23 Emotions: Nodus Tollens

blind corner,

I peer around the edge.

This isn't the right view!?

...and the sounds, or lack there of...

What date is it?

Where am I?

This isn't the trail of breadcrumbs I've been following.

The birds must have pecked them away.

I put one honest foot in front of the other 

and somehow I've not ended up here.

I'm neither here nor there,

but somewhere else entirely.

I don't know this place,

and my gut says I don't want to.

...lacking in persons, or people.

I sit in a wrong but familiar room.

Time will reveal a new plot,

but for the moment, I'm in the twist.

nodus tollens

n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

23 Emotions: Altschmerz

(repeat)

a record,

the same groove over and over

(and over and over)

wearing a canyon into the vinyl.

same same

our twins "both alike in dignity"

as with you - it is with me (too)

my friend.

in this darkest time of the year,

you nipping close at my heels,

heed not the dark thoughts,

in those extra hours.

o sister

I'm weary of this circle

(as are you, I know)

this dusty groove we shuffle in...

I will blow out your candles this year.

Altschmerz

n. weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.

23 Emotions: Exulansis

The edges start off blurred,
an inauspicious beginning,
but those who were there, marked the moment.

Words cannot hold the truth,
though the experience did,
at least for some (I  believe).

The flatness of language to convey,
sharp contrast to the roundness of reality,
that curvaceous form of being.

Pale powder between my fingertips.
all around a vibrant monochrome,
enveloping us into unity.

But these words mean nothing,
to (aside from that band of few) 

you, who were not there.

exulansis

n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.

23 Emotions: Onism

a whirring tick,
like an overheated heart. 

this, a fluttering, falling noise,
and sensation.

next destination...
(too many choices).

a leap that twists,
catlike, in midair. 

a heart divided too,
arms reaching in all direction.

i stand here, the hauptbahnhof of my life,
and wonder...which train?

once decided,
the whirring/fluttering will fade.

wind in my hair and face,
no fear of fomo.

just the desire for more time,
real gold is the beauty in a moment.

onism

n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

23 Emotions: Énouement

This sorrow you hold now, close, 

it no longer has sharp edges or angles.

Raw has been rubbed down to a blurred sepia,

the wash of florescence, turned to warm glow.

A jagged spike, one of only a few,
in that otherwise arabesque line, of life.

Radiating out from the center contact,
each line, life, moving in kind, ever outward...

...but that one, almost parallel,
the line dancing, a twining counterpoint.

Such sweet melodies...

...and I am here to tell you (your sometime self)

hold on

hold on

you will get there, 
and with such magic.

Énouement

n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turn out in the real world—who your baby sister would become, what your friends would end up doing, where your choices would lead you, exactly when you’d lose the people you took for granted—which is priceless intel that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn’t already made the journey, as if there was some part of you who had volunteered to stay behind, who was still stationed at a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past, still eagerly awaiting news from the front.

23 Emotions: Rubatosis

Home.

Shell.

Head tucked in,

burrowed.

The whisper of a heartbeat.

"Happy Anniversary"

it taps out in four-four time.

The cool night reverberates around me.

Home.

The dark canvas stretches above me.

(tap-tap)

The syncopation isn't here.

It was, once.

Round, and around

and back again.

Here.

Home.

(is it?)

rubatosis

n. the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat, whose tenuous muscular throbbing feels less like a metronome than a nervous ditty your heart is tapping to itself, the kind that people compulsively hum or sing while walking in complete darkness, as if to casually remind the outside world, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

23 Emotions: Liberosis

...when it's gone past midnight,

the other side of twelve,

unlucky thirteen looms large.

A glance backward,

the rear view, an unbroken path.

A single tire mark into the vanishing point.

Was something lost, in that moment past the tipping hour?

(...more than a decade means you rend things wrong)

Niceties are impregnated with imaginative intent.

Step off from imagination,

the world is not in there...

but in the chosen subjective reality between.

Let go of nothing.

Let go...

)nothingness can't be held(

Time folds in on itself,

across the chasm,

You are there.

Dawn comes,

morning shatters the horizon with light,

illuminating that unbroken line.

liberosis

n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

23 Emotions: Rückkehrunruhe

Dan said,
now is the season for remembering what's past,
along with other words calling forth a world of glass.

Immersed in the now, and also before.
Calling up on one, two, three...

Some things are fading and some, sharp and clear.
Stones thrown in this glass house still shatter more than air.

One is fuzzy, distant, ok. We use our words as we work and play.

Two is clearer, yet distant some how... It's shifted in to neutral and moves without push or pull.

Three is the kicker and is kicking still. Perhaps that stone wasn't thrown after all.

This Now, that just happened, held so much love, but also the heartache of oneness (three, two, one).

I count it down, always back to one, remember, reset and wonder, when...

When will I share the adventure that doesn't fade.
When looking back means a fixed forward gaze.
When what I see now, I see in the morrow,
and the day after that,
tomorrow's,
tomorrow.

Rückkehrunruhe

n. the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness—to the extent you have to keep reminding yourself that it happened at all, even though it felt so vivid just days ago—which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all your days would run together and you’d never have to call cut.