Happy as a clam.

mols:

“Sanity is a very, very good thing to have. But I don’t know, I used to think that I was so insane, you know, for thinking so much and feeling so much and wanting so much, but now that I’ve been pretty damn ‘sane’ for the past few months, I’m not so sure. I’m starting to think I didn’t quite know what I had going for me. In fact I’m convinced. Convinced that to live in madness is the only way to live. Mad with grief, hope, anger, love, remorse, whatever. It wakes you up and makes you breathe and see and smell and colours everything with new definition and clarity. It’s the key, I think. That we’re always looking for. And the reason that we’re never finding it is because we’re all trying so damn hard to be sane.” 

I know I don’t write things of substance to this blog often, if at all—I keep quite a regular, detailed journal, not to mention I find an odd sort of personal pride in and hold myself to a standard of being able to work out inner turmoils, well, within—but I feel the urge to purge this morning, so to speak, and handily enough this webpage is here, complete with friendly readers and the comforting lack of immediate response that comes with writing things rather than saying them out loud.  So I’ll expound.  Just listen.  Here’s what I’m getting at:

I said this to someone once. These are my words.

My thoughts are dripping with irony.
Clarity is going to be hard to come by.

It was nearly a year ago to the day, so it’s funny it should resurface now, when I’m a different person.  A different person and yet hilariously in the same situation.  I was filled with the sparkling hope new beginnings bring to even the hopeless.  So sure of this when I said it and so full of hope.  I was just discovering the way it felt to be understood, and even you didn’t understand me.  I liked the thought of talking and being listened to, but even you were only listening to catch an echo of yourself in the reverberations.  I was becoming certain of an important thing I had become intensely suspicious of—no one can know you the way you know yourself.  Live together, die alone.  It turned my stomach to find the truth of it and even now my heart beats faster at the gross implications.  A bitter truth, and for me one that took years to realize, months to swallow, uncountable weeks to throw away.  Let it go.  As with most things that threaten to make you hard, I struggled to see a sweetness in the truth. 

I’ve spent so much of the last few years in a kind of silent desperation, fighting it, finding it so vital to make a ‘real’ connection.  I was searching for the extraordinary, knowing the impracticality of expecting more from someone who had horribly limited themselves, of their own accord.  

And yet.  Secretly I believe, and deeply, that everyone, anyone, is capable of profound thought and understanding if given proper encouragement.  (I’m really very naive, if you want to know the truth)  Accepting this about myself has allowed me a sort of freedom I didn’t expect.  Freedom to slow down; I was rushing through life, looking for the ‘good parts.’  Sometimes there’s nothing more profound than nothings.  ”Are you doing the ‘arm out the window, hand surfing the airwaves’ deal??”  ”It’s four am, there’s a full moon and we’re together.. OF COURSE I AM!”  Parts of me know there’s nothing deeper than screaming things when you really believe them. “And dreamed like we were things of the sky!  And shouted out into the night ‘WE’RE NEVER GONNA DIE!’”  And sometimes you see glimpses of the extraordinary in the most ordinary of places, like painted on an overpass when it’s only your first year of college and everything has already fallen apart. “I LOVE YOU                  THIS MUCH.”  Maybe all we can hope to do is remain vigilant and recognize these moments for what they are, important and fleeting, and refuse to take them for granted even after you’ve walked beneath that overpass hundreds of times, dragging yourself to go to class, but always looking up at all that love.  Then you’re right under it and you can see how much “                  ” really is.   And once your perspective is too skewed to make out words anymore, and you’re forced to snap your head level, stare straight ahead as the strangers pass, not looking never looking, you gotta remember not to forget that it’s still there.

I’m not sure a had a point, but if there was ever a time to make it I suppose it would be now, several useless paragraphs in.  So, I guess this is to the girl who spewed those phrases from her pumpkin-gut visage almost-a-year-ago-to-the-day: insanity is a key, to be sure, but to what?  I’ve already been through the door—many times—and I’m no more certain.  Maybe I’ve found the right key but the wrong doors? Maybe insanity.. only drives you insane?  Maybe balance is truly better.  Who’s to say?  Of those things I am certain, I can count on one hand.  You make little adjustments, not big ones.  I learned that a long time ago.  ”You change and then you change again.  You become a dog, a bird, a plant that leans always to the left.”  Don’t play leap frog with a unicorn.  Never eat yellow snow.  The universe brings you up so it can bring you down so it bring you up so it can bring you down so it can