Not in the fire

My head hasn't been this straightly screwed on for a period of time that I can't even begin to recognize. It may be only fleeting and temporary, and I may wake up tomorrow morning and realize that lines have been drawn, lines have been crossed, and that I'm still not as close as I wish I was, but that this is OK. It's taken so long for me to understand these things, and it leaves me desolate, dispossessed, and ultimately OK.

So the time that I've spent here has been relaxing, renewing, confusing, refreshing, replete with difficulties and walks. I've done it, and I'm so glad. The funny thing about sensation is that it is not definable to the outsider, only to the one who is experiencing it. I belong down here. In the coruscating kindness, in the awful blindness, in the wreck of nature's path, in the rhythm of the stars and the simple nights. Some days, I try to perpetuate the deception that I am simply cunning, when instead I am under the gun to figure this out. Soon enough, it's forgotten, and I'll be glad enough to bury this. I'm much stronger in the face of it all from home.

This is the story of a bag of bones, who had nowhere to go, and left a trail across a desert of his own making. A promise that I made, and one that I didn't hold, it burns in my breast like a single coal spreading wide. Nothing is what it seems, and the question is truly one of how much do I deceive, how much do I fool myself? This is the story of the realization of how desolate I am. Of how I left behind all that I could have gained, and instead exchanged my blessings for skin like winter.

How could I have ran so far without even knowing? I guess I did know it all along, but I just kept fooling myself into thinking that I wasn't. How often I suppose we do this, this faking and fading, this reluctant dance with ourselves, while all the while we deny that we are. Like a man staring in a mirror, we refuse to acknowledge the Truth, the fundamental Truth, that holds our situation, our life in the palm.

I feel like I left myself for dead with the choices that I made, with the auditions I held. It seems as though in the game of greatness, I misplaced the chance that I could have grasped. It feels, though, as unimportant as a single wave of the sea, a future of grass swaying in the wind until the end of time. What is the measure of my days?

Could this have been the chance I had to face the war? Could this have been the chance I had to kill another person's dreams, another story in the repertoire, another notch in the belt?

It wasn't supposed to be like this when I started this road. It was supposed to be following the footsteps of heroes, people who had gone before. It was supposed to be short and over quickly. It was supposed to make me stronger for the next road.

Instead, the skyline's promise has left me. Paradoxically, in the supposed pursuit of that which I claimed to be called for, I followed my own wasted thoughts. I filled the pockets of my own worldly corruption. From what seemed to have been a towering, lofty height, I saw my deeds revealed for what they were, the good, the bad, the end of them all.

I saw my need to be broken in twain.

Here I am, a wandering soul on this cold, dark earth. Here I am.

And would I that my deeds would collapse and fall which were done of my own regard. Would that all who have thought highly of me see me brought low. Would that I could have given them a war to see. Would I that I could fall for my only trustworthy, only pathfinding friend.

Tonight shall I sleep. Tomorrow shall I give up my search to find how to be where I said I would be.