Beacon

We’ve been in a big fog. And while its intensity seems to change depending where exactly you’re standing; it is nonetheless a fog. We can’t see as far into the distance as we’re used to and need to slow our pace, something which can be difficult for the speedy among us.

Everything feels close; sounds of things like my very own voice coming back to me, hollow, without cadence. Everything’s gone quiet. Even the people around me seem dead-standing. My own need to communicate thunks off their exterior falling heavily back at my feet, or sometimes takes hold in a digital exchange, refracts and recoils into some incarnation of their needs. Sometimes the sound just spins and spins, into a story of how awful everything is. The damp passes through, the haze hangs low.

And yet the sun is out.

When I look obsessively at the app. that tells me what is happening right outside my window, it says the sun is out.

I start to think that it’s my responsibility to guide those around me, to help people see light despite the ever-present conundrum of sitting in unnavigable darkness, while the sun is reported to be shining. And the strangest thing of all as this sorcery dances around me, the dampness of the fog reaching my bones while sunlight pings off the water molecules in the air obscuring my vision is, I know I can do it.

I just don’t know how.

And perhaps I should simply begin. But I am a curiouser little thing, and while a task may simply be begun, I can never seem to stop myself from the philosophical queries of the average three-year-old, and persistently ask, “But why?”

Why did a stunted little creature like me arrive at such a purpose? Do I have the strength or bravery or even… the memories? Mustn’t a tale of personal growth and evolution be peppered with wise anecdotes, a-ha moments and end with a version of myself that identifies as being ‘fixed’?

I’m not fixed.

And what would it mean if I said I was fixed? Because fixed can mean “not broken,” but it can also mean “stuck in one position”. Depending on how much mucho was in your micro-dose that day, those two definitions are opposites. Because for many things, especially people, being stuck in one position, IS BROKEN.

Whatever meaning you ascribe to, fixed may just mean nothing interesting to talk about. I don’t know about you, but there are no relationships I so deeply seek to excuse myself from than those with people who are above repair.

As to bravery, I don’t think what I have is that. Upon hearing your despair, I may desire to slice myself open and house you inside where it’s warm as Han Solo did for Luke with a Tauntaun. I may feel your anguish, suffer shortness of breath at the gravity of your entanglements or experience your magnetism through dream but …. empathic theatrics don’t save lives.

I suppose I have a few anecdotes I could share, but quite honestly, I gave most of my developmental years to my adopted children, amphetamine and alcohol. Sometimes I gave them all I had, more often they took from me. But they are grown and gone away without fond memories. These days, my special needs child psilocybe has moved back into the basement and helps me more than I help her.

I have at times trapped myself, tangled in perpetual catastrophe

powerless,

someone who can’t help anyone else.

Someone with an anchor set in the depths.

And somehow, somewhere that hook still holds,

sometimes.

It must, for anything I say to ring true.

Can anyone endure the flawless or the chaste among us?

And so, while difficult and oft- interrupted I’m forced to begin.

It shan’t be kindly memories of childhood in spring,

or a bucolic adolescence manifesting happy things.

It’s just a tired person who made many mistakes,

a lucid shadow time passed right through,

shrouded in the mist waving a beacon for you.

I hold a sparkling dagger that pierces through the night,

still unsure which passage to alight,

stories bound with muddy gauze

trail blazing behind me,

but this brilliant mess glows brighter

once we’ve seen each other clearly.