Learning To Love Yourself (More) pt.8

(As His Heart Pounds, She Lost Him, from The Untitled Collaboration of Brendan George Ko and faye mullen, 2008)

Lead-Hearted

There’s a repetition in life, where you experience the same thing over and over, and yet you survive. Over time you become tougher, ready for heart break, but each time it takes a little more, even if you can’t afford to lose it; there it goes. Each time makes another failure, and you ask yourself over and over, why did I let myself be a victim. Don’t feel bad, nor feel like you have failed to learn the lesson because there is nothing to be learned. You are still pure, and your heart, no matter how many times you tell yourself your chest is a void, an absence where your beating heart once was, you still got kick, and you still got love inside of you. You will be beaten more, and more until you reach the end of what you think you have, and yet you still keep on going. I admire this about you, because your strength is beyond most. Every time you fall you get back up, and you continue to fight for happiness day after day. And as long as you continue, I will too, because we need each other in the struggle. Truth be told, it is the struggle that makes it all worth the while, and the challenge to make it sweet and victorious when you get there. Keep going, and never be beaten too hard, you still got fight, and if you don’t believe in yourself, for what it’s worth I believe in you. So keep fighting, keep going, until there is nothing left, and hope for one day it won’t be like this. Until that day, you are brave, you are strong, and you will outlast them all. Head forwards, and still smiling, hold to your dreams, hold to your heart’s desires because they are the only thing that makes sense when life is a mess.

In Search of the Single Thread That Makes Everything Fall Apart

Letting go is impossible. There will always be reminiscence, and residue of the thing or person you are trying to let go. You distance yourself and it only makes it worse as your world grows to a bitter cold. And eventually you reach a point where you are your worst enemy. You are looking for something. You see the image of your reflection shatter into a million pieces shaped to a sudden impact. You open your eyes and there you are, hovering in-between, left on the side, humbly alone. This is the way you tell yourself, you get up again, and then it hits you once more, and you’re down. This time you don’t know if you can get back up, and it feels like drowning and that person or thing you’re trying to let go pushes you with their foot on your chest. Your eyes bleed with tears of pain as the water floods your vision, and your screams are matched with water filling your mouth. You don’t feel like you can breathe anymore, and you feel the rough surface of boot scratch at your chest the more you struggle.
Before your oppressor’s face is the sun breaking through the clouds, and you can hear the wind through the splashing water and grunts, and you soon forget where you are. You lose yourself and you lose the person you struggle between missing and wanting to forget, and you don’t care anymore. You feel light, as if you were water drifting upon water, and you look around you and it all confirms your realization. You feel the world fall apart around you, and through the damper of water it all sounds so beautiful. You whistle and hum your theme song as the credits roll to the world you once know. Fairest of wells to all those greats, and all those mothers of crime and bloodsucking, to smiles that charmed the devil, to the saddest love you have ever lived. You will be free soon, as your lifeless body floods to the banks of a nameless land. You will be a stranger here, and the people you meet will disappear when you close your eyes. The air is as thick as dust, and ashes form shadows. The beating of your heart wakes you, and you no longer care. Who are you now, who are you once you let go?

And this is when you stop letting go, and you hold on, you do what foolish people do when in love and you give to a faceless hope. They aren’t here, and haven’t been for a while, still: hold on. They can never love you back: hold on. They don’t know anything about all of this: hold on. You’re falling apart, and looking for anyway out: hold on. But there isn’t any reason to keep holding on: hold on. I can’t anymore, I don’t know if I got anything left: hold on. I can’t love you anymore: hold on. Why can’t this all end: hold on. I just wanted you to be happy, and so if I leave now: hold on. Do you know how much you mean to me as I hold myself together long enough to see you again: holding on.

(I’ll be here, even if my body turns to dust, you could brush me off, and I’ll live in your hair.)

*and so concludes this month of self-help in the form of:
Learning To Love Yourself (More): or howtolivewithyourselfwhenthereisavoidwheretheyoncewere

Learning To Love Yourself (More) pt.7

(working image from Philm, 2009)

Readytotransformintoanexplosion

Running as fast as you can and hitting a brick wall. Your skull shatters starting at the jaw; you can hear the crack happen before your ear is completely cupped but a flat surface of hard and then the sharp pain in your back breathes fire all over. Your hands distort to ways they have never have before as your body dances to the collusion, and your heart is just fine besides a few extra beats in-between. Don’t cry you’ll get better. You’ll wear scars to show you had survived this experience, and instead of running away this time you embrace your past. I can’t lie, never have been good at it anyhow, but it still hurts so bad, and you just want to form a human ball and attach to a chain and be swung from building to building as you test to see which one will crumble first your world or yourself.
It’s not the easy way out, and you’re not making things harder for yourself because of a masochistic pleasure in feeling sad or pain. You just want the poetry of destruction to rectify this change in yourself. You are new, dipping from birth, and the world suddenly is not so well-known and dull. Your eyes look up at things, and everything is full of promise; every face, and every lie makes you a believer. And if this is what it takes so be it, as long as you can forget half of the fall, half of the collusion, and find happiness in surviving, and being able to walk again.

I want to explode, I want that moment of spontaneous human combustion, leaving half my legs, socks, and shoes perfectly intact as my couch turns to flames then smolder and burnt flesh. But it will probably never happen, and so I have to find other things to aspire to. I have to reach high in the sky, and tell the voices of doubt to shut their pieholes because I got dreams. Let the dreamer dream and create the world around him or her as he or she is a master of his or her own.
Remember you are the author of your life, whether things just collide into your path, you will fall over and over, and once in a while a large and heavy brick wall will appear from nowhere and it will hurt, it will hurt real bad when you hit that hard wall, but you’ll get up, and you’ll walk with a limp, and then walk normally, and one day, without realizing it, you’ll be back to running. It is because you are on your feet again, after life dished out you all these surprise brick walls that you are a master of your own, never fall too hard, never cry too long, and never forget the parts that make you, you.

A Break (from 2007)

A film I made for a soundscape I created around that time. I thought some video would make some change for this site, and I wanted a mini-break from this month of learning to love myself more.

Learning To Love Yourself (More) pt.6

(Kym with Her Father's Leg as She Plays with Her Kitty, 2009)(Rest in Peace)

Phantom Pain

It’s that headache that won’t go away. It’s that feeling like you just want to stay at home tonight, but you must go. You never know what you may find, and that no longer thrills you. It would be nice to just stay up late watching movies, or reading a book. There is a small world inside a book for you to discover. And though it may have been discovered many times before your eyes and imagine, the only thing that matters in the feeling you have inside. Breathe deep my friend, and think of ocean waves folding over each other and the sound they make, think of the air in the morning before a vast open field. Breathe deeper, and exhale. Keep this up until you feel semi-lightheaded from all the oxygen, look at the time and just decide your night is going to be good no matter what you end up doing. You hear that, it’s the sound of adventure. You may care about the people you’re about to see, or perhaps you don’t, and you might not want to go out, but now that you’re breathing in and out good vibes you no longer care, you’re in your own world now. Float on these clouds. Hop from one formation to the other sailing into the midnight sky. Kiss the moon; in its fullness and the calm wake in the air as you float back to Earth only to do it again. Rock your body back and fro and let the rhythm take you. Think of the possibilities; think of love, think of the things that make you happy. Remember them, remember them by their names, and if they don’t have names now is the time to address them at a personal level because they are with you now and perhaps forever. Now float on, breathing in the night, exhaling the day, and be carried away to your favorite place with your favorite person, even if that person may be yourself.

*There will be a memorial held at Edward Day Gallery June 20th, 2009, starting at seven pm.

Learning To Love Yourself (More) pt.5

(How We Say Goodbye)

Saying Hello To Loneliness

It’s not real, this sense of being alone. You have friends, you have people who care a lot about you, so why feel so lonely. What are you running from? It’s all in your head. You keep telling yourself it is like dirt that doesn’t exist and yet you keep cleaning your hands, over and over, for nothing. And when you look in the mirror you see someone lost, and that isn’t there. You’re not alone, just not there. And everything everyone is saying sounds like they aren’t there with you. That hearing those you care a lot about tell you you’re not alone without them being there is a strange thing. But rather to fall further, and try to find answers to your loneliness, you should stop. Hold on to the rock that you have fallen from and then proceed to the next rock right above it. Keep this up and soon you’ll find a rhythm in it, and perhaps you’ll even feel better. You think to yourself how awful it was to feel alone while you had such friends, and soon you forget why you felt that way in the first place.

Be carried away in your arms and legs as they move on their own. Feel all those worries and doubts leave you as if the growing light from above was cleaning the very flesh of your consciousness. You eventually reach a point where you once were, and you remember being happy here, but your arms and legs don’t stop, as you continue on curious to see what is at the end of all of this ascending. Would you believe me if I said there was nothing waiting for you, that all of this was just a trick to get you out of an imaginary hole; a hole you may not have even been in. You never required anything said the placebo; you were never alone or at least more alone than you ever have been. I’ve heard many words on loneliness, and one that seemed to stay with me the most over the years is: we’re always alone. It was an unhappy and bitter old man who said it, and it would be later I found myself as an unhappy and bitter man, for hopefully other reasons than this man as I denied any similarities to this man, and wondered why people were still so important to me, and the connections we share. It was the fact I wasn’t alone when I was able to relate to someone’s situation, and they saw themselves in my position and felt sympathy in the process. It was knowing someone knew me more than myself that scared the unhappy and bitter old man away, when I heard your voice for the first time it felt familiar; calling me home. I press my ear to the wind of a forgotten forest and I hear your voice as the wind warms my very soul.