direction of direction

“How can I paint this picture when the colorblind is hanging with you?”

Doubt is entwined in our DNA like the bones to our skin, hidden by layers of fat and muscle. I do not believe there has ever been a moment in the span of human sentience where there was not uncertainty in the world. A species lacking of instinct, traded for control and freedom, leaves them without a proper place in the world with options so open.

Hey that’s just like me, approaching my adulthood without direction! My life looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, except the top is four and a half inches from the ground. There’s a lot of things you can see if you just pay attention to people. If you just take into account that they are a person, and everything they do becomes so much more childlike and malnourished of maturity. I can see their fear, or maybe that’s what I like to tell myself in order to feel stronger.

As an artist I do this a lot. Sometimes I take pictures of things to refer to later, or maybe I’m in the middle of class and use someone standing at the board for gesture practice. I look at the characteristics of these people and after all of this staring and studying it leaves me in an almost constant state of over analysis and distant thought. Body speaks a lot more than the word. The alphabet is an abstract concept of passing information, pushing thoughts through a filter of audible shapes and sounds someone else decided on, to the ears and mind of the listener. It’s even stranger that we think in our spoken language. Somehow that makes the idea of safety of the mind a little less safe, an intrusion. Words don’t have to mean what they mean. They can lie. They string long like pinocchio noses and dusty fables. The body tells the truth to me. Because if I can see you in all your nakedness, stripped of all emotional coverage, I can see that we all came from the same place.

I’m talking to someone and they snap me into focus. I’m not entirely sure what we were talking about before or what I was thinking about beforehand, as if I had just awoken from an eventful dream, yet too eventful to remember the events after. Drifted from life or something. That reminds me.

When my mom told me that a someone close to me from my childhood (our parents were close, close enough that I call his mother “auntie”) had died, I felt the same. I really didn’t know what to feel. Not even emptiness. It was more like, apathy. I think I was scared, actually, like pushing away the grief of another in order to avoid it for myself, to push myself far enough from death as possible. Which is funny because I spend so much time floating away from life, in daydreams, yet I still just as equally push myself off of death. Like water limbo, and his scythe is an oar to keep me between. Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen him in a while, last time I saw him he was about, my age. He was finishing college, it was his last year. His heart failed playing ball on the court with some friends. He had some heart problems I didn’t know about. I have so many thoughts on this but none at the same time.

Cool. But that doesn’t effect me, We move in on the same direction we’ve always been moving. Collectively, as a planet. I can’t do much about it, I’m technically forced to keep moving by whatever forces are keeping the earth together, regardless of how I feel the gravities of the situations.