Something magnificently beautiful

Words and expression, articulation through a formation of letters, communication through extensive, infinitive vocabulary, is the most beautiful thing the human mind has to offer in this world full of flaws. A moment of true raw emotion, evoked from somewhere within, drawn from something that science cannot explain, written down, scratched out in pen or hastily, shakily typed – that is one of the great wonders of all. The capture of something magnificently beautiful, not necessarily uplifting but perhaps ugly or devastating or disturbing, should never ever be taken for granted. There is nothing greater or more powerful than true human emotion; it is unstoppable and incomprehensible. It shapes, creates and regulates our world and everything we achieve. It is the sole reason we fail, but it is what makes us moral and what makes us alive. It gives us life. To feel emotion is to be on the brink of despair, to be in flight with joy, to be falling with passion, to be sick with overwhelming jealousy. It is to feel burning, feverish rage, to feel unbearable sadness. To feel emotion is to feel and be alive. Love. Love, love, love. It shall break us, only to join us back together again in a new and previously unseen formation. We are not strong enough to understand or contain it; it will always, always control us. What would we do without you, our sweet love? You cause our heart to beat daily for the things we desire; you cause us to make sacrifices that make no logical sense. Love has no rhyme, no reason; it just is as it is. It is raw and it is beautiful, and to express it in words is glorious and apt and true.

What am I, sitting here, giving these words their moment? What do I mean, as this emotion overspills out of my brain and onto this page? I feel we have a connection, these words and I; they know me and I know them. I come to them to make sense and gather meaning, or to unravel my thoughts. They come to me for this raw emotion, which I give to them; for as a human, as we all are human, we cannot deal with it. And this is why I am as crazy as I am. And this is why the world is as it is. This mad, crazy world. 

The elimination of scepticism

I stared up at the temple, white against the black of the sky, arched above my head. There were stars in the air and stars in my eyes as I took a breath, my hands held out in front of me as if in prayer. I felt alone, I didn't quite know what to do. The temple was empty, its large pillars colder than the air, its beauty marred almost by its bleak void of life. I, on the marble steps, breathing in and out, felt isolated from everything. What was I even doing here? My hands shook as the stars wavered through the slats in the stone roof.

Then, out of the darkness, floating as if on a cloud, came a mermaid. Her skin seemed grey and her face was bloodless, like the ghost of a sea woman. Her face was pained, yet there was contentment in her pearly eyes. Her scales glistened like silver in the precious starlight, but her tail flicked impatiently and nervously from side to side, searching for something.

“What do you pray for?” I asked hesitantly, and her eyes seemed to notice me for the first time. My hands were still clasped before my chest, my feet planted on the steps. She floated up and down slightly as she answered.

“To swim,” she murmured simply, before closing her eyes. Then, she sighed and started to fade, 'til all I could see again was black and white and the stars. As doom set in, another figure emerged, and soon I had a man hovering before me. His face was equally as grey as the mermaids, but his eyes were a summer sky blue. His legs were stumps, with ripped trousers revealing smooth scarred skin around the knee bone, where the calf and shin should begin.

“What do you pray for?” I asked, fearing him almost. But his reply was placid; he did not hate the world for what it had done to him.

“To walk,” he nodded, as he too started to fade and leave me, I waited for another figure, and at first I thought perhaps I was truly alone, but then he appeared. This man had black holes for eyes, and my initial instinct was to run. They were darker than anything I had ever seen and seemed to shine out of his pale face, questioning me. Sight, I knew he prayed for sight, and that I could not give him. My throat and tongue dried in my mouth as I shook, ready to cry, unable to ask. But he spoke to me.

“Not sight. I do not pray for sight. I only pray to have had the ability to see, so that when I sense the world, I can imagine it as it is. I only wish for visual knowledge and memory.” He bowed his head, the holes gaping hopelessly at the floor.

My heart thudded as he faded, and my hands left their pose of prayer to reach up and trace the rims of my own eyes. I wished, crazy as it was, that he could borrow them to see the world. But maybe, perhaps, he was better off believing its brilliance, than forever brooding on the darkness and the stars. I stared down at my own feet then, the feet made for this world, the feet able to take steps and run. As if on que they jolted forward, carrying me up into the temple, 'til I was standing in the middle, my eyes wide. Everything was as it should be. My body held no ailments, no cuts, no bruises, and no breaks. I had scope to dream, scope to live, scope to achieve. Yet, I was praying. What for? What was it that I required?

All of a sudden I felt alone again. There was no helping this. It was as swift as a dagger to the heart, that sadness. It struck when you were wavering like the stars. Then, the figure of myself floated down from the darkness. It looked grim and tired, weary from wanting. But I could not guess what it would say, so I asked; I had to ask.

“What do you pray for?”

It's eyes opened – my eyes opened. They were silent for a second to the point where I thought perhaps I would not receive an answer. But then, the mirrored me spoke, and I felt a sense of gratitude for this strange night and my own mental madness.

“The elimination of scepticism,” the figure said. “Hope. I pray for hope.”

Indescribable

Just for a moment, I felt tremendous hope, and I saw all the beauty in the world that surrounded me.
 I saw it, how wonderful it all was, as the setting sun stretched across the landscape, the trees shining in the light. The leaves as they trembled in the quiet breeze, the grass with all it's beautiful shades of green, growing long against the shackles of humanity. I see the spring as it splashes with such vigorous yet gentle dexterity, carving it's way through the landscape, searching for something that perhaps it will contentedly never find. The end of the day throws fantastic fiery colours
across the vast sky, the edges tainted by the coming of dusk, but yet everything is bathed in this beautiful light still, and there is an indescribable glory in it, a joy that can't be put into words. Yet I try- because that is what we do with our words.We try to express what was truly felt, and I felt calm and peaceful, yet ignited and excited by the serenity and perfection yet diversity of the nature that I was breathing and living in. I ran like a madman down the lane, my feet pounding the dirt, the cold
air stinging my cheeks. I smiled and I smiled at the landscape, and the sunset smiled back at me. Someone, something, gave us this world. And its at moments like this that it has to be appreciated. There may be hate, death, scandal, sadness, grief. But there is love and there is beauty and sometimes we just need to take a moment to take it all in, to feel it, to know it, to appreciate it. I saw the trees
and I thought how misunderstood they are; they may be silent as lambs but they've seen way past our years, and they grow towards the clouds for what to us seems like eternity, seeing it all, adding layers to their soft brown skins, tough to our human imperfections, watchful of our failures and our cute
successes. They give us their fruit, like gifts dropping from above, and we take it. And we live. But here I stood, in this field, feeling the world, loving things, just loving things, not expecting anyone to understand me. And I write this knowing that to read it will pronounce me crazy, but
I know, and so do the birds as they sing, and the sheep as they float in the fields made by man, what it is to be here and to be alive and to want to be alive. Nature overflows here, it's not controlled, but loops over its boundaries, ready to be discovered. I waited and waited, breathing and watching, until
the sun finally set, and the landscape was coloured with grey. But this was okay, because I knew that the colours would come again, it was okay that they were not there. I ran and ran and ran back to the house for safety, high on my adventure and the weirdness of my brain, happy with my mad moment with nature. I'm mad enough to be a writer, I thought. I'm crazy enough for this. I need to write this down, because that is what I do: so here I give this snippet through my telescope to you.

Stupid Things

Stupid things that don't matter twist emotions...twist them like steel hands around a candle, moulding it into waxy mush, with concaving finger indents. Strange things pull your heart down, 'til there's that slight lump in your throat and your limbs are heavy and your head is tired. Weird occurrences you should not care about but they throw your thoughts into turmoil, leaving you grieving what-could-have-been moments, crying over unreal ideals, smiling over forgotten loves.

The most bizarre of all is that when the real things go wrong, you notice. The world falls in, like a castle of cards, tumbling down to the table top, leaving you crushed by their papery bodies. There's a longing and a sense of guilt for ever feeling so bad when things were right, because now things are really wrong: properly wrong. You beg to return to a time when the strange things pulled your heart down, so you can be free to pull it back up, without cards catapulting through the air, and tears flying like daggers from your face.

But, its no use. The stupid things make up my mind and make me tick over, like an impatient clock. And waiting for things to fix themselves while I stand perfectly intact with muscles bulging and breath clear as daylight, is ludicrous. Emotions may be superficial, but the world itself is superficial. The stupid things will break us, like the trojan horse, or Achilles heel. Emotions take our immortality; they are our vulnerability. But this is what makes us human; this is what makes us alive. Without these strange things, to make us happy as if we're birds in flight, and sad like stones in the ocean, what would life be?

Unreachable

Our society is proudly marching in the complete wrong direction in a multitude of ways, and everyone is too busy playing on their smart phones to notice. I look around so often and ask, why is everything just so fucked up? There are so many things about our modern culture that just don't make any sense at all, but we all just go along with it, because who is the individual to question the majority? We judge, bully, reject and kill, we torture and starve, rape and neglect. Addicted to unreachable perfection, falling short every time because nothing is realistic or accepted. Everything is prejudged and judged. We crave brands to be accepted and we lie to be loved. We lie to ourselves, even though we know that everyone else is lying as well. The world is just full of lies, in marketing education, and politics. Boys are allowed to waltz around and treat girls like they're worthless, and most of our music is just misogynistic bullshit that we eagerly lap up because it has a nice beat and of course, because everyone else is doing it.  

Did you waltz into the fire?

The day has ended, we are into the night; the strands of daylight whisked away and replaced by an unseeable black, which covers all in bright darkness. What have you achieved? How have you used your hours awake? Did you smell the breath of the sea as you dived off a cliff into the swirling ocean? Did you ride a muscular horse bareback as he galloped roughly through the desert, clinging to his mane? Did you understand someone and see who they really are; did you glance inside their soul and view the true definition of your complicated relationship? Or did you fall madly in love with someone whom you should for everything it's worth despise, but their beautiful eyes just got you and you felt some crazy urge to kiss them? Did you learn a true and unyielding fact that blew your brain into helpless smithereens, and left you begging for life to make sense again? Did you break a promise, walk away from a commitment, or make a devastating change? Did you steal someone's glory, did you bask in some form of shame, did you walk a tight tight rope across someone's conscience? Did you make some small correction, or alter some small fear; did you make some small objection or did you waltz into a fire? Did you use this day, this God given day and the life you have been blessed with? Or did this day, like the others, get snatched away by your immediate and dominant pleasures, as you watched things pass you by, miserably moping on account of nothing happening? Use the day and your humanity as you take the air from this planet like gold from a piggy bank; make all the pain worthwhile, because this calm and pleasant contentment and this glorious beautiful world is there for you, when you're ready for it. Make the next day and the next the ones that count.   

Nothing but sky

The sky is dark blue, like a summer crystal with a shade of night exploding in the dark dust above him. He's on a cliff, which throws him into the air above the ground below, until all the trees look like broccoli and the men like action figures from a children's toy set. It's winter, so with this summer sky with it's purple and fiery blue colours comes his breath, pale as death into the air, like the smoke from a dragon's throat as he coughs and sneezes with a seasonal cold. He stands there, taking all of this in, rubbing his white and pink hands together, contemplating what it all means.

Here, there is nothing but sky, it outstretches over everything, cuddling the corners of that tiny earth. And here he is, standing in it, breathing into it, giving it life as it floats around him like bubbles from a boiling bath; one that would wrinkle your skin and warm you to the bone. The broccoli sways below in the strong wind that soars through the earth and the little plastic men totter from place to place with these realistic aims and ideas. Look at them go, look at them live! He cannot see their smiles, he is too far away, but he knows they are there. Protruding from their ageing faces, like shining beacons of hope.

He should go and join them, he is one of them. But yet, he is not. There is no shining beacon of hope splashed across his face from summer rain; only hard crystal eyes sent from the fire of winter, sent with what he's seen and what he understands. He stretched out his cold hands and closed those eyes, and the lights went out in the world. Everyone, everything, was still. Time seemed to pause, holding it's breath, waiting, as this one man stood and contemplated everything and nothing, the end and the beginning, life and death, happiness and distress.

Tears that seemed black in this bright night dropped like tiny silver bullets onto the dark grass below him, and he watched them as they soaked like daggers into the brown ground. The figures were tottering again, though the trees still seemed frozen and waiting. He lowered his hands and clenched his teeth, the wind blowing his jacket, gnawing at his chest. What were they waiting for? Nothing. They could do without him.

And then with a bang and a crack and a blinding flash which fired up like morning and then burned out like dusk, he was gone. There was a sizzling black singed mark where he had been standing, and the birds in the nearest tree gaped with their beaks open in wonder. One moment he was there, the next he was gone. The men, the women, they tottered. The trees, they bent and swayed. The wind howled as the night wore on, but the man was gone. He just didn't hope to understand. It was beyond everything he knew.