the ruby stain across all i've ever known
“You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy. You who always pride yourself on being an observateur must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation. Ah, you are a strange fellow, one moment a child, the next an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool. But you are a long way from marriage.” ― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
The history I don't know haunts me all the same. It grips me, a steep moral imperative to learn as much as I can about the world we wrought so I may feel a little less despair about each purchase I make. I struggle with it daily; I wonder what kind of art will articulate how trapped I feel. It's in the sugar, the butter. It's the flour and the milk, the palm oil, the gasoline. It's in every thread I wear. I cannot escape, so I must grieve.
I believe I will grieve forever.
Yet I want to live gladly, and I do. I want to rejoice in the gifts of the material realm, and I do, but the truth makes me ache, so much that I no longer feel it, even if I am thinking of it always.
I've declared it dangerous to want. I abstain from what I can, coffee and chocolate and other substances that might distract me from how I am at once, somehow, unknowably numb and stripped raw. It is a burden upon my mind and I resolve to make use of this body, to write and write and write--
But it's all nonsense. Nonsense, I tell you -- it's all scraps, all loose viscera and lonely ephemera, the shards of bleeding heart scattered across my word processors.
I want for so much that I'm schooling myself to stop. I agonize over so little that even the smallest kindness is grand, a rift of light in dreary sky that wakes the optimist, shakes the gloom from her eyes and reminds her that the world is still beautiful, even amid the muck man's made upon it.
I now sell books to make my living. One day my name will be among the spines I slide onto shelves.