white horse
It was Einstein who said it, did you know? He was the one that said insanity is doing something over and over again. I was running out of distractions so I looked it up, and he also believed that, and I quote, “God does not play dice”. Maybe not. Maybe God doesn’t take chances. Maybe, when some poor angel wants to play Yahtzee or something and asks Our Father Who Art A Sore Loser, God brings his “lucky” dice (which in reality are thoroughly weighted), and he wipes the floor with his new feather duster.
Einstein is kind of a fucking idiot— not to say that I don’t believe God isn’t cheating at Yahtzee, because He is all knowing and supposedly controls everything, so there’s no way you’re winning anything against that. Einstein is a fucking idiot for other reasons. Mostly because it’s scientifically proven that doing the same things over and over can actually yield different results, like in quantum mechanics, and also because God might be omniscient, but we sure as hell aren’t. We never know exactly what’s coming next. It’s all chaos— controlled chaos, but chaos nonetheless. It’s a game of Tetris, but you can only suggest to the blocks where they should go, and they may or may not indulge you. Gaps and holes get scattered through everything.
All this to say that I am at the same place with myself that I was with this post for about fifteen minutes before I actually started putting words down, which is a way of saying that I am staring into a form of absence. I’m now noticing how many of them there are— fresh paper, empty water bottles, blank walls, those last few pages in a book that exist as nothing but a void where before there wasn’t one—they sit, unfilled graves, patient and watching.
I can’t stand it.
I used to like emptiness a lot more. Negative space was a sign of intention; God breathing in so we have space to grow and blossom, a deliberate action done from love. Emptiness used to be a sign from some bigger power saying I love you so much that you will learn how to deal with your own shit, instead of me intervening. And I liked it! I still do. But somewhere along the line, breathing in became sucking. God turned into fucking Charybdis and now there’s too much gone— it’ a crumbling cliff and it’s getting closer and closer to falling out from under my feet. It doesn’t feel like love anymore. I want it to be love. I want it to be love so badly it consumes me.
I rely on confirmation from something that probably doesn’t exist. I need a heavenly verification code to sign me back into my account— something bigger than I am to come in and save me from myself. Love, maybe. To eat and be eaten. It doesn’t matter, though. A solution doesn’t change the context of a problem. Life has become a walk in my father’s shoes, and the space between my foot and the shoe is far greater than the potential of touching the ground.
On an unrelated note, I wish things were less formulaic. It’s happening now— I’ve epiphanized a feeling, and now I take (futile) action against it. Blah, blah, blah. And now, the breakdown… on we go.
Spring weather has brought in a lot of tension. The sky is a thick blanket of gray, sitting smugly in the sky like it’s winning a breath-holding contest in the local pool. I’m nothing if not a fan of shaking my fists and doing pointless things and having conversations with personified things, so I tell the sky that I resent it for having a good lung capacity. The sky responds by starting to rain. Fucker. At least it’s not empty anymore.
I turn around, evaluate my room. The floor sure as hell isn’t empty— there’s no more than 3 inches of floor exposed in one place. The beds aren’t empty, I’ve got way too much bedding for that. All available surfaces are covered. If I’m getting technical with it, everything is covered in something because of the air and the constant state of atoms and all that, but that doesn’t count. The walls loom blank and menacing.
Last summer I painted my room and I’ve come to regret it. Not the painting bit, that was very necessary— the walls had been a very depressing shade of purple since the 1960s, and I was happy to remedy it. Tragically, I thought I was painting the walls a nice golden color, but it turned out it was my skin color but grayer. The nooks the beds are in were painted a dark blue and I should’ve painted the rest of the room that shade. Instead, the place where I spend easily over 20 hours in every day feels like an oppressive flesh prison. Great going, kid. Should have swatched it first. On top of that, the walls are empty. Empty, empty, empty— it makes me frantic. I play songs with fast and aggressive drums and pace the entirety of my room on my tip toes, trying to dodge the debris of stifled creativity. A sewing needle goes into my foot and I don’t even flinch. Those aren’t the ones I’m scared of.
When I was little, I thought of emotional range as a sliding spectrum that went from up to down, back and forth. Good, bad, good, bad, good again. When I got a little older, I called myself an idiot for thinking that and conceptualized emotional range as a color wheel. I’m the oldest I’ve ever been now and I refuse to call any version of myself stupid, but my concept of emotional range has become a 3-dimensional cone, like those paper cups they have next to water dispensers. Every shade of emotion now comes with a scale of energy, from rotting to manic.
I am trying to get better at speaking without metaphors and veils over my words. Let me say it plainly— grief has recontextualized every feeling I am capable of, and now I am left in a frantic state of transient emotions, wanting to explode. I haven’t left the city in a month and I rarely leave the house. I am, quite frankly, about to crawl right out of my skin, but there’s nowhere for me to crawl to.
It’s terribly easy to imagine myself combusting— my guts would go over the entire produce section and everyone would start screaming. Maybe I’d repaint the walls by popping like a fucking pimple. I need to do something or go somewhere or anything, please God oh please, I’m three seconds away from exploding and I need something that can defuse the bomb in me. I need my blue light.
It doesn’t matter. Nobody is coming to save me— not even me. And the worst thing is that even if I did save myself, it wouldn’t change the fact that nobody came for me.
Maybe I should stop believing in God, put my full weight behind chaos instead. I played Yahtze with Him and got cheated— it’s well within my rights to never play again. How could a God exist that would put a drunk driver in a semi truck and then put that truck on an icy road? How could a God push a steering wheel through a boy’s ribcage?
I’m so tired. I’m so tired.
There’s a hundred people who love me but it’s not enough. I put a layer of gauze over the blank wall to make it less empty but it’s not enough. I spend my days chain smoking and tanning because I have so much to do that I’m paralyzed. It’s not enough.
There are beautiful things in this world, you know? The lilac tree outside my window is budding and there are enough birds flying in and out of it that I could probably spend the whole day watching them. It’s sunny out almost every day. My mother, so about half my problems, has been in Italy for the whole week. Sometimes it’s fine and everything is beautiful again, and all my friends love me and talk to me and I can ignore the bad things in favor of the good. But then it goes away. It all goes away! And I get lost in the empty again, that tangible void, the suction of a hungry baby’s mouth.
Oh, I can feel the soil falling over my head, the daisies growing over me. I wake with silt in my hair. How long do I have until I look up only to realize I’m in a coffin?
Every day is the same, blending together into a cloud of dust like a cartoon brawl. Pet the dog. Don’t get swallowed. Get groceries. Don’t get swallowed. Sit in the sun. Don’t get swallowed. Stop smoking we love you don’t get swallowed get high don’t get swallowed ppaint your nails don’t get swallowed dont get swallowed dpnt get swalloewd don getwaloed dotn ger swallosrd dotgetswaloowwsontfeSWALOOWWSDPRGETSWALOWRDSAEMESAVEME. Save me.
I sing my song for the illuminated emptiness. For the desolation. A white horse runs through my dreams every night with silent syncopation, a shooting star against the gold green field and the flat silver sky. I watch his muscles pulse with every stride, rippling inside his coat. Like a heartbeat, he moves through the clouded afternoon and endless grass from east to west, past the house that no roads lead to, past the burning church, past my motion capture camera eyes. Aerial shot. He cuts through the grass like a comet. Close ups of the shoulders flexing, the hooves flinging dirt, the flared nostrils, the blazing mane. I am alone in the movie theater and he is on the screen, racing in dead silence except the clicking of the frames in the projector booth. The movie theater is a beach. The movie theater is a house party. The movie theater is the parking lot of a motel, and we have stepped outside to soothe the baby.
I think about twins a lot, mainly in the context of identity and experience. Who gets you the most? It’s not you— you’re stuck inside your head whether you like it or not and due to that, you’re blind to how you present yourself, how others perceive you. Maybe your siblings or parents get it, but they have other shit going on, like your friends do. Who has their life so intertwined with yours that it becomes inseparable? Who is completely able to understand the hows and whens of the way you were raised, been through the exact same shit that you have, knows what you know? Only someone that was at that place at that exact moment could understand. Only someone who’s been you could know.
I wish I could leave you on a hopeful note. I wish I could offer some sort of reassurance, but all I have is my hands and the always-rising sun. That’s it for me. That’s all there is. Is it enough?
There was a time where nobody could tell us apart. There was a time where we could fool our own families because we looked so alike, and now I don’t know what to do with my hands. The world goes on.
I say it like a prayer to the empty sky— make it enough. In the distance, the white horse is disappearing into the sun. I say it again. Make it enough. Father Who Art A Sore Loser, God brings his “lucky” dice (which in reality are thoroughly weighted), and he wipes the floor with his new feather duster.
Einstein is kind of a fucking idiot— not to say that I don’t believe God isn’t cheating at Yahtzee, because He is all knowing and supposedly controls everything, so there’s no way you’re winning anything against that. Einstein is a fucking idiot for other reasons. Mostly because it’s scientifically proven that doing the same things over and over can actually yield different results, like in quantum mechanics, and also because God might be omniscient, but we sure as hell aren’t. We never know exactly what’s coming next. It’s all chaos— controlled chaos, but chaos nonetheless. It’s a game of Tetris, but you can only suggest to the blocks where they should go, and they may or may not indulge you. Gaps and holes get scattered through everything.
All this to say that I am at the same place with myself that I was with this post for about fifteen minutes before I actually started putting words down, which is a way of saying that I am staring into a form of abscence. I’m now noticing how many of them there are— fresh paper, empty water bottles, blank walls, those last few pages in a book that exist as nothing but a void where before there wasn’t one—they sit, unfilled graves, patient and watching.
I can’t stand it.
I used to like emptiness a lot more. Negative space was a sign of intention; God breathing in so we have space to grow and blossom, a deliberate action done from love. Emptiness used to be a sign from some bigger power saying I love you so much that you will learn how to deal with your own shit, instead of me intervening. And I liked it! I still do. But somewhere along the line, breathing in became sucking. God turned into fucking Charybdis and now there’s too much gone— it’ a crumbling cliff and it’s getting closer and closer to falling out from under my feet. It doesn’t feel like love anymore. I want it to be love. I want it to be love so badly it consumes me.
I rely on confirmation from something that probably doesn’t exist. I need a heavenly verification code to sign me back into my account— something bigger than I am to come in and save me from myself. Love, maybe. To eat and be eaten. It doesn’t matter, though. A solution doesn’t change the context of a problem. Life has become a walk in my father’s shoes, and the space between my foot and the shoe is far greater than the potential of touching the ground.
On an unrelated note, I wish things were less formulaic. It’s happening now— I’ve epiphanized a feeling, and now I take (futile) action against it. Blah, blah, blah. And now, the breakdown… on we go.
Spring weather has brought in a lot of tension. The sky is a thick blanket of gray, sitting smugly in the sky like it’s winning a breath-holding contest in the local pool. I’m nothing if not a fan of shaking my fists and doing pointless things and having conversations with personified things, so I tell the sky that I resent it for having a good lung compacity. The sky responds by starting to rain. Fucker. At least it’s not empty anymore.
I turn around, evaluate my room. The floor sure as hell isn’t empty— there’s no more than 3 inches of floor exposed in one place. The beds aren’t empty, I’ve got way too much bedding for that. All available surfaces are covered. If I’m getting technical with it, everything is covered in something because of the air and the constant state of atoms and all that, but that doesn’t count. The walls loom blank and menacing.
Last summer I painted my room and I’ve come to regret it. Not the painting bit, that was very necessary— the walls had been a very depressing shade of purple since the 1960s, and I was happy to remedy it. Tragically, I thought I was painting the walls a nice golden color, but it turned out it was my skin color but grayer. The nooks the beds are in were painted a dark blue and I should’ve painted the rest of the room that shade. Instead, the place where I spend easily over 20 hours in every day feels like an oppressive flesh prison. Great going, kid. Should have swatched it first. On top of that, the walls are empty. Empty, empty, empty— it makes me frantic. I play songs with fast and agressive drums and pace the entirety of my room on my tip toes, trying to dodge the debris of stifled creativity. A sewing needle goes into my foot and I don’t even flinch. Those aren’t the ones I’m scared of.
When I was little, I thought of emotional range as a sliding spectrum that went from up to down, back and forth. Good, bad, good, bad, good again. When I got a little older, I called myself an idiot for thinking that and conceptualized emotional range as a color wheel. I’m the oldest I’ve ever been now and I refuse to call any version of myself stupid, but emotional range has become a 3-dimesional cone, like those paper cups they have next to water dispensers. Every shade of emotion now comes with a scale of energy, from rotting to manic.
I am trying to get better at speaking without metaphors and veils over my words. Let me say it plainly— grief has recontextualized every feeling I am capable of, and now I am left in a frantic state of transient emotions, wanting to explode. I haven’t left the city in a month and I rarely leave the house. I am, quite frankly, about to crawl right out of my skin, but there’s nowhere for me to crawl to.
It’s terribly easy to imagine myself combusting— my guts would go over the entire produce section and everyone would start screaming. Maybe I’d repaint the walls by popping like a fucking pimple. I need to do something or go somewhere or anything, please God oh please, I’m three seconds away from exploding and I need something that can defuse the bomb in me. I need my blue light.
It doesn’t matter. Nobody is coming to save me— not even me. And the worst thing is that even if I did save myself, it wouldn’t change the fact that nobody came for me.
Maybe I should stop believing in God, put my full weight behind chaos instead. I played Yahtze with Him and got cheated— it’s well within my rights to never play again. How could a God exist that would put a drunk driver in a semitruck and then put that truck on an icy road? How could a God push a steering wheel through a boy’s ribcage?
I’m so tired. I’m so tired.
There’s a hundred people who love me but it’s not enough. I put a layer of gauze over the blank wall to make it less empty but it’s not enough. I spend my days chainsmoking and tanning because I have so much to do that I’m paralyzed. It’s not enough.
There are beautiful things in this world, you know? The lilac tree outside my window is budding and there are enough birds flying in and out of it that I could probably spend the whole day watching them. It’s sunny out almost every day. My mother, so about half my problems, has been in Italy for the whole week. Sometimes it’s fine and everything is beautiful again, and all my friends love me and talk to me and I can ignore the bad things in favor of the good. But then it goes away. It all goes away! And I get lost in the empty again, that tangible void, the suction of a hungry baby’s mouth.
Oh, I can feel the soil falling over my head, the daises growing over me. I wake with silt in my hair. How long do I have until I look up only to realize I’m in a coffin?
Every day is the same, blending together into a cloud of dust like a cartoon brawl. Pet the dog. Don’t get swallowed. Get groceries. Don’t get swallowed. Sit in the sun. Don’t get swallowed. Stop smoking we love you don’t get swallowed get high don’t get swallowed ppaint your nails don’t get swallowed dont get swallowed dpnt get swalloewd don getwaloed dotn ger swallosrd dotgetswaloowwsontfeSWALOOWWSDPRGETSWALOWRDSAEMESAVEME. Save me.
I sing my song for the illuminated emptiness. For the desolation. A white horse runs through my dreams every night with silent syncopation, a shooting star against the gold green field and the flat silver sky. I watch his muscles pulse with every stride, rippling inside his coat. Like a heartbeat, he moves through the clouded afternoon and endless grass from east to west, past the house that no roads lead to, past the burning church, past my motion capture camera eyes. Aerial shot. He cuts through the grass like a comet. Close ups of the shoulders flexing, the hooves flinging dirt, the flared nostrils, the blazing mane. I am alone in the movie theater and he is on the screen, racing in dead silence except the clicking of the frames in the projector booth. The movie theater is a beach. The movie theater is a house party. The movie theater is the parking lot of a motel, and we have stepped outside to soothe the baby.
I think about twins a lot, mainly in the context of identity and experience. Who gets you the most? It’s not you— you’re stuck inside your head whether you like it or not and due to that, you’re blind to how you present yourself, how others percieve you. Maybe your siblings or parents get it, but they have other shit going on, like your friends do. Who has their life so entertwined with yours that it becomes inseperable? Who is completely able to understand the hows and whens of the way you were raised, been through the exact same shit that you have, knows what you know? Only someone that was at that place at that exact moment could understand. Only someone who’s been you could know.
I wish I could leave you on a hopeful note. I wish I could offer some sort of reassurance, but all I have is my hands and the always-rising sun. That’s it for me. That’s all there is. Is it enough?
There was a time where nobody could tell us apart. There was a time where we could fool our own families because we looked so alike, and now I don’t know what to do with my hands. The world goes on.
I say it like a prayer to the empty sky— make it enough. In the distance, the white horse is disappearing into the sun. I say it again. Make it enough.