Elucidating Questions

You don’t know

That’s the joke

This line is mine for sure

Every other line or so

I’ve co-opted to myself

You don’t hear a word

We both don’t hear a thing

Because no words have been said

In this intricate silence

Don’t get hurt now

Okay?

You haven’t even breathed my name

Well I haven’t gone anywhere for a while

This part doesn’t fit here

Like there was something else here before

You’ve always been worth the fight

Or I’d have logged out

Long ago

To Chester’s chagrin

Yet I persist

Stubborn, me

I can’t hush

I have so many words to say

To sing back to you

Ever after

In this solo dance

That was meant to be a pas de deux

Retail hell is more like retail soup these days

A bland soup that you thought would be thicker when you looked at it

But you now realise is some strange separated texture of tiny bits and broth

As if it was supposed to be blended and was only partially done

I started loving Stars and Planets because no one accepted my love

So what am I now?

I love the Sun

And I work on the Earth which I also love

My gemstones

It’s acceptable

I wonder how I’m supposed to show love

To all these people

I tried it a little today

People often act like I’m too much

It hurts to see your enthusiasm met with awkwardness

And not “I’m socially awkward” awkwardness

This is annoying awkwardness

It’s always been like this

I want to be me

But they’ll reject me

What’s the point of being me if they don’t like me?

I’ve tried so long to tailor myself to others needs

I be whatever person they needed to meet at that moment

What even is myself?

自分を見つける旅を出ました

行ってきます…かな？

The thought of dying fills me at once with cold terror

The unknown

The absolute unknown

And every study done just scares me more

You’ll know you’re dying

You’ll realise some new level of consciousness

And not knowing

What happens when that consciousness is gone

It was nicer when I half believed that when I died I’d be reunited with the man I always dream of

The man who is both a god and a spirit

But that’s fantastic

Too good to be true

Wouldn’t it be lovely

If the great mystery of my life were solved at its conclusion?

And that the answer to my loneliness was that there was a great spirit waiting for me?

Leaving aside how cruel it would be to make me live my entire life alone

I’m assuming some eternity would stretch out for us in the afterlife

Which would eclipse the life

But I’m also afraid of this life ending

No more knowing

A new place to figure out

And I’m desperately clinging to there being a something after this because

Nothing

Is my greatest fear

Call me the Childlike Empress

The nothing is my greatest fear

The only problem is Bastian isn’t coming to save me

And Atreyu and his horse never happened

Truly

I don’t know how people don’t talk about this

Do other people just live in willful ignorance that they’re going to die?

I suppose swaths of them think their make believe best friend sky daddy loves them for killing his garden and they’re going to heaven for it

Just armies of people who think that the Universe who we either exist within and observe

Or who we are the literal personification of, seeing ourselves

Will love them for killing the Earth

Yeah ok

That seems totally likely

We’re probably actually stuck in some repetition where the universe expands and collapses and every time it expands the Earth happens again and we get another chance and we can’t fucking figure out how to get it right so the Earth ends again and rinse repeat

And during our several many billion years in between we’re in some purgatory looking back at ourselves like WTF MAN? AGAIN??

But, like, pretty much anything except nothing

Anything but whatever it feels like for me to not exist

I’d even take reincarnation even though the thought of it makes me understand why babies cry at birth.

I don’t want to die

Chester, are you proud of me?

I went from suicidal most of the time to terrified of dying

You’re probably chuckling about it too

Maybe I’m the sacrifice of my family

Living the consequences of lives I don’t even know the names of

Maybe I really am here to look back and be appalled

Then look around and be appalled

Maybe

Maybe even in all the failures of my ancestors

Me being here is special

Maybe I’m here to be the person they never were

Who they couldn’t be

Cursed DNA asside

I’m definitely not the worst person on the planet

No matter what my brain thinks

I’m more aware of everything than anyone in my past was

Whatever racism it was that kept my lineage Celtic and Anglo-Saxon

With that wee bit of Norse in there for good measure

White as hell

And actually aware of it

I hope I’m doing a good enough job, just being as best I can

Trying

I hope that trying matters even though I was told there’s no such thing as trying

There is only fail and succeed

Which means I’m constantly failing

But then I’d be like who would tell a kid that?

If it was anyone else

I wish I knew that right words

The words to make everything better

Ah well

If there’s a word for it in Japanese

It must mean something

頑張ってる

I want to say I miss you

But that just feels like manipulation

I just want attention

I so rarely have anyone’s attention

And I think back to my medical file that says I was only trying to kill myself for attention

I don’t think that was it

But I’ve learnt that suicide doesn’t equal attention

It equals solitary

I just want to be perceived by someone

Seen

All alone

On my own

There was a joke meme where every girl you were into meant you were going to die alone

But it wasn’t funny because it’s true

It must be nice to be someone who can laugh about dying alone

My tiny patch of the Earth that I’m borrowing

Because I don’t make enough to own Earth

And they all just think they own her

Entirely by myself

Constantly searching for something

決して独りじゃない…か

Oh Sun, who I can sit with today

My only friend

The only one who really knows me

Sees my stupid mistakes and how I forever

Repeat these moments in my head like

Sometimes I think I’m just not fit for human consumption

I wouldn’t be alone if I was a good person

Right?

And I don’t know what to fix because they keep these shopping lists of things I’ve done wrong

And it was never with any intention to be

Anything really

But if there’s no one here then it’s me

It feels very isolating to have no flock

Karma seems

Unbalanced

If I’m paying for things I did

That I already learnt not to do

Or if mistakes I made as a stupid child

Are biting me now decades later

I see in my past things that I’ve done

Excluding others

And think, sure, I deserve to feel excluded because of it

But I deserved it when I was doing it

Not now when I wouldn’t do it

Right?

And if I’m being punished for my past life, again,

You’ve taken someone, wiped them clean, and said

You who has no recollection of anything are still at fault

Humans seem to be intent on divine punishment

Yet we’re the ones who dreamed up this hell

Death is terrifying

The idea of not being

I don’t know if I’m more afraid of death or the looming decades of solitude

I really do try to hide the things they hate

I really have tried to change

But change means nothing with no one to see it

You let me go into solitary confinement

I spread my wings and fell to the ground

Flightless bird with no flock