stands-alone

I am sitting in the grass with my back against a tree, admiring the intense blue that lives in the negative spaces between the leaves. The sun is warm in its intermittent visits through great, voluminous clouds that fill the sky so completely they remind me how small I am. The breeze is cool and picks up strength because it smells like rain and the trees are turning out their leaves– tender pale green preparing for a drink. I am reading Kurt Vonnegut and it makes real sense. I listen to low rumbles from the belly of the sky as it harmonizes with sweet reggae and it all tells me how good it is be alive. It soaks to my bones, how much I a

I see so much of what is beautiful, and I feel like there will never be enough time to take it all in. I want to see the world and read everything and create and experience and share it with strangers. There is something overwhelmingly beautiful about being alive. Even in this ugliest of worlds, there is so much worth singing about. I exist in these two states simultaneously: the exceedingly dark and destructive feeling-nothingness so thick I think I'll suffocate; and then the light, buoyant sensation, as if the universe were pouring all the good things right into me.   I don't know how to be.

I feel bizarre and unreal, but in some small way I can cling to the familiar symptoms that remind me I am, in fact, the human I have always been.  I can see through the dense surreality of deprivation of sanity and recognize myself in itchy eyes and a runny nose. But it is in the confrontation with this fact, too, that I find myself angry and hopeless.  That I am confined to my body, to my facticity.  That I need sleep, and yet I cannot make sleep function properly. That I must eat to live, but my being has been warped and altered by a sick relationship with food.  That every year when the weather at last shines through winter gloom and invit