Did I always talk so much about myself? What did doing this thing do to me? What did isolating myself for so long do to me? Why did I try to make it work in the superficial way that I did? Because that’s the medium? Because it’s easy? Because it costs me less? Or because you say you like it? You still like it, right? Did you like it?
Now how do I regain the ability to be in the world and draw it into me? “The world could show nothing to me.” The words sound in my head all the time, for about the last year. What have I done to obstruct this communication?
It was all about communicating to get what I wanted while revealing as little as possible. How strange it is how much I feel the need to avoid saying. Whatever I can get away with, or from. Whatever, or wherever, I can get.
I used to know how to show you something. What am I showing anyone now? My cave paintings, my spreadsheets. Faces etched into the walls of my prison cell, verses scrawled in the vertical blue-and-white stripes of soiled pajamas.
Sometimes I’d like to leave my cell but I don’t want to go through the trouble of having to find a new one.
If only I could see myself through the eyes of others. As I ready to leave Alina’s apartment I say I hope that the drugs I’ve bought will fix me. I’ve been reflecting about, I announce, my rancid vibes. The room is filled with groans. “I love your vibes,” someone says from the floor. Did I always talk so much about myself? There’s no point in wondering what it is I feel the need to prove. Like so much I can make out so clearly, when pressed I fail to find the words for it.
From birth we’re tasked with the responsibility of proving our value. Perhaps we find early on a place or two where we can derive or develop it. I talked so much as a little kid and everyone hated it. Then I became pathetically shy and cried and cried. A woman yelling at me on the train, because I had been energetically narrating the train ride. “Go ahead and cry to your stupid mother!”
I remember sitting in the ocean picking up the wet sand and throwing it and watching it fly in the wind. I remember scooping up the water so that it fell right back into the ocean I remember exactly the way that it fell.
What if I can only work in a state of heightened emotion? What if I never stopped working, and I gave up everything, and I made everything serve me, but none of it was available, none of it could be seen, but still it ate away at me, corroded me, and I became anxious, and isolated, and in denial about its effects on me, and my thinking became idiosyncratic and often barely true, twisted by the machinations created by the need to fulfill bodily desires, psychic desires, egoic desires, to persuade myself that I can take advantage of what is really taking advantage of me?
Are there advantages to be gained in the realm of the spirit? Are any of them the advantages of this world?
“How do I pray about this?” As I say the words I see myself as the bug waving its numerous legs on its hard, armored back; I’m kicking my legs, I’m squirming, I can’t stop thinking, I really don’t think, I really don’t think I’ll ever learn how to pray to you. That’s how disconnected I’ve become. I’d like to see myself through the eyes of others.
But would I dare to look through the eyes of God?
God, how do I reach you? How do I pray about this? I want to make myself decent. My mouth moves but the words don’t come out. I’m so tired of talking about myself but it’s the only thing that I ever managed to make myself qualified to do. By being shut up. By hiding. By hurting, by failing, by all of my mistakes and all of the practical questions that no one could give me any answer to.
Unintentionally bothering and then deliberately not bothering. Now I could talk my way into riches, fame, admiration, oblivion. Trading infinite humiliations for infinite worldly comfort. Loved and hated by others; loved and hated by myself. I could become so completely independent that I could functionally disappear. No more wandering the streets smiling sadly; private instead of public rages. But how can I talk to God? What do I do?
What if you felt that I was interrogating you?
Once when I asked you a question you answered so meekly, almost as though you were ashamed.
So I thought, I won’t ask you anymore.
There’s no particular word that you need to provide me.
I won’t ask you anything. No, I’ll entertain you.
With the idiocy, the inanity, the decadence of my failing life and slipping, stupid, unsustainable habits.
I’ll entertain you.
Maybe try not to ask any questions of me either.
E
love that you're back
What a beautiful prayer your essay is for in dying to ourselves we are born to eternal life… keep writing and praying! You’re on the path now and many are called but failed to heed the word of Christ!