truce » poetry

about purpose

i begin in a dark room, illuminated only by the knowledge that i must be something. and the color that light casts is dark brown and wavering, like staring up at the impression of air from the bottom of a muddy lake.

and i end in a dark room, that light filling my lungs and choking me until i turn blue, because the light never touched me until it realized it couldn't, and so it destroyed me.

because i never became something.

i spent my whole existence at the bottom of that lake, that wavering, dull black-brown room, waiting to be pulled to the surface, to breathe the cadences and melodies of the f sharp sun and e flat major storms. but there was something wrong with me; my eyes weren't made to see the sun, after all. i was doomed from the moment i began in that room.

because no one ever told me that i had to be the one to pull myself up to the surface; because i was alone and i waited.

i was nothing for so long; nothing within the outline of something that took the shape of a human body. i was skin stretched tight over bones, bones that eroded from the dust that played inside them. i was crumbling, a child made of sand, and no one can be nothing for that long without their something becoming wrongness. but i already had that wrongness inside me; it was the wind that moved the dust through my ribcage, the wind that produced that dry whisper of a howl.

and then after awhile, i wasn't alone. a candle appeared, mopping the earthen floor of the room with waxy orange light. the center of the room was now clearly marked by the candle, clearly marked by the deepest pool of light. but it was sputtering. because the room was becoming airless.

i was overjoyed; and extreme emotion takes logic and throws it away, throws it far out of reach. at that point, i had been in the dark so long, hands extended in front of me as my eyes, that logic had already been leaving - a long preparation for a short journey. so you must understand that it was easy for me to mistake the candle as my surfacing, as my escape from the room, as my true beginning as a true person. i must remind you again that i was alone; i had no one to tell me what the surfacing would be like. that this most certainly wasn't it.

and then the bird came. there was no clinical pronouncement of dead on arrival, no choked sobs, no crushing realization that something part of you and part of wonder had died. but the bird was most certainly dead on arrival, and the candle began to burn lower and lower.

the bird was a warning, but i took it as company. the word to describe such a relationship is macabre. but it wasn't, not really; your choice of company couldn't be macabre if you were, too - i was dying. i was dying because i still would not surface, and i still would not believe it.

perhaps a part of me already knew that i could not. a part of me already knew with crushing finality, with breath-stopping absoluteness, that i could never surface. i would never make it.

when i finally realized the situation for what it was, the candle was dancing in a tired way. fizzling. and the situation was dismal.

me, a fizzling candle, and a dead bird in an airless room. and something was whispering you are nothing and i couldn't tell if it was them or me.