the violins make no sound & i begin to feel the ground

The unfairness, tragedy and irony of life is sometimes too great for me to believe. I desperately want thing to work. Things to make sense. And I believe that whenever I feel unsettled, depressed, disheartened or generally at odds with myself, I go through a million different things as to why that could be. And typically, it's a different situation every time. But it basically always, in my experience, ends up being the exact same thing at the heart of the matter: It shouldn't be this way.

And I won't spend pages lamenting things I cannot change and I will not let the uneasy sadness get to me. I understand that that is life and that no amount of raving or ranting will change this very nature of life. But I refuse to simply accept it. I will not let it get to me, I will not be crippled by my anger, but I will not pass it off. Don't get me wrong; I acknowledge the futility of hurling myself against facts of life that are beyond human control and will never change. I have learned that part of dealing with something is getting beyond the inherent unfairness, because agonizing over it will alter nothing.

But I will not cave in either. I believe that if one loses sight of the irony, if one fails to see a better life, that one may live more contentedly; they undoubtedly suffer far fewer nights of tossing and turning. However, without realizing the tragedy of life, one cannot seek to make it better. If you do not have to fight against the harsh reality of the world to be happy, then I wish that you never have to. And most of the time, I've become capable enough that I do not have to. But in the times when I do, when it all seems so shallow, so dingy, so fragile to the point that hopelessness threatens to consume, it is then when I decide that life is that way- but that it is what we make out of this place that matters.

I am broken and I am messed up in more ways than I probably know. I would like to be a strong and helpful person, someone to rely on, a good friend, a good person, intelligent, resourceful, caring. I know in some, if not all of these ways, I fail. Maybe it's lying to myself, maybe I'm just sugarcoating, perhaps this is indeed why I am so deft at rationalizing. I see the atrocious things the world has to offer- the sadness, the pain, the irony- and the quieter but far more frightening things- the loss of hope, the bleakness, the emptiness, the loneliness- and I know there are depths I have not seen and hope to never see.

That world is real, but so is the happiness, the friendship, the lazy day spent cuddling in bed, the numbers that save you and the drive to find a way to make something better out of this mess in front of us. I want that life. I don't want to look ahead and see only despair. I don't want to settle. I don't want the stomach turning feeling. I am tired of being sad. I am so sick to death of fighting, of worrying, of nothingness. I recognize that these things are never going away.

So I do what I can to minimize them. I do what I can do to ignore them. And I swear, living in the dual world of recognizing and knowing but ignoring, of understanding and not accepting, of knowing I will never change life but seeing no reason to stop trying, it's difficult sometimes. It is not fair. It never will be. This post doesn't make any sense does it? I've gone back and forth between sad and happy, between resigned and optimistic, between understanding and mature and furious and angry.

Nothing ever really makes sense though, not unless it's in a text book. So you know what I want?

I want life to be fair. In lieu of that, I want to wake up happy. I want to be okay when I'm sad. I want to never, ever look ahead and see only bleakness and despair. I want to be surrounded by the people I want to be surrounded with. I want to keep the people who make the emptiness go away. I want to laugh, I want to scream, I want to spin around in thunderstorms and I want to be filled with the intoxicating feeling of being alive because when I'm not, I remember how starkly unfair life is. Life is awful but being alive is too multifaceted to be explained in any trite phrase. I do not want to be afraid. I do not want to be weak. I am resilient but not strong. Does that make sense? I want to be both. I want to be happy and stay happy. I want to suck everything I can out of life because it tries to suck everything it can out of me and the people I love.

It should be me. I sit here and I honestly believe those words, for mainly selfish reasons.

I want love and I want passion and I want laughter and I want warmth and I want brilliance and I want anything and everything that I can find beauty and happiness in. And that's an awful lot of things. I will never stop being 5 and I never want to be. It is so hard to find perspective sometimes but it will get easier. I don't want to lie and pretend till I'm almost certain it's a beautiful world. I want to believe it.

& you, all of you. you help me believe it. you do. thank you