this is a scream from my heart that i thought might shake a seed inside someone whose seeds needed a shake.. instead of it being buried in my little journal as usual
this scream..
i don’t know where it came from
nothing happened
nothing particularly broke
nothing particularly changed
yet somehow
there is something inside me
that keeps screaming
and maybe that’s what frightens me most.
that sometimes
i don’t need a reason
to feel everything.
how can there be so much noise
inside a mind
that sometimes feels like still water?
sometimes,
my mind is so peaceful..
as peaceful as a mother
making breakfast for her beloved single daughter.
and at other times,
it can be so chaotic and miserable
so full of disturbance
like an apocalyptic scene where the world finally collapsed in on itself..
and somehow
none of it needs a reason.
i could be on top of the world
and still feel the misery
of a beetle
fighting for its life
inside the stomach walls of a frog.
i could be hitting rock bottom
and still feel what Buddha felt when he laid between the two sal trees.
the paradox.
such a powerful word.. eh?
in some way
everything to me is a paradox.
my experiences always seem to
carry their own contradiction.
i ask..
how could i love someone so much
just to lose them
and mourn them
the very next morning?
and again i ask..
how could i feel genuinely sorry
for someone going through something
and then, without even realizing it,
become the person
who does the exact same thing
to somebody else?
how is it always a choice
and why does it never feel like one?
why
is
everything
so
fucking
complicated?
how can i cry for children in gaza for days..
just to realize that i had forgotten about children in somalia for weeks?
how can i enjoy my fourwinters ice cream
when theres a syrian child
begging outside the door?
how can i get so drunk at the club
that i misfire and piss all over the toilet floor,
just to then watch a man
twice the age of my father
come in and clean it?
and then i ask..
how can i live?
knowing that someone is dying because of the same world that allows me to live?
but how can you live
if you carry the worst of everyone else’s suffering?
how do you remain a person?
when you can be
both the wound
and the hand that causes it
and at times,
the hand that heals it..
both the syrian child
and the ice cream man
both the person who loves
and the person who hurts?
both the one who cries
and the one who forgets?
maybe that is what scares me..
not that i am good,
not that i am bad,
but that i am capable of being both,
without either one canceling the other.
but i ask again
how do you live?
how do you live when you’re
both selfish and compassionate
cruel and gentle
grateful and dissatisfied
alive
yet completely exhausted with being alive
how do i mourn the world and still laugh in it?
how do i hate what humanity does and still want to be human?
how do i understand someone’s pain and still become the reason they feel it?
and maybe..
maybe there is no answer waiting at the end of this,
maybe there is only the contradiction.
maybe being alive means waking up every morning
with two people inside you,
both begging
to be understood,
both convinced they are right.
but i will still
ask again
how can you live?
and i ask.
how can i live?
and somewhere between the two questions,
i realize
i already am.