Who Can You Trust?

And so one must ask oneself---who can you trust? Can one even trust themselves? Can one answer that question honestly and have its answer stand up against the validity of the future? Does one ever know what may come one's way?

Perhaps these are variables that we cannot predict. But are we able to predict the behaviours of ourselves? I wonder.

Lately I have been reflecting on what it means to be a good person. How can one define this when we are all using a separate standard of measurement based on our own imprinting and experiences? When there is no universal code to go by...how does one summarize their existence and it's benevolence?

I feel so very few people reflect upon their behaviours and the effects they have on others. So many are so unaware. Unaware, or simply indifferent. I examine myself. I am weighted down by the unhappiness in myself that I am not able to give more, understand more, feel more.

Is it really so? Is it so that we exist in motivation solely for our own gratification--that ultimately it is our own desires being satisfied that determine our kindness and loving for another? Oh, say it ain't so.

But this is a truth that I fear.

Somewhere, what lies beneath us...we seek for only our happiness. Often we disillusion ourselves that if others can make us happy, then we are happy. We deceive ourselves that if we are happy, then others will be too. I am conflicted.

Often times I have been told that I do not care enough about myself. I am sure everyone has heard this in their time. But I feel I do. I know I am not a saviour, but often times I become consumed with people that I feel need the experience of my existence in their lives...that I need to help them unlock doors that otherwise will forever remain closed.

Is this ego? And if so, why do I physically feel the desire of this action stemming from a sensation in my heart? Why do I become overwhelmed and completely consumed with seeing a larger picture? Why do I feel that my motives are pure? Can I trust myself? Who can you trust?

I do not know the identity of the world we live in. I do not know how one is supposed to live, feel, what one is supposed to learn or seek. But I am relentlessly pained and feel the pangs of wanting to become more altruistic and make the world a better place. Why is such a good intention accompanied by so much pain and suffering?

I fear more than anything living a life doomed to superficiality, vacancy, selfishness, ego, pride, deception, and without empathy for my fellow man. And yet I find myself magnetically drawn to individuals whom live their lives just as that.

I can see it from far away. I know I am not a saviour, but it is my own saviour that I aspire to be. And somewhere inside of me, I feel that these individuals need me in their lives.

I have never lived on the surface. But perhaps there is nothing wrong with doing that.

One thing I do know, is that hell is below...and I have spent most of my life in that depth. What I don't understand is how my heart has always soared to great heights despite that.

So. Again, I wonder. Who can you trust? Can I even trust in myself?

"I cry out to no reply
and I can't feel you by my side
so I'll hold tight to what I know:
You're here...and I'm never alone."
B.G.

The Words

She hides the words

She keeps them sloppily yet safely crammed

in an old, beaten up suitcase.

She keeps them for

some reason.

What to do with the words?

To render them useless is to

bury them alive

to give them a torturous death,

to dry the blood of the heart.

What to do with the words?

Let them out?

Free them from captivity?

Let them dance off her tongue

and into his ears,

and risk once again the 

slaughter of her very own heart?

What to do with the words,

what to do with the words,

what to do with the words?

She knows these words will not fit him.

They are too large in size,

and she would be ridiculous to believe he

might 'grow into' them.

But perhaps if ever one day,

the cruel world leaves him alone and cold,

she can cloak these words over him-

over-sized, loving and warm,

wrapping him with all the words

she has secretly struggled for so long

never to share.

And when she does,

she will have to speak nothing.

He will feel them and he will know.

Her love, he will certainly know.

Oh, how deeply she has missed him...

All of us together, All of us alone.

Sometimes it feels like we're all just aimlessly shooting around life wounding one another. Like we're playing razor blade bumper cars with one another's feelings. The unfortunate thing is that for those that are unable to avoid the collisions, they become more erratic and inadvertently end up driving even more recklessly, perpetuating the problem even worse within those in their immediate paths of traffic.

Most people want very little more than to be understood and appreciated by someone. A genuine validation of their purpose and existence. What I find to be tragic about the seeming failure of such a simple human requisition is that it's as if we've reached a stalemate with each other because either no one believes that anyone is interested in the veritable contents of their true being, and/or, as a result, are emotionally repressed when they encounter someone who actually is interested. Which, of course, leaves the interested party feeling shut out or potentially rejected. Wounds are mutually inflicted, and both continue on feeling misunderstood.

To be open is to be brave. To be brave is to risk being hurt. But if we're able to choose between shooting a  gun at the virtuous and altruistic, or taking the bullet for them, I think the latter choice is the only way to ever define yourself as part of the former group. This means that we need to be brave. We need to be open. And we need to receive others, despite their considerable differences from ourselves. If we can all be decent and proper in our intentions, then we might just finally find a universal language that the human heart can understand.

Maybe.

The Great Death Game

I was 5 years old when my father came in the room, knelt down on the floor and with tears in his eyes told me and my siblings that his father had died. This was my first experience with death. I remember feeling confused about my father's sadness, and about what my grandfather's death actually meant. I was told that I was too young to attend the funeral, but my two older siblings were going to go. I don't think I ever mourned his death. I was too young to comprehend it all. I just learned to get used to his absence. 

It would be 7 years later when death made another appearance. It was a strange year in which 2 kids from my school whom I knew both died. The first died in his sleep at a young age of 13, and the second was killed in an alleged accidental gunshot wound at 14. At this time in my life, I could comprehend death a bit more, and I recall spending a lot of time in thought about the loss of futures ahead, and about the family of the deceased. I imagined what it must have been like for a mother to come in and try and wake her 13 year old son only to discover he was dead. I pondered over the mystery of the gunshot wound death.

3 years after that, death returned again once more. In a bizarre chain of events, my cousin and my father's then girlfriend were in a high speed head-on collision with one another on an old country highway. My cousin would survive, but my father's girlfriend died. In even stranger circumstance, this happened on my brother's birthday. The odds of a person being involved in a head-on collision in traffic are one thing, but the odds of being in a head-on collision with someone else that you actually know? It was so peculiar. My brother's birthday would forever be somewhat tainted with the sadness of the events of that day. While my father would surely want to celebrate the birth of his oldest son, his heart would always be marked with the loss of a woman he loved.

2 years later, I would be awakened by my mother telling me that I had an important phone call from back east. I took the call and it was my best friend telling me that one of our great friends whom we had known all our lives had taken his own life in the night. He shot himself in the head. He had just graduated high school and had enrolled in college courses. I remember wondering why he even suffered through high school if he was just going to kill himself a couple of months after graduating. I always took a lot of photos (still do), and after his death I remember looking at the photos. I also used to use a video camera and film my friends when were hanging out. I reviewed the photos and the films, and suddenly it seemed so clear to me. It was as if it was so obvious our friend was not happy.

2 years after that came the overdoses. These deaths would continue for years and years to come, and were many. There was something about death that had perplexed me. I could not distance myself from it, it seemed.

I then lost both of my grandmothers and an aunt. Then my sister lost a man she once loved, who was also a friend of mine.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that I wanted to become a mortician. I felt that I had a lot of experience with death, and I wanted to be able to help people during the most devastating time of their lives. I wanted to be able to try and quell some of their anxieties and suffering. Eventually, the human funeral, corpses, and grieving families became a part of my Monday through Friday routine. Though it could be incredibly stressful, I felt good inside knowing that I was doing something for others that few actually could.

Then I moved to Sweden. Death and I once parted from each other again. Until this year.

I lost a beautiful friend in May. Sara. She was 40 years old.

Then Yancey died. He left behind 2 children as well as my 2 nephews.

And today, I was told someone very special in my life died. David. He was under 30.

Treasure those dear to you. Love them with all your might.

Death has made its move once more in a great game that I no longer wish to play.

The Miracle

Life and its bastard 'trials'. Why is it every time you finally think you're strong enough to live with misery, right at that exact time that you finally resign yourself to living with your pain or your problem, right when you accept that this pain or this problem just might be a significant part of your existence in its totality, that suddenly SOMETHING comes along and changes all of that?!

These things one cannot predict. Perhaps you can predict their coming, but never the moment of their arrival. It's like waiting on a friend that is running seriously late. They said they would be here, but it's getting very late: 

"Are they sure they are coming? Did something happen to them along the way? Ok. Maybe they aren't coming. That's it. They are not coming. Sigh. Oh well. It's okay. I really wish they could have made it, though. It would have really transformed the entire evening. But that's life. I probably didn't need company tonight anyway. No, no, I didn't need company. See? Now I can do this, and I can do that, and this. That's what I'm going to do. Yeah, that's it. But wait! What's that!? The doorbell! They ARE here! They HAVE arrived after all!"

Waiting on the miracle to come can be a lot like that. The hope. The uncertainty. The doubt. The resignation. The acceptance. And then? Well. The miracle comes.

Now I know it's quite a character flaw, but very few things make me genuinely smile when I am alone with my thoughts. It is when I have these moments--these authentic, grand smiles in the quiet and lonesomeness of my space--that I know that no matter how dismal the world can seem at times, it isn't pointless to have hope. 

For some of us the world can be an infinite field with only a few flowers. The important thing to remember is that the flowers are indeed there. Instead of being upset that our fields are so empty and lifeless, we should be grateful for the contrast we get when we encounter these flowers. For it is, for us, a wondrous gift to be able to never take a single flower for granted, to be able to see all of its rich colours, to smell the intensity of such a rare fragrance, to touch the fragility of such perfect petals. We take great pride in caring for our flowers because they are not many and do not come often. We never take them for granted, and from our hearts, for our flowers, we become the sun.

And for some of us...

...that is nothing short of a miracle.

The Lights Will Go Out

Right now I feel as though life is a holy mess--as if there is an inhuman pandemonium occurring in the air around me. People as a specie have become second, even third, fourth, etc., issues of interest to my mind. I'm further preoccupied with the happenings unfolding all around me. I'm watching a beautifully strange, lit-up, autumn Ferris Wheel make its rotations, and I am peculiarly hypnotized.

Each car on the revolving wheel possesses a different realm. There are realms of cacophonous street life, blasting sirens and garbage trucks, blaring horns and roaring engines, drills and hammering. There are realms of dancing and swing music and the sound of my tapping feet on an old wooden floor. There are realms of the sound of my family's hearts beating--loudly and quickly, slowly and lowly. There are sounds of ice clinking in glasses of whiskey that are still yet to be drank in a smoky bar in Hamburg. There are sounds of the waves of the ocean lulling from a terrace in Spain, where the night sky and doo-wop music sits waiting patiently for me. There is an anxiety that mirrors mine and merrily welcomes me to the South of Africa. There is a realm of a house in south Texas calmly watching me discern it all, and there is a nest of squawking baby crows that patiently wait to be hatched one day. There are these realms, and so very much more.

The excitement and dreaminess of it all can drive me to mad nights of sleeplessness!

But somewhere else, in another realm called Georgia, the lights will go out once again. And it is for this man's life that tonight I will turn out the lights of this Ferris Wheel called life, too.

Dear Lord, Karla.

No matter how many times I tell myself that I'll "never be hungover at work ever again", I keep finding myself crawling into the office slightly disheveled and feeling a little rough. I hang my jacket and scarf, turn on my computer at my desk, and then do my best to sink down into my chair so as to hide myself behind my screen. It's on these days that I break my 'no coffee' rule, and I sit with a cappuccino and eat some sort of pastry. "Is it inappropriate to wear sunglasses inside the office?" I find myself wondering. I then realize that my hooded sweatshirt complimented with wearing sunglasses indoors just might give off a bit more of that unibomber look than I would want. Particularly in the office.

I wish I didn't bore so easily. I drink mostly out of boredom. And to relieve anxiety.

Yes. I know. I shouldn't do that. But if people always did what they should, think what a catastrophic effect it would have had on art. We can't have that, now can we? So you see? I'm doing it for the art of the world. Settled.

Office anxiety is really quite discomforting. Especially because I can't drink on the job. So being hungover at work is just a barrage of anxiety that I really wish I'd stop signing on for. It just leads to blank conversations, a heightened sense of hearing (and being irritated by nearly every sound), and compulsive clock-watching. Most importantly, it even interferes with my youtubing. Joke.

So as I throw back this orange juice that I desperately need, and try to restore some order to the island in upheaval that is my desk, I can't help but repeatedly hear my own voice in my head saying:

"Dear Lord, Karla!"