“We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone and we are not alone when we imitate. It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.”
“If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With freedom, flowers, books and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy? But if after I am free, a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me, But that could not be. I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the lovliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realize something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God’s secret as anyone can get.”
“Joshua!”, she shouts
There, across the street:
“Josh! Josh!”
I see her silhouetted
against the night sky,
In the balcony through the trees.
It rains, the streetlights tell me.
She cries out again:
“Josh! Josh-ooo-aa!”
A friend some houses up
I presume.
I sit in my darkness
and listen to her.
Again and again and again,
growing agitated slowly.
Wouldn’t it be nice, I ask
If I were him?
If i was Joshua and
this girl across the street was
calling to me?
I crane my neck slightly.
“Joshua, stand up!”
What is this? I ask myself.
“Are you talking to me?”, I call out.
“Yes!”
“I’m not Joshua.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
I return to my darkness.
“We’re prisoners of War. Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.”
After she’d scrubbed,
And mopped and rubbed,
And scraped and groaned,
And screamed and moaned,
And hoped and feared,
The stain reappeared.
– My grade 8 poem
“Man is only a reed. The feeblest reed in nature; but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the entire universe to arm itself in order to annihilate him; a vapor, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But were the universe to crush him, man would yet be more noble than that which slays him, because man knows that he dies, and the advantage that the universe has over him; of this the universe knows nothing. Thus all our dignity lies in thought.”
If i could be one thing,
I’d be a cigarette.
So close to your lips,
so full of regret,
I’d be a cigarette.
I’d hide in your pocket,
or raise a match for you.
I would always linger
on your clothes and your fingers,
I’d be a cigarette.
“I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person i’d never seen before in my life.”
I cried over spilled milk once.
I really don’t like milk, and I was being forced to drink it.
So I cried great big tears of joy over spilled milk.
I didn’t ask to come to this world, but here I am, and I don’t fit. I wish I could choose a world to be in just as my parents chose to have me. But I had no say and I still have no say, so I’m stuck, in a world that I don’t belong in. I want to remember what it was like before I was born. Did I have thoughts? Was it as peaceful as I imagine it to have been? Why was my soul selected to be presented to a world where I can only live as a pariah? There is one of every kind in this world; it must have simply needed an alien.