It’s not fair, turning you into my savior. To know it and keep that secret, acting as the same for you in the desperate hope that you might return the favor. A freedom trap. Won’t you join me in my glass cage? Where I pretend this openness is an ocean. When I am motive: treason. Luring you to an aquarium.

so I may turn down the Grandiosity volume

deliver the melody of humility so I may rhyme to it

Brought the dishes to the sink. The flies gathered on the grease. Chuckles found me: “remember that oven fire. You watched it like a fantasy.” At least I didn’t panic. Imagined the smoke engulfing me.

poof

Inside, I meet despair. I’m convinced I am familiar with her. Maybe she has changed, too.

The room is littered with emptiness. The details are unimportant, but they are evidence of solitude. It is a basement apartment. There is little sound from above. The mourning begins. Emotions require a flood. I am under the command of The Direction. Thoughts are plentiful now: twisted memories, unlived futures. The death of fantasies. I must live the fantasy, ignoring my surroundings. It’s easy, I am in the cave. This imagination is nimble and wily: it finds an early end to every maze.

Some days I consider that I should shed some friends, tell them how I truly see them. I'm talented at spotting deficiencies in those closest to me, and woefully naive about the motives of a stranger. I don't have any enemies, so I lack practice in that arena. I have decades of time-strained friendships. The longer you pick at the cracks in the armor of those closest to you, the deeper you understand how human they are. How imperfect.

Evil.

Maybe that's love…

It's too easy to live in your bubble, develop a more complex illusion of problems to complain about. Drama. Propagated. Celebrated. It's too easy. You were born into the responsibility of ease: challenge hasn't confronted you, maturity stagnated. The ease has made available your creativity to apply to those who don’t have it.

Living isn't something that can be simulated. The world needs our idle hands. And if we don't volunteer to confront this reality, we will descend into the worship of immorality.

home is smiling when you miss someone, crying when you forget the scenery is repeated.

home is familiar, but new every day. it is forgetting you will be leaving too soon, no matter how long you were allowed safe passage. you know it will be gone, as all homes are, someday. you know it, but the safety makes you forget. you have this moment. some take a lifetime to create it. you have it now. tomorrow is for grieving the past.

maybe someone will join your fight when the settlers come. but you may become one, too. if they win. keep your principles true.

home may find you in a place you have already seen, in a place completely new, in a place that is changing at the pace which brought you there.

All of this, given, has tuned us into parasites. We, most of all, have lost the sense of graciousness.

I made a life exactly how I wanted, and I still don't like it. Where does desire come from? Where do decisions? That's the me I search for. I thought, all this time, that contentment was sloth--a sin. I was convinced I needed tension: emotional wreckage, insurmountable challenges. I need depth. Dig. Drown. Sink my bottom.

Why am I here? I find the next answer every year. Am I...? To see, feel, taste love? Respond to sensation. Or is this a test of freedom: to follow, defy. Search to never find.