Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning’s hush I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die.
I am still angry at you. I want to make you
understand. I want to shake you and yell at you. But even if I did, you
wouldn't understand. You never did understand, not even when I thought we were
close, let alone now. And why should I make you understand? It's not my
responsibility to make anyone understand.
Sometimes
I wish that the people who mistreated me would become aware of their
mistakes and sorely regret their decisions. I would love to see them
looking for me and not finding me. But this is wishful thinking.
Humans are too self-involved and egotistical to realise there are things
beyond their self-indulging mind games and petty interests. The sad
fact of this life is that we're unappreciated by others, and they never
realise their mistakes. Time passes, life moves on, and none of these
people have the guts to come and apologise, or say they understood, or
they are sorry. If they had the balls to admit such sentiments they
wouldn't have treated us so shitty in the first place. Soon the
relationship or friendship is a memory, yet another page torn off the book of Life and thrown into the fire. Humans go on, as blind and
ignorant as always, life goes on, nothing changes, nothing is ever lost.
Except maybe for a few days, weeks, years, lives, centuries, and it's
still nothing on a cosmic scale. We're ants reproducing on a speck of
dust in a vast, vast universe, and it doesn't really matter, and it
never will. Evolution matters and evolution has no winners and no famous
authors, no celebrities and no point. Its only point is continuation of life itself, orgiastic expression in myriads of
forms and countless colours, in ways I cannot begin to perceive or imagine
with my humble mind.
Everything matters. Everything is completely futile. Writing here is futile. Not writing, when I can write and so many others can't, is hubris.
The planet will continue, with or without me on it, with or without my
writings on it. It doesn't matter to anyone except me that I am awake
instead of sleeping and writing here instead of resting. It makes no
discernible difference either way.
I miss Virve.
I miss her fiercely. Almost two years since her passing. And still life
goes on regardless of how I feel, what I do or don't do. When I am not
angry, I am sad. When I am not sad, I drag my feet from one chore to the
next. And sometimes, just sometimes, I am happy without needing
anything besides the fact I am alive and breathing and healthy. I see a
blind person, or a drowned infant, and understand how many things I take
for granted.
Won't
this pain ever cease? Won't this suffering end? Does it ever end? I
guess it does end, when we cross over and there are no more words. But
until then, I am here and I am writing. For good or for ill, and until I
can no longer write.
This is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. It might not be your cup of tea, but oh well. Each to their own. I'd say it puts things into perspective.
Truth is, we're really insignificant. And that's why it's all important. Since what we are and what we do on a cosmic scale amounts to shit, we might as well make a difference in the lives of people around us by not being self-absorbed little shits. I mean, why the hell not.
If the only way we can transcend time and space is love, and perhaps art, we should transcend our mortality with whatever means we got, right? If every one of us is as old as the oldest stars, because we are made of star matter, and matter is never created or destroyed, then maybe we can act like it? Maybe we can put our tiny, whiny egos aside for a bit, and behave like grown ups?
I know you're waiting for me on the other side. The people I've loved, my dead cats, they come to me in dreams, in the one place death holds no sway. I wake up with tears in my eyes and the knowledge they aren't here with me, but they are somewhere. Maybe looking after me, maybe waiting for me.
This was part of an email I sent to my late friend on the
day she died. I didn't know she was so seriously ill. She never read it and
now she is not here anymore. Or maybe she is everywhere and everything, her atoms
travelling the entire universe. So it's time to share that email with the
world. We never talked again, but at least now I know what I have to do. I have
to make sure I don't give up, like she never did, although large parts of her
life were living hell.
"...I can’t for the life of me understand what I am
supposed to be doing here on this planet. I am 36 and still don’t have any idea
what my role should be, how to respond to any role, what it is that the world
needs me for, why I am here in the first place. I do know that if I go, this
world will be poorer, and I am not saying this due to any inflated sense of
self-importance. From that aspect, my creations are far more important than I
am. I brought them here from the dreamland, from the collective unconscious,
and I filtered them through my experiences and my unique point of view. No-one
else will manage to bring the same things here and express them like I do
because no-one else is me. I don’t know if I am a good writer or not, but I
love my ‘children’ like any parent should love theirs. Such a pity our parents
were such complete failures. Maybe if I had a different childhood I wouldn’t be
looking for meaning, because meaning would have been self-explanatory. A
psychologist once said to my friend A. that only children from dysfunctional
families look for meaning and a sense of belonging, because they never had this
offered to them. A happy child feels they belong here, they have no doubts or
fears or questions of that kind. I am not unhappy with my share, I do count my
blessings, and I can’t change the past. It doesn’t really matter now, and I
would miss the weird, quirky individual I’ve grown to be due to my fucked up
childhood. But the feeling of not belonging drives me batty and gets me so very
depressed. I guess we all have our demons and the better we get to know them,
the better company they keep us during those long sleepless nights.
When I feel very depressed, I always dig up my older
writing and read it again. Older heroes, some of them created when I was
fourteen or fifteen years old, most of the story plots not valid anymore,
because as I grew up I added elements and made it more and more complex and
less teenage fiction… Still they are mine, they are my first creations, written
in Greek on paper that by now has yellowed and creased and has been read
hundreds of times. Inevitably, trying to acquire a sense of belonging, I fall
back to my creations, I go back to familiar space, just like you would resort
to your music. They are my safe space, the place I built in this world for me
because this world didn’t have one reserved for me, or wasn’t willing to host
my being. I belong there, to my stories, not here, and maybe that’s the
problem. Children who grew up feeling unloved and unwanted open their hearts
and look for alternative worlds in which they are important, cherished and
protected. They grow up to be gifted individuals because to escape the outside,
from a very early age they turn inside. Most of them, through the inside, they
discover and open the door to the Other, they pierce the Veil and go to the
Other side. These children are always with one foot here and one foot there,
changelings that one side doesn’t want them and the other side can’t have them.
They also bring gifts here, gifts from the Other side in the form of art and
innate understanding. Outsiders, lost children, weirdoes, outcasts and social
failures, forever struggling to fit in and make sense of this world. I am so
tired of this world, tired of my legacy, tired trying to fit in. I read my old
stories like a child would run to the cupboard and embrace the dress of its
dead mother, trying to get a whiff of her scent, trying to feel her close,
trying to feel loved and safe. That scent is getting less and less each year,
until the child isn’t sure if they can indeed smell something or it’s a ghost,
a comforting memory cause they have nothing else to hold on to. I feel like
that child. I have no mother or father, no siblings, no-one. We’re all isolated
in our bodies and our minds and we live separate existences, and then our paths
cross with people we come to care about and then we’re alone again. We’re
always and forever alone and that loneliness sometimes kills me. It’s like the
cat you love so much and caress and keep close and sometimes that same animal
turns and claws at your face for no reason.
Don’t worry about me, I’ll keep going and keep trying. I
miss you, I miss you so much though we haven’t met. I need you to be here. Please
be here. Don’t go away and leave me, it would just make life even more
unbearable. I care about you so much and I don’t even know how that happened. I
really don’t, you sly, subtle Finnigami.
We’ll talk again soon, I’ll write you a normal letter.
I am sending you a chapter of my story. As I’ve said
before, I don’t write something for someone, but I do write things because of
someone or something. Can you guess who that piece refers to?"
