from somewhere i find myself lost in the feel in the feeling somewhere between the self righteous feeling of being able to do what i want and doing what i need to do im trapped between wishing i could do stuff i can and actually doing it at twelve when i click links to feelings to emotions to things i don’t fully understand my fingers twitch my head rolls and wonderful splinters of crashing ideas come careening into my consciousness but through some utter desire some distinctive and instinctive yearning i shake my passion heavy head and utter for those graces of life that so move me oceanfuls of life that pour into me flooding my conscious with desire and hunger for whats next for everything that i could do but i seem to turn around with ever increasing brevity to the next seemingly endless desire and now more than the time before i wonder if this thing will stick and will it? will i ever do anything i want if i cant decide as to what i should do maybe i should just run off and do what i cant but that wouldn’t be me and I couldn’t give myself up for what would be simply easy for me to do i just run into these walls that shape just before i reach them they are ever increasing in grandeur and i have no idea if anything i do will amount to anything at all but i feel like i have some innate desire and initiative to keep thinking about it all and wondering if there will ever be anything for me
I think English words taste like pickles: crunchy on the outside with savory, meaty middles.
Image: goldbelly.imgix.net
Spanish is like a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window, its colorful geometry sliding into place like the children’s game Rush Hour.
Speaking Arabic is like putting on gilded silk robes that I don’t deserve.
Hebrew diffuses through my veins, and Yiddish sends me spiralling into my ancestors.
When I sat in French class, I was able to peer into a manicured francophone antique store that enthralls me.
And when I preach my dreams of universal Esperanto, I feel the international interdependency of the future colliding with the frilly beauty of antiquity.
I was barely twelve when I sat on a train pouring words onto a page, words that sounded right, that fit right, that like singing nails resonated in my chest.
I was a silversmith working self-righteous metal into ornate rings around fingers black with mud.
stuck uncomfortably askew into my otherwise sweetly lapsing childhood
the odd cold memory next to geraniums and my dads’ warm hands:
it hadn’t rained in weeks but it would tomorrow
tyler and his friends tore down the highway
the truck old
the boys young
and the night infinite
four teenagers careening through space
running out of time
(twinkling like stars, the holes in the bottom of his truck shone into the cab. Twinkling not like natural light, but like reflections from yellow road reflectors and moonshine)
then as Murphy knowingly frowned
the teenagers plunged abruptly into the darkness
two flew through the night and landed bloody on the highway
but he and his passenger tumbled endlessly into that indiscriminate abyss
and someone I hadn’t thought about in years came crashing back into my life
(and those stars that lined his bare calloused toes erupted into vivid supernovas)
tyler and I were friends when i was very young. he lived in Kauai and i would visit every so often. he was a terrible influence; he would steal stupid things, and i would watch. sometimes tyler took me fishing. he would torment the fishes by cutting off their fins and sending them back to the water to die bloody but breathing. and i would watch. he told me fish don’t feel pain, but i saw that he did. he grew up between houses, neither one was particularly welcoming. he grew up never believing he had a chance. one day he was watching his younger sister, and i remember sitting where the tide leaves sandy pools on the beach. she splashed and screamed while he delicately folded her clothes placing them carefully on a log. I watched him pull a shirt over her wet sandy head and I saw how precarious tyler’s life was. he couldn’t have been more than twelve.
it barely hurts to imagine him flying down the road drunkenly focused, it doesn’t pain me to imagine his dark brown eyes, and not even the dead teenagers trapped in a combusting coffin bring me to tears
I got up early on Sunday, and went to the breakfast table.
We sing songs at the breakfast table: how your day has been, how my day has been, how everybody’s day has been… yes, even on a Sunday morning.
It was one thing that I did, one tiny thing that I mentioned. But then it became all that defined me. I was no longer myself, but the ugly thing at the breakfast table. Imagine the horror of that—losing yourself at a breakfast table.
Jake, way to impress the breakfast table, I thought. Now I walk with a label. It’s going to expand with delicious rumors while my bones crumble and unravel.
In a way, it was a relief. The breakfast table only found out about this nasty side of me. Even when aristocrats at the table are disgusted by the sight of me, it’s ok. It’s alright because if my character is defined by a tiny mishap, they won’t discover the real fault of me.
I left the breakfast table a long time ago, and aristocracy means nothing to me. But days like today I find my bright side wondering, did the breakfast kill me? My respect for the breakfast table has crumbled, but just like before, I’m still idle. Have you ever been to the breakfast table?
So many things I’ve felt, so many things I’m feeling: like
the lips, the teeth, my hands that go numb from time to time;
unwelcome visitors crawling across my arm, still not wanting to disturb them;
hoping to be an anarchist someday – not in a way so extreme as starting a revolution or in a way so dull as loving someone your family doesn’t approve of, but in a way that falls somewhere in between;
watching the words pour out of your mouth, pour out of your mouth and drip down the sides – they drip down the sides and spill all over me.
I could miss the blue days, the warm days, but I don’t. I could miss the excitement that came along with summer, the uncertainty, perhaps, but I don’t.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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