I've been thinking a lot about what mercy means. From compassion.com, "'mercy' derives from the medieval Latin merced or mercers, which means 'price paid'. It has the connotation of forgiveness, benevolence, and kindness...mercy often refers to compassionate behavior from a person in power". On google, there's a graph showing usage of the word over time, and it's steadily declined since the 1800s. It's often used in religious contexts, which I assume alludes to God, who's often referred to as "merciful". It makes sense then that the use has declined in a society becoming steadily less religious.
I can see now that I've thought a lot about the concept without relating concept to the word. I was in a relationship earlier this year and he couldn't decide whether or not he wanted to keep dating. At a certain point I started telling him he needed to "shoot the dog," in reference to Old Yeller and I guess, myself. Instead of having conversations about it (with the subject in question, no less), I wanted him to just end it. I wanted him to be merciful. I didn't get what I wanted. I ended things of my own accord after repeated poor treatment that finally drove me to my wit's end. I had to be merciful toward myself, even though I didn't feel like I had power in the situation. A friend of mine had a mouse in their apartment recently. I was visiting when the trap popped, signaling its success. We checked it to see the mouse hadn't died but had broken its leg. The mouse was twitching and disfigured with its leg unnaturally bent. I told my friend he needed to kill it. I knew he needed to kill it because my mom told me as a child that my dad killed a dying animal with his boot once. The memory had stuck with her and her retelling with me. It says a lot about the kind of person my dad is - straight to the point, lacking emotion, merciful. My friend was debating what to do as I grabbed a plastic baggie, reached under the bed, and grabbed the mouse. I twisted the bag and took it to the linoleum kitchen floor. I stepped on the mouse until it died. I did all of this in a few minutes, more acting than thinking. I don't have a relationship with my dad. There's a good chance we are too alike. I am also straight to the point, lacking emotion, and merciful. History repeated itself in a strange way that night, and I don't know if it's because I know my dad did that and agree or because I share his genetic code and act the same without free will. The mouse was my first thought the next morning; I've thought about my actions every day since. I don't like what I did, but I know it was right except for maybe in its execution: if there is a faster or more efficient way to end a dying animal's life, that's better. I'd shoot the dog because I'd want the dog to shoot me.
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I bled my colors dry
Colors just for me I know why grey birds fly away soft faces, you might not expect them to hope will sink you waiting for them to return outside, the clouds drift on I've been looking for a way out. Does that make any sense?
When I go for walks and smell thousands of blooming honeysuckle mixed with the hot air, I feel ok. Otherwise it's mostly questions and not many answers. The answer is probably: stop asking questions and be present. Life is a complete mystery for me. I often wonder if I'm worse off without a belief in a god to buoy me. (Does anyone actually believe that shit though? More questions.) I often wonder at my resilience. I'm doing my best but there has been a continual "falling apart" for...a while. Life can't always be in that state. (Or is that what entropy means?) How will I handle Big Things, like my mom or cat or best friend dying? I keep reminding myself to break things into their smallest counterparts. One step at a time. Just like you'd hear at any AA meeting. So far it isn't really working but it brings me some small comfort. I just have to do the next thing. Not the thing that's 40 ahead of the next thing. It's a lot to ask of life for it to have meaning. I think this includes believing life is meaningless. I think wanting life to have meaning is failure to be fully present disguised as philosophy. I mostly stole those thoughts but upon hearing them they fit me. I guess I'm demanding answers anyway - this is how I was born and likely how I will die, yelling my loud opinion the entire time with no awareness of volume. I urgently need to know: that emptiness I carry around, do I just accept it? There's no filling it, right? No amount of spending time with people, habits ranging from productive to vice, will ever entirely address it. Right? As long as I resist that feeling, it will be more difficult to cope with. (In theory, though admittedly less scientific than particle theory or the like.) I need to know: are the blooming honeysuckle the best it ever gets? They're great, plenty even, but it isn't always late spring after a few months of rain. I want to say I'm happy to be here. That's the goal. But maybe for now, just "here" is enough. 06/2020
When was the last time you fell in love? Do you remember the last time you told someone "I love you" for the first time? Did you want to say it over and over until it didn't scare you? I sort of hate being in love. I mean of course I love it, but I believe every 80s song that called it a drug. I've never done drugs but I understand them. I understand they make you think things your boring sober brain wouldn't normally. They impair your judgment. They take you high then crash you low in ways that don't overlap well with day-to-day. Of course I love being in love. Everything seems miraculous at 5 am when I'm not sure what I hate about them yet. And I can't wait to find out what I hate about them. I anticipate every first with a nervous excitement. I can't wait to see how they hurt me and if they can ever make it up. Of course they can. I hope they won't shatter me until I can't be glued back together, etc etc. Then I remember no one can hurt you without your permission - Eleanor Roosevelt but that isn't even the quote blah blah blah. I've tried love before but my tolerance for it is somehow brand new again. I've been looking for ways to shock myself. I got bored because I was boring and now it's all loud music and saying whatever I think. I'm trying to romanticize whatever's in my head. That hasn't really changed. The truth is I'd probably be the most fun drunk/drug addict ever. That's why I can't do it. I'm usually right on the edge of being WAY TOO MUCH and that's just on a Tuesday at 10 am. Anyway, this is all sort of self-aggrandizing, but I'm not above it. I know I'm nothing special but at the same time I'll never really think that. How else are we supposed to manage? Everyone is a mix of contradictions, in one second even. I'm constantly a funny balance between caring deeply and being nonchalant. I mostly care deeply about what I want and am nonchalant about all the rest of it. Or vice versa. I sometimes do have an urge to lose my mind and behave in the worst way possible, though you'd never know it by looking at me or talking to me. Even "worst" doesn't mean much to me because I don't know what my morals are. I never have. Someone could tell me they killed someone and I'd just think about it for a while. I wouldn't admonish them or have much of an opinion because if I was them I'd be them and do as they do. I'm just lucky I don't feel like killing anyone. Do you get that? Do you get that if your life is going well and you play nicely with reality it's just luck? Your genes, environment, anything anyone ever says to you - that's all just random so free will is an illusion. I get the impression people don't feel that as deeply as I do which is fine but at the same time very confusing to me. I like to say the insane things I think out loud. Usually people are pretty cool about it. A housefly lives for an average of 28 days. A month: to emerge as larvae from an egg, five days to grow up (go quick!), four weeks: to fall in love, out of love, in love, is this fly the one? make fly babies flies have perfect hindsight: they can literally see behind them, so I guess it's closer to currentsight maybe this is their gift in exchange for such a short life Does it feel like forever to them? Do they experience midlife crises around day 15? Is their concept of time like ours at all? Is fly life just one very long day? To compare, I have had 22 years and 9 months 273 months: to be vacuum suctioned out of my mom, to go to elementary, middle, and high school, then college, to grow so slowly and suddenly- where did the last year go? the last 5? a year. 12 times longer than a fly's life. 60 times the fly life is less than 1/4 of mine so far and while I'm probably not a maggot, I feel like a pupa. I don't even have any babies, fly or otherwise Flies probably don't work a 9-5 because evading spiders and fly swatters is exhausting and for them, literally a life's work I work, work, work and sometimes I feel like I'm in a spider's web JUST WAITING I'm not sure what the real life spider is, probably boredom I hope if the spider catches me, it's actually something great, like a free trip around the world If the spider is death, like it is for the fly, well I guess I'll build a catapult launch somewhere far away from the web Are there flies and spiders on Mars? I think humans exist because of rhythms.
Breathe in, out, in, out, in, out, not too fast, or your face might go numb, not too slow, or your heart rate will drop. Steady heart beat, lub dub, lub dub, to the beat of crickets that chirp outside at night. Circadian rhythm, the 24 hour clock, which keeps humans (and plants, and animals, and fungi, and cyanobacteria) in sync with earth. Loving you has become my latest rhythm. lub, love, dub, love, breathe in, love, breathe out, love, in sleep, love, awake, love. i haven't loved you since birth, but my body can't tell my love from my heartbeat, at least not anymore. And I didn't want to write about love, because everyone writes about love. Get creative, get away from the mostly undefinable, omnipresent force that most of us seek, find, feel, give, take, yearn for, get mad at, run away from, but always come back to- love. Before I said it, I used to tap it out on your arm, back, falling asleep, three taps for i love you. I can't do that anymore. It would take too many taps to express all the love and besides, maybe by now it's redundant and the tapping has turned to knocking on a locked door. I don't want to be bitter, am trying so hard not to be bitter, because if too many drops of bitterness touch love, it gets cloudy, ripples out from the first dark spot to the edges, ruins the quality. I don't want to breathe in love mixed with poison. When I think of letting go, every single time, I imagine the banksy graffiti with the little girl, hand outreached toward the balloon as it floats away. Only in my image, I'm tightly grasping the balloon. And now I understand why: my love for you is rhythm and i can't let my other rhythms stop, can't let my heart stop beating--if i was drowning i'd instinctively fight to rise above the water--and if earth didn't orbit the sun to completion once every 365 days then could life exist as we know it, would plants stop making oxygen, would hearts stop lub dubbing in sometimes perfect synchronicity with the crickets chirping outside, because the crickets would be affected too you know, and if crickets go extinct their deaths will impact entire ecosystems and the animal kingdom, and maybe loving me isn't your rhythm, maybe not now, maybe not ever but i think we can all agree that crickets matter. I write (think?) a lot of unfinished poems and essays in my head. Sometimes I make notes on my phone. Most of the time I'm half asleep, and by the time I read it again, the thought is jumbled, not nearly as poetic to fully awake me.
Like the one from today about wind being the soul of earth (earth is the body) because wind is the force that moves so many things but nothing moves wind. I think our souls move our bodies like wind moves earth. Or this thought, typed into my notes on May 26th, 2016: "The words fall off the tip of my paintbrush into a portrait but it doesn't look like you. I can't actually paint but I thought I could use my words to turn you into art that couldn't change, art that could be referenced later before time changes your neurons and ages your cells" ended abruptly, no period, no sense of finality, because that's who I am as a person? Or because the potential of the thought might be soured by the finished product? I can't decipher some of the notes, like this one from May 13th, 2016: "the stars, her shoes, blurry finger" Some of them are inquisitive, like this one from January 8th, 2016: "Meaning linked to the spelling of words How can we understand words if we can't spell them" and a few of them I will finish, like this one from June 6th, 2016 "I wish it would rain in my soul I wish the metaphorical heavens would open up and collapse the walls Writer Sarah Kay said, 'rain will wash away everything if you let it.' But what if it won't rain?" These are the ones that make it into my phone, by random chance, selected out of the whirlpool of thoughts circling constantly around my mind. "Whirlpool of thoughts circling" sounds like an exaggeration but when I think about the image of my thoughts, I see the thoughts in a rapid circular movement, buoyed by their own force. Some don't survive the centripetal force and those thoughts are sucked down and forgotten. I think forgotten thoughts are as important as existing ones because their revoked existence allows room for new thoughts. It's the circle of thoughts made up of unfinished thoughts, forgotten thoughts, potential thoughts, and the most difficult for me: formed thoughts. I wish formed thoughts didn't count as much in communication with other people. I wish people could read this (from February 26th, 2016) "if you see something in a picture and don't know what it is, it's hard to look up" and understand the way my mind works without any further explanation. The formed thoughts scare me because of their finality. No one told me that I would think of my grandma every day once she died. I didn't think of her every day when she was alive, so no, I couldn't have known, might not have believed even if some well meaning person had told me.
I see her in the grocery store as the short haired old lady with a lot of junk food gets in the check out line. In the psychic gift shop with the horribly ugly wolf dream catcher she would have loved. In the mexican restaurant with the native american painting right in front of me, like she put it there herself. And it's different than missing, this feeling I feel. I think of her so often that I'm not sure I miss her. If I miss anything, I miss not thinking of her. What I want is the choice. I want the choice to call her, the choice to touch her. The choice to send the picture of the dream catcher I've had on my phone since December that nobody else would understand (or appreciate). When I was little she let me spray her hair with a water bottle--she let me drench her, she liked the water droplets to race down her scalp and collect on her bed sheets. The last time I ever saw her, I used a water bottle to spray her hair. Thinking she had humored me as a small child, I was careful with my sprays, careful not to wet her hair too much. She spoke up, said "spray more honey," so I did. She wanted to feel the familiar sensation again, I think. She loved it. I did too. I knew this was the last time I would see my grandma, the last time I would touch her coarse hair and her soft, leathery skin. I don't think I've been more present at any other time in my life. No one told me how deep the emotion would well inside of me. I had only read soft phrases about others' loved ones dying: "I miss her so much" "She was the kindest person I have ever known" and while those may be true, they lack something. My grandma was not the kindest person I've ever known. She shamelessly flirted with younger men, she borrowed money from anyone who would let her, and she loved her dogs and gardening. I won't contain her in a word or common phrase because she was her loud laughter, her refusal to wear a bra, her love for Jesus, and so much more. Today I remembered her old brown car, uncomfortably hot in the summer time. Her yellow, clingy dog that went everywhere she did. Sandy. My grandma put Sandy in a diaper when she was in heat. When I was 8 or 9, she told me my eyes light up when I smile, and it's still my favorite compliment I've ever received. I'm glad I think about her every day. If the most I can do is make sure she's not forgotten because of my memories, I'll think of her forever. |
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