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: Vellichor

Dust motes swirl around me
in a novel they would catch the golden sunlight, 
but this is not that.

Outside it's raining
drops spatter against the grimy window,
but the squashy chair is cozy.

Settled back against the cushions,
the light may not be golden,
but the feeling is.

Inhale...
a thousand stories are held in that scent,
(not just the printed words) but that of how they got here.

One blink of my imagination,
and I'm back on the other side of the glass.
(time has moved me forward) but the books are still there...

waiting,
waiting for a (glorious) dreary day,
of tea and reading.

vellichor

n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

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: Adronitis

A puff of wind...

and it's gone.

Pulled in both directions,

time, coupled with here, and now.

A flash of magic that races through,

in a heartbeat,

tracing a physical course,

down mental pathways.

...and in that heartbeat,

I would tell you my deepest unknown.

My heart beats into the air,

and the moment is gone.

Wishing for an eternity will not grant one,

but I wish anyway...

(on stars, as is the custom)

one wish, floating,

spiraling up on coils of dust, and smoke...

adronitis

n. frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone—spending the first few weeks chatting in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, each a little closer to the center of the house—wishing instead that you could start there and work your way out, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into casualness, until you’ve built up enough mystery over the years to ask them where they’re from, and what they do for a living.

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.

23 Emotions: Mauerbauertraurigkeit

Sorry I haven't been here, 
and that I've gone away.
I know my absence hurts you,
but I just couldn't stay.

You know how much I love you,
and that I always will,
but in the moment, right now,
I can't swallow this pill.

No matter where I travel,
how far away I go,
though oceans may divide us,
I'll come back again somehow.

But please, just in this moment,
while pushing you away,
know this (and know it fully)
someday I'll come and stay.

mauerbauertraurigkeit n. the inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like—as if all your social tastebuds suddenly went numb, leaving you unable to distinguish cheap politeness from the taste of genuine affection, unable to recognize its rich and ambiguous flavors, its long and delicate maturation, or the simple fact that each tasting is double-blind.