A Reminder

When everything is still somehow off over the horizon.

Jul 09, 2024

Writing at 4am, meaning this particular type of 4am—the air so thick yet stale, as if to invite thoughts to come and pierce its silence; it’s lack of sound but not tranquility—is an inspiring thing.

I don't trust people that don't believe in inspiration. It's cool and convenient to say you don't need it. I think they're the type that purport to "hustle", make what they do a habit, but not really put skin in the game, have it grind and scrape and hurt, and build a trophy case of marks and callouses. It's the years in, the times out, the rejections, the pivots, even the silver linings turned bitter what-if's. People like me need to be inspired to make it to the next.

But it's all "discipline", they say—some of that is true, but some don't have the luxury of that being true all the time. Some can only tame their wild mind so much. Some can only be so healthy, so able, so “locked in”. They can't chain themselves to a rail for too long. They can't be content with waking up to that every morning, let alone the next. It begs the thought, that comes all too quick, Is this it? When are we there?

To be inspired is to want to continue, not just have to, and I want to keep wanting what I got. Lest I forget what I do it all for. Lest I get it and not want it anymore.

But making that come about, that is ugly, and no one wants ugly anymore. It's all prettiness and hygiene, compartments, levers and pulleys. They even try to give “ugly” a sheen it was never meant for.

When can I switch my robot off? When can I retain more, know less? Anything that points to even resembling an animal, with instincts and needs and excretions, even that is noise, clamoring, disturbing of "peace". These walls I’m bashing into, they seem to budge every now and again. I’ve seen their trajectory. Look long enough and they seem to have a will of their own, and they will to cave me in—each of us, really—but so slow as not to notice.

Yet still comes a day you realize your own voice stops to echo, instead reverberating in your head and it's so loud now, it rattles your skull, and it's a little tighter in here, it's a little hotter, you're sweating, and you wonder if you're forgetting how to breathe with how--it's pitch black. When did it get so dark... You're in a body bag. Might as well be.

The day is like the last one, and the last one, and the last one. The weekend was fun, but wasn’t that like the last one? Hours become minutes, the sands are pouring out a crack in the glass. You're older. (Nevermind you're young, you're older.) You realize you're a frog in a pot of scalding water, not knowing when's enough, what's right and what’s wrong and what’s the beginning of death when you stop being able to feel what anything really is.

It's all noise, yet it's all silence, nothing—you're deaf, and you're blind. There's no beauty to behold anymore. Cause you plugged your ears in and plucked your eyes out, now you’re deaf and blind and forgotten in a blackness.

I've tried discipline, I hear it takes you places, I was raised that way, hearing like it's an elixir of life. But all of circumstance has left me up at what is 5am now. The sun's up in a few—if I'd been disciplined, I'd keep seeing black right now, but I want to see the light again. I want to see that sun, I want it to touch my skin and see how it makes everything warm in its few moments of amber glow.

I choose to need the sun. I choose to be inspired. I choose wanting something to live for.

The things that have inspired me lately1…