Tree

June 8, 2006

Wait, wait for it. Words will come, they always do...

I was not suppose to be here, tonight. Tonight is another end to another dead day, and I grieve about where life has brought me. Melancholy is a dreadful thing to be redundant with, but an artist knows no other way. I am tormented by simple things, and strengthened by the terrible. It is a mystery, dear Reader, a mystery.
I wait for new growth. I wait for a new stature. I try to love the simple life that has been given me, but I grieve for its simplicity instead. I want suffering, and hardship, and turmoil. A fool! I know. But without challenge there is no purpose, and I feel purposeless. I feel like I have nothing to show for bravery, and strength, and virtue. I have nothing to show for wisdom, growth, and accomplishment. None have come to challenge me, but I don’t even know if I could meet up to them anyway if they were to even come at all. In all frankness, I fear the outcome. I fear the mirror of inevitable truth, the evidence that I am nothing but weak, fragile, sinful, and failing.
My good childhood has cursed me. I have been sheltered from the darknesses of the world, and I know nothing about it. I relate to no one because everyone has not been kept up in a shell like I have. Men don’t want me because I have no strength or wisdom to carry their burdens. Friends don’t want me because I have nothing to offer but desperate melancholy. Is it good to have a good life? Not if you feel spoiled by it.
I realize my fragility when I confront the reasoning to why I have been so safe. For years upon years, I did nothing but hide from the world. I hid in the secret caverns of my poetry and stories, creating safe worlds that were familiar to me, and I never came out of my hiding to find out what truly lay beyond the veil of fantasy. I have been shut up in a prison of safety, and it has maimed me. It has turned my own self against itself, and the battle is tiresome and cruel. I hate the unwanted person that I’ve become. I give illusion to myself that I have so much to offer to the world, and to people, and more intimately, to men. But I then come to realize that I am so shut up in selfishness and safety, and I am so stunted in worldly knowledge, and I have no challenger to give me reason to grow, and I am so virgin to all the ways of true goodness and virtue that I have absolutely nothing at all to give. I am empty. The void is falling into decay as the age of uselessness consumes it. A rotten, fallen tree. Hollow, and purposeless. But then I say to myself, if only I had been but a tree! A fallen tree would’ve been much more elegant than what I’ve become. I envy the tree.
I hope with all hope that I’ll find reason, or a path, that will lead me out of this terrible fate. Instead of waiting for life to challenge me, I should rise above it and challenge life itself. But, in truth, I am a coward indeed. This speech is redundant, and still I have not changed. I have written this melancholy many a time, and I always draw the end to a “new beginning”, or a “new hope.” But the new beginning never comes, and hope becomes foolish. I am a coward. I speak of coming out of my hiding veil, but I never do. What will become of me tomorrow? All that I know, is the world inside my head. I will be blind with never the hope of seeing simply because I am too afraid to open my eyes. A fool’s way, but it is the only way I know.
If I remember how to listen to the trees again, I just might find my way to certainty and purpose. They beckon to me, wanting a better life for me. They seem to be the only ones to know why life is said to be so beautiful. Maybe, tomorrow, I will rise to the heavens with them.