on secrets and the shakable world.

for a long while, i used to wake up, or i used to never sleep at all and stay awake for days, writing in my journals and listening to records, chain smoking and living on all the worst things. for a long while, i never could believe the life i was living. at every point, if i let myself shift into the head space of questioning the real and the unreal, i could never believe what was around me. when i write this out, even now, it seems kind of romantic. but truly, it is the least romantic thing in the world.

here is the thing: i keep secrets. i have always kept secrets. when i was a child, i kept secrets to protect people, and i kept secrets to keep friends, and i kept secrets for the sheer art of secrets. i kept secrets for the pleasure of whispering, and most of the secrets i kept were in spite of myself. when i got older, and i realized the weight of all those secrets, i realized that i was really keeping secrets because i could not trust anyone. this is not to be understated: i had never ever been able to trust anyone. this is not the fault of any part or any person. this is the fault of movement and ideas, and mostly it is the fault of the fact that usually no two people should trust each other. this lack of trust and maintenance of secrets created a very terrible causal relationship: an unreal, shakable world. 

this is not romantic shaking. i cannot say that enough. this is not the movement of romance. this is the kind of shaking that baby possums do when they fall out of trees and are forced to play dead on summer sidewalks. this is the shakable where the world never feels quite right; the parts where i never quite felt a part of any of it. and, in some parts, i know that is true. i know in a decent bit of ways i am dislocated from quite a few things, and mostly, it is the movement of my will and my ideas that have displaced me.

i fell into a life for quite sometime that i was miserable in. maybe i should not say miserable. maybe i should say that i thought that it was all my life could be. and maybe i should say too that i should be satisfied with the parts that life could be, and i tried to be. but i know it would have pushed me farther towards the unreal. that the spaces between the trees and the birds would look more disparate. that there would be subtle black lines through everything; all the parts of the world and all of the parts of myself that i would have had to cancel out because i was fractured. because in that life i needed to change; i had to be something i was not, and i was terrible at it. 

i dont like to cause harm. above all, the things that hurt me the worst are hurting others. at night when i drive home from work, i think about harm. i think of the things i can do to repair the parts of the world i have dented, and i know, at least now, that there is nothing i can do. that things move past, move beyond and people are resilient because they have to be. i can repent i can create good i can hug the people i love and take care, but that is all i can do. 

and the world around me is not unreal anymore. for the first time ever, i feel secure in most every space i am in. i know i can trust the people in my life, and i know that the people i love love me. with all of that heart, it becomes impossible to build walls and burrow farther into the dark rooms of the soul. i know there are still dark rooms within me. sometimes i feel them, heavy in my heart. i worry if the bombs will drop. i worry about the economy. i worry about my parent's health. but the small awful things that used to hen peck me are gone. the only small parts around me are pinpoint ideas that connect and make this bold, beautiful thing. and even though it has taken me so long to know that the world is real, i feel grateful that it happened; that something happened i never thought possible in my own life. and that now, my life is the way i always imagined it could be. and like stepping through a mirror, the world is no longer weighted by the secrets i have to carry.