My Devotion to the Air You Breathe
Money money money… I love money!
It’s tragic, a practicing socialist with deep ties to making money. Having it, treasuring it, hoarding it under the guise of rainy days that have become fortnightly flooding.
The squalor of a once beautiful Victorian, rotted floor boards teeming with colonies of mold and mildew. I ran out of money, broke like a stopped clock, no longer swinging a pendulum to the beat of my heart
thu-thump… thu-thump
I hear it in my head, one of the few noises in my quiet mind. Occasionally my stomach gurgles, or I feel the choral singing strain of the muscles lining my tear ducts and face damming up yesterday’s sorrow. Constant breath, as if the ocean breeze came and went as predictably as… my breath.
Under the practicing devotion to money, that fights my deepest spiritual espousements to the unwritten doctrine of mindfulness gurus, I keep vaping. It was the lazy man’s meditation when I would smoke a cigarette. I would get in a fight with someone whom I love, and take a break. Typically, we would end up outside commiserating over the hot smoke and head rush, and things were better again. Cyclical toxicity in our lungs, a vape is twice what I make in an hour, saturating my alveoli and bronchi with millions of metal shards that pierce through the thin capillary walls like bullets.
With all the money I wish I had, I would no doubt drink and smoke at every vista, touch skins with people in every continent and country, all to soak in the brief silence as they scan my unfamiliarity. Overlooking the horizon from each coast and getting the little rush I know I can have behind the curtains of my eyes in the swirling inhalations of even the thickest city smoke.
It’s true, I will keep chasing after money and its promises of liberation until I find them too untrue to ignore my growing faith to the air you breathed into me. Where I am lost in the dance between myself and all life, where there is no myself and, and it is just the dance.
I want so badly to be with you, I wish I had not fallen into the love I find myself in now, it is always like quicksand. I want to sink into it, I struggle and fight to hasten its enveloping grasp, the asphyxiation of my lungs as they are filled with every granular piece of you I can hold inside me.
To play this game of false idols, misidentifying You for anything but the divine, the poisons I have ingested expunged and excised, but only through my missteps. I tire of stumbling through, I know not the person that returns my gaze in the mirror. I am infantilized by your knowledge, how dare I be treated as equal. Searching far and wide, I need not look out but keep my gates open for siege, any fair maiden to come and steal my heart and feast on my entrails.
Lain agape against the sky, in due time you patch my wounds, I am given ample time to turn onto my knees and take count of your blessings. The infinitely complex machinations churning without my effort inside of me. I breathe even when I don’t want to. You did that to me. You did that for me. I feel your love, what you’ve given, by what is taken. It would be cruel if it was not immaculate. Our sicknesses grotesque if not for the beauty that comes from our survival.
If I were to be a true believer, devout in my practices, I would not ingest the poisons tempted to me, but it would not be faith without tests. How am I to truly believe if I am drawn to wanton consumption, shouldn’t they be quieted by my prayers if you would only answer them? I lack the delusion to your illusions, I am too grounded into your creation. Sometimes, I can see the edges of things falling into themselves, or melting walls and firework in my ceilings. Sometimes, my vision becomes full of TV static when I look at concrete, and repeating runic patterns may beat like living flesh in the sidewalks and streets. It’s all too familiar, the repulsion of nuclear and electrostatic forces creating the sensation of floor, the mass of the Earth keeping my frame of reference to the ground, the photosynthetic echos still lingering in the creation of ATP in my eyes, I know I am a plant, rooted to what you call reality. All I truly do is breathe, all I truly do is love my awareness of breath. Such a wonderful duteous sensation, sometimes, I open my eyes and I am in intense eye contact with another person.
Sometimes we are speaking calmly and laughing, or watching a movie together, or each of us reads something and we are merely in each other’s vicinity, lost in ourselves by the thoughts conjured by words, projecting imagination on our cerebrums.
I think I learned science so I could write about it. I definitely can’t do physics “with the best of them”. That’s my imposter syndrome. I feel that way because I procrastinate when I should study. I do drugs to fill the feeling of procrastination with the feeling of escaping addiction. I chose to study to fight procrastination and addiction because I could make more money with the degree. I fear I may not get the degree because it is not meant for me, and if I have no money which you desire, and we need to eat, then you are not meant for me. If you are not meant for me why do I study, let me procrastinate, but rather than call it that, just get high. Then low, and study intermittently in case I can make them think I am worthy of that degree. Just in case we are meant for each other, just in case I am none of the things I fear I am or claim to be, and that we are something else I cannot yet see.
Or the we is not you and me, but rather someone or someones I have not met yet, but really there are no yous and Is, just divine is or I am or YHWH or tetragrammaton… perhaps you know what I am referring to. Or, the time of understanding will come to pass. Or the time of all time is now, and it is all breath for all time, in no time at all.
Expand… collapse… rise… fall… inhale… exhale… in… out
until we come.
