The Secret Life of a Serial Insomniac

Okay. So now I've got me some industrial strength air freshener that smells like cotton blossoms. Well, that's what the can says, anyway. Let's just agree that it smells good. And so now my pink Shox no longer stink like something rotten. Yeay for small victories, right? I've changed the scenery of my blog for a few reasons: (1) because I have this pathology that makes me want to change my blog; (2) because Love is Louder had 393 posts on it; (3) because getting my MacBook Pro seemed like a momentous enough occasion to celebrate by starting my blog afresh; (4) because I simply fell in love with this template and had to, had to, had to use it somehow. (Had to.)

What I'm Reading: Love and Other Four Letter Words, by Carolyn Mackler. Yet another Young Adult novel. Yeah, I'm currently on a YA Fiction binge. Maybe it has something to do that I'm writing a YA manuscript? Yep, I've sort of immersed myself into the YA culture .... straaaaaange .... as in, started watching Pretty Little Liars, Degrassi, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, The Secret Circle and The Vampire Diaries. Weird, huh, how I totally lost my historical fiction fixation for the YA genre? Yup, I'm quirky like that. I think it all started with watching the pilot episode of The Secret Circle. And, oh yeah, I've discovered that the DVR thing isn't like taping stuff with a VCR. Like, I can't record one show and then decide to record another show after the first show, without watching that first show. Grrrrrr. Yeah, that's me, learning things the hard way.

I have become an expert at avoiding working on my manuscripts in favour of shiny, pretty things on the internet. Maybe I am some kind of mutant magpie? Definitely I am some kind of procrastinator! Here are some pretty things I bumped into:

Music For Your Mood, A Magical Mystery Tour, Music Mixes, The Awesomest Book Cover EVER, My Favourite Susannah, Eye Candy, Sand Becoming Art, Something For Photographers, Some Nerdy Stuff About Feelings, Soundcloud.

Here's what I'm listening to tonight.

A Few Rhetorical Questions

1. Why do people insist on dressing their pets? Pets already have their own clothes; it's called fur. If you really need to be dressing up your pets then you should get therapy! Seriously.

2. Okay. So the dude's dead. Will someone please tell me how to spell his name? Kadafi? Qadaffi? Gaddafi? Gadhafi? Which one is it?

3. The late news featured the world's biggest cheeseburger. OMG, AYFKM?? Like, the patty made me think of a giant hunk of sh!t!!!!! What's up with that, anyways? Why waste all that food?

4. Why do people use Facebook to spam others with every single graphic they come across???

5. Why do people feel the need to twitter that they are paying their bills? Do I really need this level of detail?

6. I have started making short films/videos from both still and moving shots .... I love my MacBook Pro ..... my vimeo is here.

7. Do I really want Captain Morgan to pilot the plane I'm travelling in? What if Captain Crunch was his co-pilot?

NaNoWriMo, Working in My PJs, Joan Didion and Thoughts on Motherhood

OMG!!! I am some kind of mental .... I've just signed up for NaNoWriMo; I even have a story idea. Woah. You know what's even crazier? That I'm sort of excited about it. I'm also excited about the fact that I've designated tomorrow a stay-at-home day; that's code for I get to stay in my pyjamas all day and work on editing a sh!t-load of photographs and film clips. I might even squeeze some writing in there, somewhere. I read this article about Joan Didion late this afternoon. One of her quotes really resonates with me: I don’t think anybody feels like they’re a good parent. Ouch. Secretly, I fear that I wasn't a really great mother, that I don't have as much to do with my son's success as a human being as I would like to believe. I want one of these. I wonder if the landlord would bend the rules for me. I've been thinking of a Frappuccino all day today. Grrrrr. I'm tired and I have 37 pages to read.

This guy is hilarious. Check him out if you haven't already. (Don't bother if you hate profanity).

image credit ~ Sloth by Mandy Jansen

Contemplating Freedom

My absolute love of historical fiction leads me to appreciate things that I otherwise would never give a second thought. Freedoms, in particular. Desmond Tutu said once that only those individuals who've had their freedom removed can ever fully appreciate the gift of freedom. I agree. Books that have transported me back the the 15th and 16th century have introduced me to a time in which rulers designated thoughts of human equality as heretical. Just pause and think for a moment, of the implications; can you imagine a life in which no freedom of equality exists? Can you imagine a life in which you could see yourself executed or burned at the stake for practising an "un-sanctioned" religion? Can you imagine a world in which the mere reading of The Bible, for a common, lay person, would spell heresy and ultimately, death? Can you imagine an life so cloaked in a darkness which blots out any new ideas, new knowledge, or new ways of seeing things? Google Galileo, and read about his life and works; you will see the enormity of it all, of life lived under the damocles' sword of a united Church and State.

Rooting for the So-Called Villain

I've spent a great deal of time these past weeks reading historical fiction. Currently I find myself reading a series about the Borgias, narrated from the POV of a (fictional) poisoner. Long before the television series about the original crime family, and long before I'd come across any of the books about them, I knew of the treacherous reputation of the Borgias. Corruption, bribery, and the like ~ none of these befitting for the occupant of St. Peter's Throne. History paints these Borgias as villains, at best. Yet, in reading these fictionalized accounts of them, I cannot help but empathize with Borgia and his family.

I recently read Dracula: The Un-dead, a sequel to the original Bram Stoker novel. Once again, we see a monster portrayed as worthy of our empathy. This book depicts a monster capable of feeling, giving and receiving love. How can this be? Does it seem naive, then, to view the world as a series of contrasts of black and white? When does a being become it's heinous actions? Do we ever need to consider the context? Perhaps, instead of good and evil, we have shades of each. This complicates things, our understanding of things.

I find it interesting when authors paint their stories such that the bad guy seems worthy of readers' sympathies.

Day 161

I find myself caught in a maelstrom ~ a beautiful maelstrom ~ the maelstrom of my heart, a heart lined with raging and monstrous love for you. Desperation clamours inside me, foaming inside my every cell, lining my mouth with an acrid taste. Sitting at the mouth of cavernous deception, I have only my own cold self denial to wrap myself, and I savour the stinging as it whips itself across my cheek and into my eyes.

I try standing, I try taking flight, only to fall. Backwards, backwards I stumble, and then, flinging myself far from the barbed ramparts of your stormswept and leaden heart. Backward has become my only way forward. But I feel afraid, and cannot deaden the howling of my heart, which has cleaved itself to yours, and refuses to release itself. And so I turn around, delicately place the veil of courage around my heart, and then creep across this web of grief I have woven for myself.

Cataclysm

I did not see you. Until we collided. In a most breath-taking and explosive way. It tasted of piquant, wrapped in a droplet of nectar. Maniacally, we plunged into one another. Our union, so fierce and forceful, the ground around us shook. Your kisses resurrected me; what delicious anguish, my rebirth. I wanted to drink you, eternally. But, cruelly, you would not let me. I craved your fiery and frightening essence. With each breath, a new lesson. With each teardrop, a new cleansing. And now, like any cataclysm, this us has evaporated, leaving, forever altered, the topography of my heart.

Day 137

I cannot count it, the many hopeless nights when my shadow searched for yours. You thought to punish me, by removing yourself, leaving me filled with this, an insatiable hunger for absolution. I would burn away the world, to feel your lips passionately pressed against mine. And, so, I remain frozen, in footsteps untaken … our footsteps. And I ask myself, was that Dangerous Angel real? Then I feel a familiar ache, the ache of scars not quite healed. And I tell myself the purpose of scars: to remind us that the past was, indeed, real.

Day 135

From the moment I first laid eyes upon you, I felt my heart in danger … in danger of betraying itself. In danger of loving you, my beautiful and dangerous angel. In loving you so intensely and obsessively, I expressed some sentiments which I can never, ever take back. And my soul, it flew from my lips before I even realized you’d captured it.

A Thing Called Truth

Empty-handed, I turn up empty-handed, when I attempt to dissect my true feeling at this moment. How can I dissect nothing? I ask the question, only to receive an answer filled with silence. I shudder to think how deeply into the bowels of my pysche I may have to dig in order to locate truth. And, will I know it when I’ve found it, this alien thing called truth? And what shall I do, when finally, I find myself face-to-face with this thing called truth? Perhaps I shall pluck it out of myself, perhaps it holds the seed of this restlessness, of this complete absence of tranquility in which I find myself? There seems no way that I can disengage the sharp tines of this immense dullness which presses against my heart. No way except for waiting. Waiting.

Drunk with Rage

I wonder, always wonder, when we will have our last goodbye. I shudder to think, perhaps we have already had it? No, I choose to believe we will meet again. Until then, I remember you, my dangerous beauty, drunk with rage ~ a beautiful, broken piece of art. My art ~ beloved.

The Beauty of a Broken Thing

I feel a deep, yet dull, sadness  when I think of you ~ a hollow man, a black hole that devours everything substantial in its path. When sparing my life meant leaving you, my heart felt as though it dried up. You remain, to me, a question without an answer, a perpetual white-hot flame burning my heart, from the inside, out, and eating away at my soul. So many times you left me, leaving only your enormous absence. What of our love, if such a fragile entity ever existed? I cannot say, because putting it into words would only destroy any meaning of what lay between you and I.

I have tried to burn up my memories of you, of us. But the ashes only reconstituted themselves back into memories, each time rendering themselves more difficult to burn than before. When I ponder the beauty of broken things scattered across the formless soul of our union, I see so clearly that the broken thing is you, and not our relationship, not our love. Our love distills itself down to my love. A broken you has no capability of love. And love cannot, does not, ever break itself. Your inherent pollutants consumed you long before you entered my heart and my life. No matter how much I loved you, I could never fill the vortex inside you. No one could.

Train Wreck?

Loving you broke me wide open, like a shattered incandescent light bulb. My pain crept among the strewn wreckage, feeding itself, like a parasite. Loving you, I could not tell the difference between reality and the creations of my own heart. Such darkness enveloped me, so much so that I could only sit and wait for my pupils to dilate. And by the time I could see in that awful darkness, I had already begun to bleed, having cut myself on your barbed, razor-sharp thirst. I saw myself, taciturn, brooding, and waiting for exsanguination.

I tried to love you better with my mind, which I had stuffed like a barn full of impotent ideas and logic. No amount of armour could save me, could close the wound out of which my life force flowed so freely. This type of death has no smell. The end has long come and gone.

The sun has sliced through your thirst, severing it. And reviving me. I like to think that my wound has healed, leaving only a scar as its legacy, your legacy. At times I don’t feel so sure ~  down to the marrow of my bones, I still feel your absence. Perhaps that’s what this scar is ~ a physical membrane, an ugly container for my various perceptions of your absence?

Day 105

I’ve written you a letter. I wonder how long I’ll keep it at my bedside before mailing it. You’re frightening beauty lingers in my heart.

Language of My Heart

I tell myself that you led me astray, that I got lost, being with you. Forgetting my own language just to speak to you, I lost myself in translation. And, now, without you, I try to find myself. I have no map, no co-ordinates. The information flows within me. So, I cut myself and watch me bleed. Feeling pain, watching the blood flower out of me, gaudy as poppies, seems like a worthy remedy for this swarm of nothingness that makes me feel hollow inside. I think of running, but can’t seem to get away from myself, in order to find myself. I long for the city, long for its feverish streets, that make me forget what I do not want to remember. There you’ll find me walking down a road called despair, suffocating in the thick air, with concrete blocks for feet.

Day 95

Do you belong? You have such brilliance and frightening beauty that you almost seem …. out of this world.

Day 91

It depresses me, somewhat, the it of you. And so I turn to that place which always offers me solace and comfort ~ a scalding hot bath and the ensuing onset of heat exhaustion.

Day 90

I thought I could be brave and let go. I lied. I cannot. I don’t know if I can ever let you go.

Day 88

My heart, starved in the coldest desert, cries feebly, a cry pulverized by a wall of bone white sand. Forgiveness, sits on my tongue ~ a frozen thunder. A frozen thunder which, when it hits the air, roars and then shatters. And I have sliced my foot on the shrapnel that’s scattered itself upon the ground around me. The fire in your eyes has spread, so much so that I begin to fear that frightening demon which lives inside you. I must never forget. I must ever remind myself of your monstrousness, lest I find myself drawn into your web. Lest I find myself falling for you, again, and again.

Day 85

You are a sad man.

Day 83

Soon it will be three years since I left you. Please return my computer.

Day 82

I remember. I will never forget. Naively, I hope for metamorphosis.

Day 81

We can only find truth in the darkness of the mind. It’s frightening. And it hurts.

Day 80

The more tenacious our love, the blinder that love becomes. That explains a great deal.

Day 79

I shall give you a kiss on the brow when you are dead. I wonder, shall you feel it?

Breathe

I loved to watch you, watch you so intently that you told me to stop or my eyes would wear out. Still, I found myself unable to remove you from my gaze. I felt so insecure, so unsure about your presence, as though you would leave at less than a moment’s notice. So I watched you, to convince myself of your real-ness, and to stock up on mental images of you, for when you finally removed yourself from me.

Loving you seemed like some desperate attempt to breathe life, to live out loud. In those early days, I felt as though I would die if I could not make it work with you. Getting down on my knees, begging you to stay, felt like gasping for air, gasping for my next breath. How can the presence of one man feel so vital to my life? I sinned exquisitely to love you, to make myself yours. Can you see the corpses that we created in the wake of our passionate destruction of each other?

Now that you’ve become only a fleeting and bleeding dream, I no longer fear the dark. You cannot hurt me. I cannot hurt me. And so, I turn off the light, because I no longer need to see my thoughts. I can feel them on my skin, light as the casings of dandelion seeds.

Day 78

It’s often said that we’re only as sick as our secrets. You have so many dark secrets. And so, you’re sicker than even I can imagine.

Day 77

How could you convince yourself that what you present to people seems real to them? I wish for you a grand metamorphosis. Ah, but wishing doesn’t make it so, does it?

Day 76

My heart no longer shatters in to a million pieces when I think of you.

Day 75

The lid to hell opened, and suddenly, you appeared. You looked so beautiful, because that’s how everything and everyone looks like in hell ~ beautiful. In an instant I scooped up your shivering heart and pressed it against my lips. Your unspoken words found a place in my heart, a place that had been waiting all this time, just for you. No sooner had you entered my life and my heart, you left. Without word, without warning. You left, leaving in your wake all of your empty promises clinging to me, like a clump of unwarmed snow in the dim corner of an unknown garden.

Day 74

A dear friend of mine told me today that the most treacherous among us often have a great deal of charm and incredible physical beauty. And so it is with you, dangerous angel.

Day 73

You seem so remote to me, right now, in this moment. So very alien.

Day 72

I have these fleeting moments when you seem beautiful, pure, devoted. I have these fleeting moments when, in my mind’s eye, you do not seem like yourself, but instead, a fantasy, that fantastic figure I created and fell to love. Like a fallen angel, who gives up her wings and all their enchantment, I fell so very fast and hard for you, a bad medicine, a dark fantasy. I have these fleeting moments, but that’s all they are ~ fleeting.

Day 71

You don’t have the power to hurt me anymore.

Day 70

Love is louder than your rage.

Day 68

I will not set that trainwreck back on the track. Simply will not.

Day 67

Loving you nearly annihilated me.

Day 65

So many months have passed since your last contact. I have long given up ringing your number, leaving you voice message or text-ing you, in hopes of a response. It’s as though you have died, though I know you have not. Hiding … you play this game of hiding. In my grief for you, I came to see you, not as that supernal creature into which I made you, not as that figure I exhalted, but as a mere human ~ a man. Flawed, wounded, and perhaps incapable of knowing truly what love is. How can this be? I have asked myself so many times. It just is.

Each time you popped back into my life, I had just begun to face life without you, just begun to cast you away from my heart. I loved you so deeply and desperately that when you tore yourself away from, you also tore up pieces of my heart. How many wounds can one person have, from the mere act of loving another? Loving someone amounts to war against oneself. Also excruciating lessons learned. I have learned more how to be me, just me ~ not defined by my relationship to you or anyone else.

I know you will re-appear in our lives. And when that happens I shall want to run away from you.

Day 64

Lately, I find myself reflecting upon the fact that you would have killed me, had I chosen to stay with you rather than leave the country. Yes, I had to leave the country to escape you. I believed, so desperately, that home existed in you. Until you frightened me, almost to death. Then, and only then, did I fling myself back into the arms of my homeland, and back into the aching embrace of your brother. Aching? Yes, aching, for me, his very own prodigal wife.
I find it so profound that you would have taken my life, and so I feel I must regurgitate this thought. I think the taste of it shall never grow stale ~ it shall ever remain bitter.

Day 61

Slowly, oh so slowly, I’ve begun shedding you, in the same way a snake sheds her skin. You rarely appear in my dreams. That’s a good thing.

Day 60

I remember the way I felt 3 years ago, virutally destoryed and wanting to die. You really had me believing that I was at fault, it was all my fault. What’s sad is the fact that you actually convinced yourself it would be my fault if you, in your rage, succeeded in killing me. WTF?

Day 59

I have just read about your dubious hero, Shackleton, and how he brought cocaine tablets with him on his voyage to Antarctica. And you judge me, a former coke/crack-head? You know you would have killed me long before the cocaine ever would? That thought leaves me gobsmacked. Really does.

Day 58

I’ve got it. While watching The Sopranos it came to me. Tony Soprano, he reminds me of you. Only he seems a little more mentally/emotionally stable than you. A thug, that’s what you are.

Day 57

I just finished watching that movie, Goodfellas. I’ve seen it so many times before, but can never resist another chance to see it again. At the end of the movie, Henry Hill, the narrator, says that he sort of misses the old life (i.e. the drug and crime life). That got me to thinking … that’s what made it so hard for me to let go of you, the life I thought we had together. What a lie. What a big lie you turned out to be.

Day 55

It’s official. You’re certifiable. Why, then, do I continue making excuses for you?

Day 53

I could say that, I don’t miss you, not one bit. Alas, that’s such a lie.

Day 52

I had a dream about you last nite. In it, I telephoned you, hoping to get your voice mail. Instead, you answered. I felt somewhat dumbstruck. Still, I get butterflies. Also, the taste of fear in my mouth. How can it be?

Day 50

Today my heart spent little time focussing on you, and what went so terribly wrong. I expended little thought in wondering, did you enter the world as a monster? If not, then when, what precise moment, did you make that transformation? Perhaps I can say, after all is said and done, that I knew a modern-day Jekyll-Hyde? Shall I feel sorrow for your loss ~ yourself?

Day 49

I try not to think about you, about it, because, what is, is. Still, I find myself, at times, struggling to loosen my grip on the fantastical image of you my mind had conjured up. Why do I find it so difficult to let go of the myth into which I made you? How could you possibly ever live up to such a myth? How could anybody?

Day 48

I want to tell you I don’t miss you, not one bit. That’s a lie, though. Hope used to float for me, now it seems futile, to hope for you to deliver what you promised. I feel sorry for you, and the misery of desolation which must clench your daily existence. Still, that does not seem like enough to fill that hole in my heart which takes your shape. Will that part of my heart ever grow back?

Day 47

I thought about you on the way to the store. Thought about how you used to make love to me. Explosive. I still get that quivery, butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling. That seems just a little deranged. This just goes to show that love has no logic or mind of its own.

Day 46

I miss you. However wrong that seems, I miss you. Despite the monster you became, the one I had to run from, I somehow have this delusion that you loved me. I tell myself that a sociopathic narcissist lacks the capacity to love. And then I lie to myself, insistent upon your love for me. Am I deluded, or a liar? I’m never sure. I can only describe our time together as surreal. I feel as though the monster wasn’t you. As though, you liked to play with gamma rays in your younger days and that’s the cause of that raging monster which manifests itself inside your body. How can that monster, who deliberately set out to physically harm me, be you ~ a loving man who held me tightly in the aftermath of a frightening nitemare? You became a frightening nitemare, one from which I had to escape, fearing for my life. How is it that I can still love you after all that?

A Distant Star

When I met you I had this strange feeling, like my soul being yanked out of me. You felt to me like a distant star, one which no longer existed in the present. I hoped to defy science, hoped that if I loved you more and better, you would exist. Being at your side hurt, like a knife in my heart. How quickly that knife became my everything, my life. Never did I feel so alone, as when I slept by your side. The deeper our relationship dug itself, the more hungry I grew for love. And then, the light of the morning arrived, decomposing everything, including you.

One Thousand Faces

I apologize, little one. I don’t mean to hold your untimely departure  against you. Still, you have gone, while we remain in this awful and  vacuous bell jar. In so many ways, I hold it against every parent on  this planet who has never felt the pain that I feel. I have spent so  many years angry at God ~ calling him a cruel God ~ for taking you from  me, that I feel like He would banish me from His presence. My anger  leaves me to believe that I am not entitled to ask God to help me carry  this monstrous pain.

I have held onto my grief for you so tightly because I know of no  other way to keep the memory of your existence alive, alive inside of  me. If I let go, I will have to live my life in spite of your absence.  How can the world go on, how can fate continue executing itself, in the  wake of my little one’s death? It seems cruel. So very cruel.

Plunge

Her crushing beauty struck me. It had the power to annihilate. Resonant, it echoed in the far corners of my mind, long after we parted. I have not done enough to save her. A cruel thought, and it echoed, haunting me. I wondered, if perhaps, like Icarus, she had fashioned herself a pair of wings. And I wondered, also, if, like Icarus, their wax adhesive had melted when she chose to fly too close to the sun.

I willed her to awaken, as any fallen angel would awake. She did not. She remained motionless, broken, and so crushingly beautiful. Broken things can have such beauty. Just as beauty can break. And break. And break. And still remain beautiful. Seeing such beauty broken, my heart fled. It took a shadowy and circuitous route, between particle and wave, between desperation and satiation. It spoke in iridescent fragments, punctuated by the passion of frenzied electrons, washed away by millions of teardrops doomed to eternally wander. Then plummeting, with cataclysmic passion, toward a sea of melted wax.

And then, I felt her spirit, tender and gentle, touch my cheek. 'I came to comfort you,' she whispered silently, 'to offer you deliverance.' I did not want comfort. I did not want deliverance, I wanted to follow my heart, to plunge, into silent oblivion. In my grief, so precipitous, I sought only the heaviness of descent. I could never conquer my grief. And so, I surrendered, allowing it to conquer me.

Lonely Silhouette

He evaporated, leaving only a memory, etched in my mind. It left me feeling lonely, the kind of lonely one feels after the amputation of everything familiar and treasured. An amputee, yes, I felt like an amputee. Complete with phantom pain. He evaporated, leaving my heart feeling desert-dry, and at the same time, like a great swollen river which has flooded its banks. He evaporated, leaving a lonely metal soul, seeking. Seeking nourishment for my loneliness, seeking something to fill the nothing.

He evaporated, leaving his flesh dissolved, and his form dissipated. And leaving me, to become a mere silhouette of my former self. A silhouette who drowns in the darkness, uttering soundless words. In that moment, the moment of my drowning into the darkness, I realized that I don’t choose fate, that fate chooses me. Then I reached the point of no return, a point from which I seem unable to advance. Then I reached the utter desolation of depression.

An unfamiliar voice welcomed me to this unwaking world of violent sadness ~ a world where tear drops flow into a sea of despair, and where death seems like a welcome retreat. In this domain of the world, jelly fish speak, and the sea breathes ~ ebb and flow, inhale and exhale. And the only other sound I hear is the hollow, metallic rhythm of my heartbeat. Hollow, because of my heart’s incredible emptiness. Hollow, because I have vacated myself long, long ago. In this domain of the world, time does not extend and stretch itself, I do, up to and beyond the point of my breakage. And so walls erect themselves, to keep me inside, and to keep others outside. And everything becomes a tasteless, shapeless shadow of itself.

Perfect Despair

Without you, I feel the weight of homelessness, in this, the home we shared. For so long, I made my home inside you, inside your heart and mind. Now, the immensity of the silence and solitude here seems to swallow all sound, movement and light. Each moment that steps into me completely resembles the previous one. I live inside the emptiness of your absence, unwilling to find my way out. This enormous landscape, known as mourning, keeps me anchored to you. Still, I cannot stand it, this razor sharp loneliness.

And so, I walk the streets aimlessly in this notoriously feverish city, carrying my sadness close to me, like some sort of comforting plague. I want to drown my endless longing for you in the beautiful anxiety of life on the streets, to scatter my pain amongst the echo and tremble of their excessive noise.
But the more I scatter my pain, the more it pulverizes me, seed by seed, grain by grain. Abstract, intangible parts of you linger in each granule of my pain, like dust floating in the air. I cannot touch them; they do not suffice. Right now, in my perfect despair, I feel as though I could die of this life without you, missing you as I do.