slowupwardspiral

Sometimes, I think that everything that's ever been written can be reduced to the word help. I think that if we were all more honest, and less concerned about the things we always concern ourselves with, we would write help all over our bodies and clothes, because when you think about it that's what you want to say the most to people, as in "I'm Tyler, please help". That's what I say to Jesus over and over and over and over. Not like a mentally-ill patient who keeps repeating "black cat bean" because his head isn't tied to his heart, or to itself, in the way it used to be, but like how people who mean it say "I love you" over and over because it means a little bit more, a little bit deeper, each time. 

When I'm alone, which is often, ache begins it's slow, upward spiral. It used to drive me wild, and cause my heart to lean it's weight again, and this time harder, against the restraints Reality, in her matter-of-fact way, had put on me. "If   I fill myself with enough want..." I hoped. I don't think it's maturity, I don't know what it is, but I've become more quiet and content to ache. Maybe it's that I know now that things like love and death are complicated, and that I'm only one person, and that my heart is only as big as it is, and can only hold as much as it can hold. I think I used to spend a lot of my time thinking about all the unlocked potential inside of me as if there actually were some, as if the world of My Bright Future were real. I used to listen to my high school teachers talk about how we were all going to save the Republic and whatever, as if Jesus were American. They meant well, and I probably didn't always understand what they were really saying. It's not wrong for teachers to try and inspire their students. I appreciate those teachers a lot, it's just that when a teacher tells you that someone else in the high school said that they were called by God to be President, my first response shouldn't have been jealousy, it should have been to say "turn that down, please. I'm 16 and I don't know shit about myself, much less about being President". I'm not saying that God doesn't call people to that. I'm just saying that I wish that instead of that, they had been telling me to listen to what the Lord is saying and to have a good time at my soccer game and to be nice to my girlfriend, because those are the first hurdles people have to get over, not figuring out what your domestic policy will be in the future world that doesn't exist. But maybe they were saying all of those things, and my cynical 17-year-old brain only picked up on the things that I could lash out at. 

The world that I actually live in isn't called My Bright Future. It's called Present. I live there with some friends of mine and my family. I eat pasta and salad and fired chicken when I can there, I smoke after work cigarettes on my porch there, I listen to music and it makes me ache, and I write music and the ache doesn't leave. I write words there and sometimes the ache leaves, but then it comes back and I realize I didn't solve anything, ache just stepped out to get a half-pound of coffee at the corner store and has just stepped back inside, brushing the snow-melt from her shoulders and hair, and she tells me she's back and asks how my cigarette was. Ache is a girl I would get over if I could, if I wanted to. Ache falls quiet, and quiet, and it covers things and it melts in the necks of my boots and turns my mind back toward home except I don't know where home is, in the way that no one really does when they think about it, and I don't know if I even want to go there because I'm always afraid that finding home won't be as good as wanting it. I don't know if having if better than wanting. 

Fall is here, and it's weather is sure to follow soon. I want the kind of weather that turns your mind to drinking cider from a mason jar, to older leaves, to that just-warm-enough-in-the-cold feeling. I want to smell like wood-fire. I want to be around girls that smell like wood-fire. I want days measured out in music. I want to be under the weight. I want my heart to breath deep, and take its time.