Clarity is Gasoline in a Parking Garage

Journal Series

Written prose, or maybe a journal entry, if journal entries were deeply edited, (though I dont think they should be) I digress.

It’s been a while since I’ve spoken aloud. I speak through excerpts of pages, through characters that are a direct reflection of myself, but they aren’t me. They aren’t, and that is, I suppose, why I can speak.

But can I?

I speak, sure, but when no one’s listening.

I cough when it’s fake.

I haven’t cried in a year.

Though, how long does it take for a quiet girl to go mad? And how long does it take for supression to turn into a three - headed screaming beast with pointed teeth? How does it feel to be fully on display but still considered a mystery? To talk when no one’s listening?

To care only when it doesn’t count?

To be hidden in plain sight?

It feels like a head full of lice. A pit in a full stomach. A fairytale told to a prosaic. An exorkismos between a demon and an angel.

A paradox, or impossibility.

And I don’t write unless it’s under an alias, because I don’t claim this.

I can’t claim this. I can’t claim who I am. I can’t look in the mirror. My mirror has never lied to me, nothing has ever been contorted. But I love to lie. And I love contortion. You see the conundrum?

I love to lie. I love to play a trick of the light. I love to put on a puppet show.

Is that the mystery? If everything’s on display, then what’s real? If nothing’s hidden, is it all a void?

Similarly, if there’s too much to say, why speak? If we all die, why’d we ever live?

Anyways,

My fascination with the guillotine didn’t stop at eleven. The fog did. The electricity went out. The constant company left. I was alone. Left to feel.

However, when the fog clears and the wind that hits you isn’t clarity, what is it? If you can breathe, but the air has an air of confusion?

And what if you were waiting for the clarity? Clarity that wasn’t real? Clarity that was a fox wearing sheepskins?

Because the thing about clarity, is that if it doesn’t come when the fog clears, it probably isn’t coming. But it doesn’t tell you that. And now you’re older, and you’re dying with your potential waiting for this seemingly never - coming clarity.

And it’s just like gasoline in a parking garage. An unforthcoming death. A silent, watchful, slow one at that. You slip into an unkown territory without ever knowing.

Though I can say I stopped waiting for death, and started fearing it. I can say I stopped bleeding and started biting. I can say that the self pity died at sixteen.

But I’m still a mystery, and I still have this wet, furry ball of desire in my throat. I still have that urge to scream.

Still posess that fox - like curiosity that doesn’t seem to ever kill me. Still contain that fire - like passion in the form of a beating heart.

Though I can’t seem to escape that hollow lonliness from the dry Texan benches with spiders and cigarette ash, I have moved on, and I have laughed immensly, and I have loved even more.

I used to ask God what the point of potential was, if he knew it’d be wasted.

I used to ask what was the point of love if it wouldn’t be enough.

But now I see that grief is simply the price you pay for love.

And I am nothing without my potential.

So, I guess I thank God now.