Tonight I miss you again. This song reminded me of you, and how you once grabbed a shotgun to save lives, including your own.
Grief is a strange animal. It resembles an old injury. You think you have healed and then the weather changes, or you make a sudden move, and your body reminds you of the exact places it had been broken. It's the same deal with grief. You think the worst part has passed, and then you see or hear something and sadness pours out with such fierce intensity that startles you.
The funny thing is that lately I am content. I am tired, sure, and vulnerable, and everything is far from perfect. It doesn't stop me from being content. This contentment is not apathy. It embodies a quiet sense of being in the present moment. It has sadness and curiosity and hope and my sense of humour and a generous amount of disbelief for the stupidity of mankind. You can be content and hopeful and sad and dog-tired at the same time. It's not the same as being joyful, or happy.
I recently noticed that the blog is a breath away from 100.000 pageviews. Well, as blogs go, it's old. It turned 14 years old in October. I don't write here as often as I'd like, and have no idea who reads it. To be honest, I don't know why anyone would read it as it is so personal, and sometimes repetitive. I get no income from it and I don't get contacted by my readers. I never have comments. In a way, it reminds me of a person posting letters to themselves. I write here because I have to, just like I grieve and laugh and eat and sleep because I have to. And it seems to me that is reason enough.
Take good care of yourself tonight and every night.
Don't be someone's reason for grief if you can help it.
Some winter nights are tranquil. Masses of clouds travel fast in the sky and the cold is not unbearable. I stare at the moon and distant stars and try to decipher the meaning of their shapes, the hidden stories in the shadows.
Some nights I am happy. Other nights, the pain spills out and covers my skin with goosebumps. I listen to music and remember dead friends and dead pets. I try to wrap myself in the comfort of music and imagine the notes as an ethereal embrace, the ghost arms of those who once loved me.
I'm tired. Two nights ago I re-watched a short film I had made with a friend. He needed to make a short film as a dissertation, and I found myself starring in it. I thought the DVD was lost. Recently I found it again.
Watching my much younger self in the film I experienced an overwhelming wave of sadness. She had no idea what life had in store for her and I wished I could hide her in my embrace and tell her to be strong, because she is someone I love, appreciate and admire more with each passing year. But we can only travel forward one second at a time, and so I watched her and shook my head. If she knew what her life would be like for the next fifteen years, maybe I wouldn't be here now, writing this blog entry. Maybe she would have thrown in the towel and stepped off that building eleven or twelve years ago like she planned. I don't know what kept her going. Hope? Stubbornness? Anger? Whatever it was, I am glad it served to keep her here. I've seen what suicide does to those on its ground zero. It's not pretty.
I'm trying to develop a strong inner core so that the outside doesn't rule my inside. It's very hard.
I wonder what you saw in me all those years ago, my dear Virve, and decided to make me part of your family. We never did meet, but the fact you considered me trustworthy enough to confide in me is the greatest praise I can think of.
I am tired, love. Tired of this life that it seems to run in two modes. One is the crippling routine mode, the second is the kick in the teeth mode. I keep pushing my hand inside, and like a blind person, I fumble about inside my inner darkness until I pull out wonders. I sink my hand inside the river of Lethe to pull out the salmon of Wisdom. I push my fingers into my wounds to study the nature of my despair, the taste of my blood, the root of fear inside me. Then I share my discoveries here. I know most won't understand, and that's okay. The soul's journey cannot be shared. But even if one person understands, that's enough. And you did understand.
I miss you tonight. You, and all my dead pets, and the father I never had, and the innocence I cannot regain.
I miss you. But maybe the music I listen to is the embrace you never gave me in flesh and blood. Now your ashes travel the world, and I'm here, writing and remembering.
Thank you for believing in me when I didn't. I still draw strength from it. I appreciate everything you ever did. I wish you were here so I could say it to you, but maybe you know.
When I kiss the stars good-night, I kiss you too.
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That last exit for me is music. Writing presupposes some kind of coherent thinking, music needs less thinking. Screaming, for that matter, needs no thinking whatsoever. But since it is next to impossible to start screaming in a flat without drawing the wrong kind of attention, music and writing it is.
2018 is here and thankfully I am here too. I have an impressive frostbite on my right index finger, good music in my possession, a wound inside my mouth, lungs full of mucus and a half-insane mother because one of our cats is probably not going to make it. I am resigned. She is not, and she is making me crazy too because she needs company. Oh well.
First blog entry of the year and I set off on the wrong foot. Someone once told me that this blog is always complaining about something. He made me feel I should apologise for feeling the way I did. Then I remembered my friend Virve, the one who died. In one of her very last messages, she told me to keep writing regardless of who loved my writing and who hated it. She said that neither category had anything to do with my writing per se, but the person themselves. The reason this blog was created in the first place was to be an online diary. I won't censor myself. I guess no matter what you write about, someone will be displeased. Then again, there is always the option of not reading what makes you upset.
So I was talking about sadness. Sadness is not acceptable by society. Mourning is not trendy or productive. Being constantly positive is the latest fashionable prerequisite. Everything happens for a reason. Everything is a valuable lesson. Whatever does not kill you makes you stronger. And so on and so forth. Right?
Not everything happens for a reason. Most bad events happen because we are the most pig-headed and close-minded race of sentient beings I have ever had the unfortunate 'privilege' of coming across. There are less than five people I can talk with and not need to explain or be wary of their intentions. I survive by keeping a low profile and feigning ignorance. I survive by listening to music, reading, writing, and minimising the time I spend socialising. Which reminds me...
I've done a lot of socialising for my standards since October. Turns out the maximum amount of exposure to a large crowd (30+ people) I can handle is once every two weeks. I refuse to repeat it in a smaller amount of time. I simply get sick. Sore throat, cold, you name it. The funniest thing is that everyone who mets me regards me as super social and friendly. Low profile, remember? And to be honest, I do care about people. I am not friendly and kind towards them because I want to manipulate them.
Music is what makes our souls soar above the mud of existence. Man-made vibrations that express a multitude of feelings. Love is what makes our souls merge with something bigger, leaving behind us every smidgen of pretense and appropriateness. And to quote one of my most beloved heroes, "You don't choose the ones you love. What you do choose is the way you'll treat them".
If I extend my hands left and right in this small room, crammed with books and CDs and personal items, and with a cat sleeping on my bed, I am alone. Right?
No. Because they open the door of my heart and out they come, one after the other, the ones I love, my characters and creations. The ones I brought here and gave them flesh and blood and other people who love them and hate them and want to see them dead. And together with them my books and my comics and my CDs and my old drawings secretly open too, and countless stories pour out, colourful strings of every conceivable hue. Everyone I've ever loved and hated is here with me, and what I need to do is close my eyes and will them out. Every story humanity has ever come up with, or at least one variation of it is here with me, together with every note and colour and tear ever shed. How can I be alone? I am not. I am never alone. Even in the most desolate, tiniest cell of the whole world I would not be alone. There is a richness inside beyond anything. It merges with me and makes me ecstatic, makes my eyes so full of beauty and wonder that this world will forever pale in comparison. And that is why I am sad. Because my eyes and mind and heart perceive the fullest potential in a world that has gone to the dogs. And the gatekeepers of this world hate my guts for it.
Should I really apologise for that? I don't think so.
I recently read that grief isn't a process, but rather a new way of seeing things. It was one of the best ways I have seen grief described. I'm still mourning for my friend Virve and it has altered my entire perception. I will include the quote at the end of this paragraph. Some might find it helpful. I did find it helpful.
How do triggers work? They work due to the mind's
ability to make associations and connections. You see something that for
another person means nothing, or something positive. For you, however,
it has a very different meaning and causes vastly different feelings. For example today I saw a bottle of soda water on my desk. I wanted to give you that bottle because you love soda. Then I remembered we're no longer together. That's a perfect example of a trigger. A soda bottle made me feel sadness and a sense of futility.
Don't get me wrong. I don't regret a thing I did for you, and I don't consider it futile because you didn't appreciate it. I am who I am. Nothing can change me. Only death can take my personality away. When my time comes, death will step in lightly and transmute my being into something bigger and brighter and literally larger than life. Death is the one place, the one condition that wipes the slate clean of everything. And guess what, the first thing to go are our lies. All the lies we told ourselves and other people are gone like morning mist under the blazing sun. For death is yet another sun; it shines black and negative and peaceful in its anti-existence. The doorway opens and you step through it naked as a baby. Everything you have been holding onto for comfort is gone.
When your comforting lies and possessions are gone, I hope each of you will hold onto the one thing no-one can take from you, not even death. Your dignity.
This is not directly related to the post, but it's very nice. It's my random act of kindness for today. You are welcome. XD Source: https://www.facebook.com/MichaelStokesPhoto/
I have an observation to make, as well as a request. Don't be nasty. When you do something bad, the misery you create spreads in waves and finally finds its way back to you. How does this work? Let me give you my thoughts.
As you have guessed, a friend of mine passed away a little more than two years ago. She was very dear to me. A few months before she was gone, she posted me a birthday present. I have no idea what that present was. You see, she posted it from Japan and although she sent it by registered mail, her gift never arrived. It turns out that the tracking system for the packet worked only inside Japan and someone stole it. Since this was the last present she ever sent to me, I wish I had received it. Not for any other reason but for its sentimental value. In any case, someone interfered and I never got it. That someone obviously didn't know that this gift was important to me, and didn't care about the consequences of stealing it. He or she didn't think it was something, but to me it was.
Now you are going to tell me, how does this affect other people? Whether we like it or not, we are interconnected. We exist within a very complex web of social interactions. Every time someone behaves like an arse, this affects a lot more than just the person who becomes the receiver of that behaviour. What, seems exaggerated? It's not.
Let's say you have a fight with someone. You go home enraged and take it out on your significant other. They get out of the house with their panties in a bunch and without meaning to, they run over a cat. The cat owner isn't going to be a happy chap, and I don't even want to refer to the poor cat. So misery spreads like sticky smog and affects a lot of lives, because whether we like it or not, we are connected. Even small and seemingly unimportant acts of anger, greed or malice can have major consequences for you or someone else. I don't believe in heaven or hell, but sometimes a single act of ill will or irresponsibility can turn a person's world upside down. For this reason alone, humans need to be careful. And though it may be hard to believe, happiness spreads in a similar way, through the same social web.
I am giving by nature so I don't need anyone to tell me how that works. However, let me elaborate for you. Do you remember when you went for coffee and the waitress was extra polite and nice? Or when a random stranger stopped and helped you with your car trouble? Or when a co-worker complimented you on your new dress? Do remember how good it felt to be at the receiving end of such behaviour and how it improved your mood for hours afterwards, making you smile and making you nicer, too? That's the way happiness spreads, and unlike misery, it is unlikely to cause damage to someone or cost a person's life.
Do something nice and don't do it because you expect something in return. It affects a lot of lives, more than you can imagine. This is a small world, and what goes around comes around. It may come in a different form, but it does. You don't have to save the world from hunger. All you need to do is buy a sandwich for the homeless guy in your neighbourhood, or throw your remaining crumbs to the pigeons. Don't think big. Small is more than enough. Small and immediate is fine. And if you don't want to do that, at least don't step on other people's toes. That, too, is plenty. (If you enjoy my content, please consider supporting what I do. Thank you.)
I haven't gone anywhere near Dir en Grey for two years now, maybe more. When I do, I remember you are gone and get depressed.
We amass knowledge and experience during our lives. Look at you. You played a mean piano, ghost-composed or contributed to the songs of countless bands I listen to, supported noble causes in so many ways, and now you are gone. All you got was 37 years of life. Your creations are still alive, yet your knowledge and talent are gone forever. The languages you spoke, the music you made, the foods you cooked, the way you made love, gone with you. There is a hole where you used to be and it can't be filled.
I keep losing people I considered friends, either because they die, prove themselves superb assholes or just follow different ways. Every year that passes finds me with a smaller circle of friends. But if I want to be 100% honest, no-one can replace you and no-one will replace you. Some people are one in a million or perhaps one in a billion. What do I know? I don't know. You were one in a billion for me.
Lately mortality is a weight that pulls me down, it chokes me like an anchor hanging from my neck. I do the best I can, I say to myself. I do the best I can for reasons unknown. I don't know why I go on. I just do. Even when everything seems completely pointless, even though I know the knowledge and experience I amass and the effort I've put in bettering myself will be gone with me, I bite the bullet and push on. What will change if I give up? You never gave up. I won't give up either. I'll keep pushing, if only to make those who hate me cringe their teeth. I push on just to rain on their parade. One of the best reasons I had ever read was this, by the gracious Steven Barns:
"I had a student ask why, if nothing ultimately matters, we should care
about anything at all. Well, that’s why no world religion will take you
all the way to clarity: there’s no social benefit. However, encoded
within each major religion seems to be a hidden path to dis-assembling
the ego walls without turning you into a bum, madman, or wandering
Saint. It seems to be the inculcation of core values at a young age,
such that the residual ego shell still functions appropriately even
after you’ve shed the illusions. It’s tricky stuff.
My guess
is that the gate of Adulthood—responsibility for the core values held by
the culture (my version of this is body-mind-spirit) MUST be passed
before deeper, more secret teachings are offered. Most will try to go
straight for the goodies. But religions are what Buddhism refers to as
the “large boat” while direct experience of the divine is the “small
boat”, not for everyone. I don’t recommend it. I just speak about it
because, as I realized yesterday, this blog is my version of Literary
Autolysis.
But more directly, try this: a baseball game
doesn’t “matter”. But if you decide to play, you learn the rules and
play hard, to the best of your ability. If you don’t want to play, you
lose the right to complain about the results you get in this world.
The
challenge is to be “in the world, but not of the world.” To play hard,
to learn the rules, to clarify our understandings, and then to move on.
To say “it doesn’t matter” falls right back into dualistic
thinking, and logic breaks down a bit. “It matters/it doesn’t matter.”
They don’t exist separate from perception.
If you can’t play
hard, work hard, care for your family, engage with your community,
preserve your body, provide goods and services, and grasp the fact that
we can know NOTHING other than the “I am”—then please, please, please
don’t try this. Don’t use “nothing matters” as an excuse to ignore your
worldly affairs.
Remember the chakras? Master the lower ones
BEFORE you get to spirit. Otherwise, I promise you, rather than
clarity, you will be lost in illusion, and feeling holy about it.
Obese, broke, and lonely…and feeling smugly superior to all us idiots
who act as if the world is real. And then secretly weeping at night,
confused as hell: with all this wisdom, why am I so miserable?
Trust me: you don’t want to go down that road."
Perfectly put. Thank you, Mr. Barns. Taken from here:
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 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?"
