The Dog’s Way

Indecision, my worst enemy, my bedfellow, my self. I look in the mirror and am met with a series of incomplete paths, loose ends, commitments unfinished. I am torn each way and no way, my spirit has been drawn and quartered. I watch my friends walk the straight and narrow line. I envy their distance, as I sit in the stagnant waters that grow higher and higher. Instead of standing up and walking away from it all, I tread water. You can always stay in the same place, contemplate the same questions, mull over the same potential paths, but the comfort the old routine brings you will fade away. That is one certainty I hold in my bundle of uncertainties. This life I live will get worse.

Would you burn the olive trees if you grew them, if you felt their bark wind under your fingertips like locks of hair? Would you poison the water if it quenched your thirst, if you let the river stones touch your sole? You claim the land is yours, and you’re owed every grain of its sand but someone who loves the land would not demolish its beauty so recklessly. If that is how you treat what is yours, I dread the fate of those you call others.

I am tired of hiding. Of being embarrassed. Unsure. Reluctant. Ashamed. I am tired now, more than all of those things. And it’s a fatigue I love, the sort that kicks in to spare me misfortune, and only spare me misfortune, in an awfully painless way. After all isn’t that fatigues purpose, to stop us from continuing on and hurting ourselves.

Where there was once blood in my veins, cold laughter flows.

Bells ring at the tips of my bones,

A strange sound cries out my throat.

Alabaster dice roll in their jaws,

and I sit in my skin too tight bathed in spotlight,

Waiting to see grimace or grin.

To drown in failure or soak in glorious win,

Step forward step forward, renounce body and soul,

Become a jester like me, and luck is all you’ll own.

What softness could I find for myself, if I allowed it. I feel a tightness in my chest every time I love myself or forgive my failures as if it is a betrayal of who I am. Maybe some people are meant to hurt. Maybe love smothers some fires that are born to burn.

Why do they call my brother a genius, when he cannot comprehend kindness? When his tongue is tied in any conversation but his own?

Why is the emotional intellect of the women in the room discarded? So often shamed out of me any desire to share myself, my thoughts, upsetting my family feels like embers landing on every inch of skin searing me to silence. The boy gets to be a boy his entire life. The girl has to be a woman the moment he enters the room.

These javelins, these poles sharp at their tips that cascade through me as water, do they hold me up or affix me to the ground?

Would my body be strong enough to stand without them? Would I still know how? The stacking of the feet, the ankles, and the calves. The shuffling against dirt and grain to the steady rhythm of progress.

Isn’t it a shame that our empathy can be one sided? That we notice the wound of the beast first, and bleed with him, while his eyes are set on our swollen heads?

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Please.

Sincerity is the blood held in by the knife in your chest. It feels too much like dying to be honest.