all the vileness and debasement I’ve partaken in, I did it all on my own terms. I owned these last four years, for better or for worse.

Of course, part of this is immature fantasy. When I fell asleep this morning during a lecture, I found myself dreaming of things that only have a seed of possibility. There is nothing in my life that I can take for granted. The road ahead of me must be seized, must be tamed and ridden. It is not the passiveness that I’ve experienced thus far, the feeling of being carried by a surging river, impelled downstream whether you wish to or no. The road ahead is more like wind. A current of air that must be captured and held on to, bearing me aloft, with the possibility of dropping me into the abyss in the blink of an eye. If I want to take this road, I have to want it every second of my life, and that kind of force of commitment frightens me.

In these four years, I’ve learned to make definitive decisions. No more wavering or dancing around the issues. I’m still nowhere near as certain as everyone else around me is, but I’m certainly more certain than I ever was. And while I have figured out some things about life and about death, I’m still procrastinating about figuring out which way I want to tack my sail, to catch the wind, and to find the shores that I’ve been searching for all of my life.