Sadness

Here is a feeling of truth.  I have an extreme sadness.  I'm surrounded by people, good people who care.  I'm alone inside myself.  A sadness is debilitating, paralyzing, and it insinuates itself into my cells, from the inside out.  It's a thing that makes me very tired.  I'm so tired of it.  I wish I could peel myself open with a scalpel, layer by layer, and scrape out this disease with a paring knife.  It's so heavy and demanding.  I feel like once it turns me gray all the way through, I'll just switch off like a blown fuse.  Maybe a loud pop first. 

Going forth I feel things

Going forth I feel things, I get these feelings, these familiar feelings. That's what links all of them, that they are familiar. They can be lonely dark full of despair sad stagnant but all familiar, and all attractive. All of these feelings, that's what makes them the same, all linked together they're familiar and attractive. They draw me down into the shadows, dark places that I can see into that hide more mist shrouded apathetic and comfortable dangers which I'm afraid to approach. Like dreams. It's all like a dream, like that dream you remembered in a song that made you cry and despair and was oh so comfortable. I can't get away from that dream thing, the whole aspect of it, it's like a dream. It's like a dream. It feels like a dream it's like I'm in a dream all the time. When I feel like this, it's like it's like that, it's a feeling of foreverness and heavy like gravity, of being drawn into the foreverness, gravity, of being pulled into it, the heavy feeling of sinking into the never forever. It's it's it's I'm afraid of it. But but it's but I'm it's I'm pulled to it into it pulled in falling in I'm I'm in love in love in love in love with it.

A comfortable hell

I pass by a row of houses on a street in a neighborhood. Several of them aren't lit, and they seem abandoned, and they mostly just form big dark shapes. There's one that's lit, however, and it's a long one, with two front porches - one at each end. There are waist high wooden rails enclosing these little porches, and the porch lights are turned on. The rest of the house in between the two porches is lit by a dim backscatter, and there are a few darkened windows. My imagination takes over and I can see inside that house. I know what it's like in there... not necessarily the precise layout, but I know the feel of it. I've been in that house before, in a dream. I can feel it. It's an attractive feeling, one that I wouldn't mind dwelling inside of for an eon or two. That stagnant, warm, all encompassing embrace of apathetic comfort. Something about it is rotten, but I don't mind.

There's another house that isn't lit at all. It's another long one, set about 50 feet back from the road by a dark, wide lawn. There's a lamp post standing there at the top of a brief series of steps with an accompanying hand rail, and there's a sidewalk that continues on up to the house. The lamp is one of those old style street lamps which are made to look like they're supposed to burn gas. It's a tall, black lamp, and it only casts a dim light, as if it were on its last leg and about to go out. There is a huge, round tree situated off to the far right. There's only a vague outline delineating it from the sky, causing it to look like its just growing out of the side of the house. I can feel the dream memory of this house too... but somehow I know, without actually knowing, that I've never been inside of this one. All of the dark energy surrounding this house is focused right here on the steps, with the railing and the black lamp. I'd have to wait here for a long time before I could go inside. I'd sit right here, at the foot of these steps, under the wan light of this dark lamp and wait... forever dreaming about walking up that long, infinite walkway, and into darkness.

There was one area where a house was supposed to be, but wasn't. It was just a black expanse, with a copse of trees to either side. I could see the remains of a broken, crumbling foundation, and beyond that, just inky dark. I stood there and regarded it for several minutes, waiting for some kind of feeling to identify it to me. I never felt anything though, except for an urge to get away from it, which I did. Quickly.

This is that dreamy feeling; the one I've talked about before and keep trying to describe. It's a lumbering, smothering tide... foamy and soporific, and pulsating with a long, slow feeling of lethargy. It's just a feeling, but it's also a thing... dead and heavy, like a sticky black steepness, accompanied by the stench of slowly undulating moments that pass unnoticed inside of a comfortable hell.

Pain shaker (good name for a band)

Everybody feels pain, right?  I'm pretty sure we all do... but I think you can break that normal variety of common pain up into little pieces, and depending on how you add them up and put them back together, you'll get different flavors. 

For instance - pain can taste good sometimes.  Kind of like how nobody ever notices that carbonation actually hurts like a bitch.  Why do we do that?  Think about it.  Drinking a Coke hurts, so why do billions of people do it and come back for more?  Huh?  Why is that?  Are we all just stupid, deep down? 

And slurpees hurt, too.  I'd even venture to say that brain freeze is probably the most agonizing thing you can experience as a result of just going about your regular old uninteresting daily business.  I had one today, and it was just about the most agonizing thing that I've ever felt, and I'm not exaggerating.  The pain was debilitating. I was at work, and I had to stop what I was doing right then and there and just wait for the unbearable, excruciating agony to pass.   The customer at my register thought I was having a seizure, and was on the verge of dialing 911. That's how bad this stupid brain freeze thing hurt.  After it was over though, I took another long slurp of slurpee.  Am I retarded?  Seriously, am I?

And then there's spicy food. Chili peppers and wasabi, and what not.  That stuff hurts! Why do we do it? Why do we put fire in our mouths, and enjoy it?  It makes me think about that movie, K-Pax, and how Proat described the physical act of sex for his species as an overwhelming feeling of nausea, accompanied by the sensation of having your nuts squeezed in a vice while being rolled around in corroded alien sauerkraut.  When you think about it though, is that really all that different from putting a hot poker in your mouth and enjoying it?

So anyway. When I started writing this I was feeling pretty depressed, and my intention was to prepare this elaborate and profound exposition on the delicate subject of personal pain, seasoned with a dash of self pity to make it serious, and definitely not a joke.  But then the lid came off of whatever shaker it was that I was shaking, and this thing happened instead.

Befuddlementedness

Occasionally something happens to me that causes me to question my sanity with actual bona-fide fear. An event occurs which escapes the parameters within which I define reality.  You know, common sense reference points.  Things you rely on, that you can count on, like... the Sun will rise, the Sun will set, there is oxygen in the air, the moon is up there going around the earth, I have a job, I know people, my mom loves me. Things like that. Things that are facts.

Then a thing happens that throws all of that right out the window. Just tosses all of that away like a piece of paper thrown out the car window, like it weren't never worth anything at all.  Your sanity.  Tosses your sanity out the window.  My sanity.  I guess that's what I'm getting at.  So here's what happened:

Tonight I got off work and I walked up to Albertson's to buy these steaks that they have on special.  They're buy 2 get 1 free, which is crazy, but they keep doing it, so I don't know... I guess they're crazy, so I keep going up there after work and buying them.  It's like the recent gas prices.  I never thought they would go below 3 dollars again, but here they are, below 3 dollars.  I guess the whole world is crazy, which is kind of what I'm getting at with this.  Anyway, back on track.

I bought the crazy steaks with the crazy prices at the crazy store, and I walked my crazy feet across the crazy highway to the crazy Racetrack convenience store.  What with everything being crazy and all, I did this crazy thing and went inside and bought a crazy bottle of crazy water.  Then I left.  With the water.  Right?  You'd think that's what would have happened, right?  That after doing that crazy thing; buying that crazy bottle of water and all, that I would then do this crazy thing, like... that I would actually leave the store with the water?  And that there wouldn't be anything crazy about it at all?  Huh?  Right?

So here's what happened. Again.  By the way, it may seem like I'm building up to some really big thing, but I'm really not. I mean, at the time it seemed completely insane to me - like it really was a really big thing, what with 'big' meaning 'insane', you know - and I still think that it was, but in hindsight it doesn't seem that way.  I mean, in retrospect it would seem to me that it wouldn't seem like a really big insane thing to someone that I might be telling this to, right?  Like, it seems that it would seem to be a big deal to me, but not to you, right?  If I put myself in your shoes?  Do you get it?  That is, what I'm getting at?   Do you get that?  Right!  ANYWAY!

So... so.  So what the heck does so mean, anyway?  What is that?  Why does it seem natural to continue an interrupted thought by re-introducing it with the word 'so'?  Is it just a sign of insecurity, like 'like'?  Or, you know... like, 'you know'?  I mean... aw crap.  Isn't 'I mean' one, too?  Anyway.  Hells bells. That's one too.  Isn't it?  Isn't 'anyway' another one?  Yeesh... whatever.  You know, 'whatever' is probably even another frikin' one, come to think of it... you know?  And you know another thing?  Fuck it, I'm tired.

So anyway!  I bought this bottle of water, and after I'd walked about a hundred yards away from the store, I decided that I wanted a drink.  And since I'd just purchased a bottle of water not a minute and a half ago, I figured that I would just take me a nice drink out of it... only.  Only, you see... only there weren't no bottle of water...! 

? thought I, as I rummaged through my plastic bag - the exact same plastic bag inside of which I had fully expected my bottle of water to be contained.  However, this was not the case, as it was not there.  I realize that it's strange that I should wax eloquent over such a seemingly trivial matter, but unusual events compel me to do so.  Allow me reiterate, as this is a fairly important observance - THE BOTTLE OF WATER WAS NOT THERE. 

The bottle of water - the one i had just purchased - was not in my plastic bag.  I looked inside of it and all through it... up, down, left, right, forward, backward, inside, outside, between, betwixt and behind, before during and after.  I retraced my steps to the store, and back again to the place where I'd first noticed that the bottle of water was missing... twice. I rummaged through my bag again.  You know, that plastic bag I was just going on about.  I went through it the same way, again.  I mean, there ain't a whole lot of real estate inside a plastic bag for a bottle of water to take up residence, you know?  Well, continuing under the assumption that I am a relatively sane person with no legitimate reason to fabricate a story about whatever this is going to turn out to be about, I'll continue. 

So (there's that word again), having searched for the bottle of water that I had just purchased only minutes before, and having come up empty handed, I was understandably befuddled, now wasn't I?  Certainly.  I had just purchased a bottle of water, but I didn't have the bottle of water.  I'd searched well for that bottler of water, high and low, but I still didn't have that bottle of water.  Anyone would have been befuddled.  I was legitimately befuddled as I retraced my steps to the store, and it was in this state of befuddlementness that I finally decided to go back inside and ask the clerk if I had even left the store with the dang thing in my possession in the first place, as this often happens at the 7-Eleven where I work.  I had high hopes, but to my dismay, the clerk seemed to be similarly befuddleded.  So, despondent, I thanked him, and as I was turning to leave, the clerk said, "Hey, just grab you another one.  No biggie."

Wow.  Incredible!  I thanked the guy - the clerk - my hero, over and over again, thinking about how rare it is that we'll run across an authentic human being during the normal course of events throughout the day, like this one, and how it kind of sucks that my default reaction when it actually does happen is to be amazed.  I kept thinking that though, that it was just incredible, and I kept thanking the guy as I walked out, and thinking, and thanking... and thinking.

Do you want to take a wild, random guess as to what happened next?  Do you?  Go on, I dare you.  Take a guess.  Come on, guess!  Guess!  Never mind.  As I was putting the bottle of water in my plastic bag, I saw a bottle of water in my plastic bag.

The stupidest thing you've ever heard, ever.

I see freshly mown grass, where it wasn't the last time. I see a little dog on a porch, being very still. I see a couple ride by on bicycles. I see the guy take a look back at me after they've passed by. I hear something explode. Way off in the distance. I don't know what it is, but I guess it could have been fireworks, or a gun, or maybe even a bomb... but not thunder.

I pass by insanely familiar sights. I try to open a pack of cigarettes with one hand, and it frustrates me, and then I feel like my awareness is unlocked. Just because of that little thing - that little episode with the cigarettes. I understand that my equation is unbalanced, and that there is more sad than joy in my particular situation, and that I'm starving for beauty. Then I realize that took too long to say, and that the beauty of it was lost, because it became too personal. Beauty should never be personal.

I said that like it was some kind of nugget of wisdom, didn't I? What the fuck do I know? I walk down this same path every day, every night. The same one, over and over. Every day every afternoon every night every day every noon night day night and stuff. And again. I do this over and over and over and over. Do you want to know what it feels like? It's like this. Imagine that you have a red hot poker shoved up your rectum, and it hurts, but it's also funny at the same time. The reason why it hurts is obvious, but the reason why its funny is pretty personal. Or vice-versa. Whatever. Who cares? That part is different for all of us. Are you getting it? Are you relating to this in any way? If you are, then that feeling of a red-hot poker up your ass might actually mean something. That's funny, right? But damn don't it hurt.

Anywho. A lot of things are like that. A lot of things try to mean something, which kicks ass because that in itself means something; that things just kind of want to do that naturally... to have meaning. That's one thing that rules about being awake. So if you're ever being tortured, try to remember that. I don't know if it will help, but ask yourself this (while the torturing is happening) - would you rather be a nothingness, or would you rather be a potential for joy, pain, beauty, despair, and stuff, with the possibility of being extinguished always ever present? If you're ever being tortured, that is... that's when you'd ask yourself that. I guess it all depends on what you think is interesting.

But horror exists at the same time. Horror is an undefeatable injustice, and it's always right there, and its always ready. Like quicksand... or what I imagine quicksand to be. That seems like it might be a little bit too commonly vague, actually. I'm trying to describe the feelings I have as they occur, but by the time I think of the words for them, the feelings have passed by. And then I have to try to remember what it felt like, and I try to describe the feeling based on that memory...

And then I walk a little further, and I vegetate a little more, and my stupid cabbage brain remembers that people are afraid of me. I'm just a small person, with a bag, and a light, and a cabbage, at night. And people get freaked the fuck out by me. They don't understand that I would try to save a life if I could. That I would do a good thing to check an act of evil, if it was right there in front of us. That I'm in the light and I'm a good guy, and that I'm carrying the fire.  Even though I'm an asshole. They don't understand that. They're afraid. I understand the fear, but it still hurts that they are afraid of me. Heck, I'd give one of my kidneys to save anybody's life if I could. I'd do whatever I could to help anybody, even though I'm an asshole. Assholes can be good guys, too. Look at Han Solo.

It's amazing how we don't concern ourselves with each other. What's really weird, and what really sucks, and what's weirdly and sucky, is realizing a thing like that because you're in the middle of it. For example...

I'm a self-aware bottom feeder with a galaxy-sized ego, capable of swallowing the concept of 'screw it' in 13 dimensions, which hurts pretty bad. But in my defense... just being alive hurts Ok? We breathe oxygen, and we need it to live, but it's corrosive and it hurts. I forgot where I read that, but it's true. It has something to do with free radicals, or rust, or something. Anyway. Trust me. Oxygen is corrosive, and it's killing us. We are all like crack babies, except we're born oxygen babies. Isn't that the stupidest thing you've ever heard, ever?

Little pieces of life

Sometimes it feels like I can only live my life in little snatches. Little tidbits of beauty, or meaning, which are a part of something which has motivations beyond my own. These little pieces of life are only available to me in special circumstances, and now that I've recently become aware of them, they seem like they are elusive. I never used to look for them, but once I realized that this phenomenon was a recurring thing that had an indescribable meaning, it got weaker, and it stopped happening so much.

I used to get filled up with it on my nightly walks. I guess that's why I started doing this so much, all of this walking at night. I think I may have described a little too much of it, or I've given too much of it away, and it doesn't want me anymore.

Lately these walks of mine are tired, empty, gray things. I don't know what to do now. Maybe it's just that I've walked everywhere there is to walk here and didn't, and there isn't any more prize or magic or life in it. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's just all too familiar now, and I've drained all of the stuff out of things here. It feels like it's all dead now. Everything feels dead now.

What is a word

Intimate is such a delicate word, isn't it? No hard consonants, no long, obnoxious vowels. The sound of the word seems intrinsic to its meaning. It's a soft word that rolls off of the tongue and dissolves like cotton candy in the air. It's such a fragile word... an almost perfect ononmatopoeia for the concept of vulnerable trust; exposed and defenseless.

What is a word, anyway?

That's like saying why do people ask questions, or...

After giving it quite a bit of thought, I arrived at this description of what a word actually is:

The thoughtful essence of a thing.

Or... The attempt to describe, or translate the essence of a thing by condensing it into terms which are, by necessity, finite and truncated in order to fit within the local structure of language...

...an abstract essence which, by....

...is made more accessible as a concept... and more manageable as...

...has been made manageable by reduction to finite terms, in order to more easily fit into the structure of...

Words are extremely limited and simplified descriptions of abstract ideas, condensed to the simplest finite terms which, due to the limitations of language...

A word is an abstract idea contained within simple boundaries consisting of...

...an abstract idea which is given meaning in finite terms in order to contain it and to separate it from other bounded, word-like ideas.

Yeesh. What the heck just happened?

Alone. Not the definition, but the simple expression of a few bits of information. Hollow sound that feels like an endless, empty tunnel. It has just enough structure to thoroughly describe the concept of isolation, and...

...just enough substance to build an echo around...

...the yearning for the simplest, most basic compliment to define it.

I feel so far away from everything, especially.

A frightening thing

Tonight after work I was walking. Very slowly. And at one point I was getting pretty far away from myself. Far away from what it was like to be me. Stepping outside of myself. And almost escaping myself. That happened for a good long while. Hours at least. I got lost on a real country road. Miles away. Really. It was wonderful. I had to use an electric map to get back. Before that happened a cop found me. He made a thing clear to me. That walking. At night. On a public road. Is deviant behavior. It's threatening behavior. It's suspicious behavior. People don't like it. They don't want me to do it. They will try to stop me from doing it. They will get others to help them. This was made clear to me. I am not. One of you. It is not okay. To be me. This was made clear. 

During and around all of this a seemingly interminable period went by. I wound up in Denton again near where I started from. Walking close to the store and away. And I see headlights forming around me. So I move over to the right onto the sidewalk. To give them room to go by. The headlights don't go by but they fade away. I keep walking. Then they come back. I keep walking some more but they don't go away again. They stay with me. So I stopped. I stopped and stood there motionless. Waiting for the headlights to go by. They never went by. They just stayed there shining on me and I stood still. Shining on my back as I stood there. Motionless. 

About a minute went by. Finally I turned around. I stood there turned around and looked at the car that was there. Shining its lights on me. It didn't move. I didn't move. I stood there looking at it for a while. Another minute of silent standing went by. About fifteen feet separated me from the car. I was on the sidewalk. The car was pulled over to the side of the road. I took two steps toward the car and it sped away. It sped away instantly like a bat out of hell. Like a frightened thing. Am I a frightening thing?

The awfulest horriblest thing

I feel sick. I feel like everything around me is just this thick stuff... like the volume of space that I move through is made out of some kind of transparent, suffocating yuck. I'm nauseous and I want to throw up, but its all up in my windpipe and down in my lungs, and into my stomach, and its like I'm embedded in jello; without any flavor or nourishment or purpose, except to just make things slow and difficult and awful.

Where did this stuff come from? This is bad with a purpose. To hurt and injure, and to wound... deep down. This ain't like looking at a rock and imagining that you could carve it into something nice. This ain't even like just looking at a rock because it's a rock. This is like looking at a rock and knowing that it wants to dash your brains in as hard as it can. This is the essence of evil expressed as a fractal. It's pure malice; intricate and infinite. It's not like a corrupted thing around me... it is corruption itself that I slog through every day and that I am smothered by every night, as it slowly insinuates itself into my pores. It's the thing that is inspiring me right now to describe it in such detail and with such passion. It's the stuff I'm inside of that is trying to remake me out of it, so that I'll disappear inside of it and never know that I was ever a thing apart and separate from it. It doesn't want to corrupt me - it wants to disappear me inside of it. So that I become corruption.

Isn't all of that just the awfulest thing to think, and to write down, and to publish publicly, for everyone to see and know? Isn't that just the horriblest thing for someone to have inside, and to acknowledge? It's a slimy, malignant, vicious and repugnant thing that slips through my mind as if it were in my hands. As I pull it up to the surface of my awareness, I can feel long, stringy pieces of it - cancerous tumors which are forced to function as veins and arteries, filled with putrid, rotten puss blood shit - pop and break and spew as they are exposed and die. And then it all just turns to ash and dust.

An excessively deliberate lack of purpose.

It's 7:00 am and I just got home after an eternity of walking around after work and thinking about the people I've loved who have killed themselves, and how much I've thought about taking an exit stage left, and how much I still think about it, and how much more thinking I would have to do about it to actually bring me to that point. Sometimes I think I can see that point pretty clearly, but most of the time it's well hidden. When I see it clearly, I slow down. I think I move in slow motion... breathing, thoughts, movement, decisions, processing information, making choices, all of that just kind of grinds down until every thought and action seems excessively deliberate, but with no purpose at all. Deliberately purposeless. Weird, huh?

So, I walked into the house at about 6:50 and I felt like a used up, wrinkled old motile turd, ready to fall down somewhere and just disappear from this thing called being awake for an extremely long time. My sister Chey was up and getting ready for work. I hugged her and said goodnight, and said to her, "I think there's hope for everybody, no matter what. Even the ones who killed themselves." It was such a strange thing for me to say, especially in that it seemed deliberately purposeful.

You know what I love more than anything?

You know what I love more than anything? I mean, really really love, more than anything in the whole wide wonderful world? Well, I'll tell ya. It's walking for miles and miles with a half collapsed umbrella in a torrential downpour while getting blinded by lightening and scared shitless and deaf by the thunder while trying to watch a movie on a tablet and covered in mud up to the knees and getting splashed by a cop as he drives past and almost flipping him off but realizing it was a cop just in time and deciding not to flip him off and then arriving at the house and after getting somewhat dry and comfy and situated using all the ice to make a great big refreshing satisfying awesome glass of ice water and then knocking it off of the dresser and soaking the floor and settling for a lukewarm glass of water and then going to sleep with the soothing, relaxing sound of thunder and rain. That's awesome.

Trans-Dimensional Hilarity

Let's see if I can describe what it looks like, and how it feels. The moon is about 37 degrees above the southern horizon, and it's full. The rest of the sky is completely clear; there are no clouds at all. Oh, and its 2:50 in the morning. I'm on Bonnie Brae, walking south, and there is a heck of a lot of stupid traffic. Why? Why are all of these cars with people in them out and about this late? Don't they know that I hold the sole power of attorney and exclusive ownership rights regarding and pertaining to all nighttime extracurricular privileges, and that they are BREAKING THE LAW by violating my own personal zones of exclusion? How could anyone not be aware of this? I mean, I don't walk on their front lawns during the day, I don't stand in their bathrooms with them while they are taking a dump, and I don't forcibly insert myself into the passenger seats of their vehicles every single time they make a milk run - grocery run - cigarette run - beer run - drug run - automatic weapons run - or just an old fashioned hit and run. You will never see me interrupting anyone involved in any of those activities, so what makes it okay for anyone to pull those very same shenanigans on me, simply because I'm walking at 3 o'clock in the morning?

Oh, and by the way, I frikin' hate hate HATE loud motorcycles. And I know that there's such a thing as a motorcycle muffler, by the way. I can't think of a single, solitary reason why a motorcycle should be so purposefully and obnoxiously noisy, other than the extremely likely possibility that a certain prevalent breed of motorcycle pilot possesses a sadistic desire to inflict maximum annoyance to any person or thing which happens to exist outside and/or in the immediate vicinity of their own self established ego boundaries.

Okay, now that all the birching and whining is out of the way... what I originally wanted to say was, wouldn't it be weird if, while I was walking along and typing this in the dark, if all of the air just disappeared

Sorry, but there went another frikin' stupid ass loud noisy f'ing worthless piece of shit motorcycle, right then, just then. We hates them.

And then a bicycle just rode by, just a couple of feet away from me, and scared the shit out of me, just like that guy did an hour or two ago! WTF? Oh, but that was when I was walking and recording the talking thing with a kind of video thing. I guess you wouldn't know about it unless you saw it on my YouTube channel. I haven't uploaded it yet. Anywho.

Screw it, whatever it was I was going to say. I hope all of the air gets sucked up by interdimensional beings who are squashing our universe in between two other universes which are made entirely out of an infinite amount of naked singularity in order to generate a fourteen billion light years wide Casimir Effect to establish a vacuum vacuum which sucks up our vacuum into another bigger vacuum which will turn our entire cosmos into a single, vast region of negatively curved space-time, populated by an equally infinite amount of exotic, degenerate matter of negative mass, in effect repurposing all of existence into a thirteen dimensional FTL spambot with the intended side effect of first annoying and then enslaving entropy after a period of 999^999^99999 years and driving the 2nd, 3rd, and 7th dimensions insane, just for the fun of it, and ensuring the ensuance of trams-dimensional hilarity on an infinite scale.

A dream - The end

Nuclear war was imminent, and Leah had been sent back to Denton to get her affairs in order before going back the monastery to await the development of events.  Matt and I were at the house packing, and Leah was there to say good bye to me.  I was in denial that any bombs would fall, even though we had heard on the radio that there had already been several cities around the world that had been destroyed.  I knew this, but I said out loud that I didn't believe it.  I didn't want to leave.  Matt was urging me to hurry, and I was putting on my boots and lacing them up.  I began to grow very afraid, and I found myself wondering if it would hurt more when the bombs landed since it was cold outside, and whether or not it would make a difference if it was summer instead of winter.  Leah told me that she had been instructed to get back as soon as possible and not to become distracted, and I panicked and reached out for her, and she was there, and she grabbed my hands and pulled me out the door.  Then I was in a car with Matt and Leah, and I could feel my mom's presence but I don't think she was there... but I cried out for her, and said "I'm scared mom!" and she said, "Leah's there for you, she's there, she didn't leave.  Hold on to her." And I reached out, but I felt like I was blind, and I couldn't see, but she was there, and she put her arms around me and we sat there together in the car, in the dark, holding each other.

Little blue fowers.

This is how I feel when I hear this:

A bad feeling starts to well up inside of me, down in the center of me. Like a spring bubbling up, but black instead of clear. It continues to fill up my insides, until a sadness starts to leak out of my eyes and my nose, and I feel like I'm drowning in it The awful, horrible, beautiful melancholy which is this sound pulls me toward it. I feel like I'm attracted to it, but that's a lie because it's pulling me. And I feel so stupid for being sad, because the feelings that these sounds evoke in me seem so familiar and beautiful, but my sadness is a dull monochrome compared to it, in the truth of things where nothing is hidden. And I'm colorless and embarrassed and I despair.