Words are useless

Words are useless. Like all the best things in this world, the most useless things are the ones we have the most need of. In moments such as these, I feel myself desperately thrashing in sounds trying to make sense of myself, while the mere cathartic sense of feeling I have a voice soothes me, or settles me, regardless of how much more confused I am when I stop writing. Not picking a subject, but merely letting go, in a seizure of ink and thoughts that incoherently piece themselves together, trying to contain a person inside a body, once the first impulse of an explosion subsides and decides to come back later. It is this explosion, this bursting into flames, which would mean freedom, catharsis, the liberation of something too big to ignore, or to manage.

But it doesn’t come. Because as human beings, flawed perfections that we are, we are forever cursed to smolder without consuming. We are allowed to burst into light, but we are not allowed to jump headfirst into the fire and spring into flames.
I jump, and I throw myself at the leaping fires, but you don’t let me burn, cease to exist and become a million fragments of mirrored glass in the air. I am destined to live my own broken life and beams of light in this body of mine, a body which doesn’t make a difference, a body that is my reason for being who I am.

How selfless can a love be? Shock every nerve into another level of perception; make me feel every single shaking of a leaf, feeling so intense it becomes pain. The more I love, the more I hurt. The more I reach out to every stranger on the street, and wish to reflect a million memories of souls broken day by day, the more you crack the very foundation of what I thought I was. I tried to give you everything you needed, but as I realize that all I can give you is what I have, little by little I hear the rumbling gasp of agony that flows out of my every word and promise. I realize now that I made you flow through my veins to keep you alive, and it didn’t work. It doesn’t work, and now we’re both caught by poison. I chose you as my means to die, to break, and you did nothing but push me off the ledge. You lacked the nerve to make me bleed. You lacked the will to let your voice out of its memory box. You lacked the courage to reach out. And in trying so hard to keep me away, locked in a crystal cage to keep me intact, or rather in your own desperate need to drown in morphine, there is nothing now to pick up, no smoke, no ashes, nothing but jagged glass.

Lick away the sunlight from my wounds, and I swear I can still see. Kiss away the smile from my lips, and I promise you’ll hear me laugh for moments on end. Brush away with your fingers every single memory from my hair, and I won’t speak of home. I won’t speak of tomorrow. I won’t think of yesterday. Stare my dreams down like melted honey, and handcuff my wrists to keep me still. I’ll still dance away your fears every day, and say hello to the moon every morning. I’ll drink away the ocean into silence and burn in the sand. If you will just smell the secrets from behind my neck.





This is not a decision that’s mine for the making, because the one word I am and who I started off being, long before getting lost or getting found, decided long ago that I should love each person under their own terms, and tie myself to imperfection. I am bound to fail and flaw like a god is to a rock, to give as if I cried liquid light. I am begging for a candle, begging for a lighter, or a small match to scrape against the rock, and every spark I speak soaks into your skin like a not-enough remedy.

To know that time, as insubstantial and unmeaningful as it can be in my mind, passes or washes or is tread upon by us, and makes a difference in the way we plan out our lives. One month, two, three, years. Trying to measure ideas and learning and love in hours and minutes. Measuring the worth of something in seconds and decades. And yet I don’t feel it pass. It’s not wind, it is not light, but rather a weak change of vision which little by little loses some of its glad spring of its step without seeming to gain anything in exchange. The words coming out from my lips change, the intensity with which I cry changes, the colors my eyes seem able to see change and smoke away, the clenching of my fists is less often, but more dangerous, and my blinking away of tears a little bit less rehearsed. That as a forgotten song that hadn’t been played in months is hit upon by the shuffle mode; the air is choked out of my lungs, emptied, torn and disappeared, as the shock of what I hadn’t noticed leaving makes my insides cringe with pain. Loss, and nostalgia, and the pain of time is simply that you know there is no choice but knowing it will never come back. The feeling, the hope, that color, that face. Those words, so easily flowing out of your lips every single time you saw my face, and smiled across the room, or the million times it would happen again and again, to know that it is all changed and torn and forgiven and over with. To know that regardless of how much it hurts, I smile because it happened hurts me with the uselessness of being stuck where I am.

Words are pointless. Yet I write.