Something To Say

What is there to say that hasn’t already been felt? I can create nothing new, only new to young eyes. I can create nothing new but can only cut and paste words to tell you something I want to say. What do we tell anyone, and what do we tell the anonymous everyone?

The walls are white, and there is a clothes rack in the middle of the room. The windows are open, and the comforter is damp. The lamp is turned on, and a dog just barked. Is that what I should tell you?

The ink of my pen is blue, but that doesn’t matter does it? What makes it not matter? And what makes anything matter? I use the same words to tell you when I woke up and where I’m from as when I tell you that I’m scared of never getting what I want because I’ve turned my desires into things that could never exist. It’s all the same words, or at least the same letters, or at least the same lines and curves and edges.

Only the ideas of things exist, when these things are not before you. So we live in a world that is swarmed with an infinite number of ideas. Anything is possible as an idea, but that doesn’t mean anything’s possible. Things keep moving as I move my pen across this page, they keep moving and allow me to sit up here and act like everything’s still. That’s a privilege really, most people aren’t allowed to question themselves or the reality on which they are dependent. They can’t risk it, they can’t climb all the way up and hold their tic tic ticking watch off the edge and let it slip to be amazed at how far they’ve climbed or how far they’ll fall.

I heard a homeless couple break up last night out my window. He felt she was selfish because she complained about being hungry after a day of no food while he starved himself for three days just to give her anything he had. He called her selfish, said that she didn’t care about his feelings. It’s strange to think that no one’s immune from feelings. But, it’s the way in which we find and express them that hides that characteristic of universality.

It is that feeling of loneliness in the empty space of emotions that make them ever more potent. Thus it is the very nature of feeling anything to at once feel like an individual, and to feel the duplicity of being a body that others can look upon and think to know and a self that is blind to that very body. It is the privacy of self even to the conscious part of that same self. We are scared to not know ourselves. How could we not when we are constantly having to be so sure and decide where to eat tonight? We are forced to pretend to ourselves that we know every one of our parts. It’s cleaner. The outline is defined, the wood isn’t splintered and the metal isn’t rusty.

Let’s all write what we are supposed to. Let’s all say what we are supposed to. But no, then we would all fade into the outline of these words, of these bodies, and nothing would mean anything if I ever figured out what I wanted to tell you.

— Samara Michaelson, BFR Staff