I'd rather be in Michigan

If it wasn’t for the unimaginable colours of your landscape, the quietness of your ways, the stillness of your heart, the perfect harmony of this ludicrous unity, I would have given up, admitted the insanity of my place a long time ago. I burn like a lantern underwater, like a flame challenged by hurricanes, rains, icicles falling from the sky. The fire dies from time to time, almost regularly, as often as it is re-light then gains strength and gathers the capacity to fully glow under the hazy waters, amidst crazy winds, monsoon like rains. You demand an explanation and I cannot give it to you, this is just how things are. Contradictious and lovingly different, this is how I survive, this is how I accept the things that I cannot change and the powerlessness that overshadows every move I make. Indescribable is the beauty that surrounds me, yet words find me in abundance, hold me captive until they can rest assured on paper. I give in and allow myself to be moved not by the harshness of what is outside, but by the quietness of what is inside. The almost silent yearning for something else, a different place, a different time.

These futile fights I must learn to never again engage in. I know full well the outcome, yet cannot resist. Cannot resist the desire, feeling content at having voiced these thoughts. This is my place, here to stay, here to be shared with anyone who wants to see. Dead certain that this is my place, but longing for something different. When have dreams not made you yearn, fully succumb to the burning desire for change? Desire that can never be acted on, still feeling the undeterred pull of the want, wish and hope. Keeping it all a secret, conjuring to manifest only when it is safely dark outside. Feeling hidden if nobody else can see. Feeling exposed if nobody can see and ghoulishly using the anonymity of these words to cover any trace linking this fantasy to reality. I cannot shout this any louder, I cannot make you see more clearly, I cannot decide whether to gaze at your unending beauty or to move away from the blinding spectacle that you have decided to surround me with. I could even die trying.  

Then again I am here and you are where you are. If standing still never challenged you then you might not understand the sorrow that twists its tight rope around me. Squeezes tighter, invisibly cruel. Physically moving through the obstacles, through the thick fog, through the forest in which all my dreams are projected onto a canvas where I move in and out. There are a million places I want to be in, want to share the right now, experiment with the more fortunate, with the more talented. Pack my words in a suitcase three floors tall, take them with me, toil over the labour of pulling them from street to street. Someone will take pity, offer to take some home, use some for more and more people to read. Slowly I would part with each and every one. Then I would hide, spend days, months and years befriending more conspicuous kinds, parade them later, but in another dream with melodies accompanied. Lose them overnight and only see some rarely, barely recognisable through the change that freedom has forced onto them. Surely some would never find their way home. I too might end up homeless, poor and drenched in sadness, empty and regretful over the places I did not go, instances I did not follow, instincts I refused to embrace, people I have shut out, words I never knew I could use. I too might end up silent, just a lost figure, seamlessly ordinary in a landscape where nothing stands out.  

My holes have been made by fear gnawing swiftly, by courage being forced to leave each comfortable den, by doubt lurking, by indecisiveness playing hide and seek. The holes are too numerous, cannot shield me from the burning sunshine so I stay safe in the shadows, shouting from the sidelines, cheering those who have less holes, who have more holes, who have ribbons of courage tied to every hole, whose holes spell out pride, who have accepted to be homeless, reckless, friendless, and always ready for sadness to take control and create. I do not have enough holes to let go, I may never will. This is where I am. It may be exactly where I need to be, it might also be the last place I should be spending time in. I am who I am and it may be perfectly enough, it may also never be anything I long to be. I make my choices and embrace the things I am able to make, never find happiness anywhere else but in sadness. I would never have it any other way. This is me. At times I long to be elsewhere. At times I would rather be with you in Michigan.