What am I
Where is my place in all of this.
Or am I just collapsing inward again.
Is there a fixed ground beneath me.
Is there even one decision I can call mine.
Is there a self, a fixed, real, mine, self.
Who am I. What do I want.
Not everything around me is wrong.
So why does even I feel wrong to myself.
And how much more of myself can I correct.
But the one I actually am, even that, I cannot seem to hold onto.
Do the people around me know me as much as they believe they do.
Or am I, like always, trying to dissolve into them
caught in a current that moves without me,
a current I have never been able to match the pace of.
I try.
But I was never part of that current to begin with.
The more I reach out, the more I reach toward people
the more I realize I am not worthy of them.
Not of their feelings. Not of their thoughts.
Not of their mistakes, their forgiveness.
Not of their jokes, their laughter, their tears. Not even their anger.
Everything, everything, has become just an awareness for me.
Whatever moves inside my mind,
I am thinking about it from one level below.
And from that below, there is no way out.
No way up.
I cannot be perfect. That was never a possibility.
But I am not normal either.
And what even is normal,
what I think it is, or how others seem to live it,
or what I have been handed and told,
or what I absorb from everything I read and watch.
What is a human being. What am I.
I am only my thoughts.
And those thoughts carry no real relationship with anything,
no feeling, no connection, no purpose, no love, no opposition.
Just awareness. Everything reduced to just awareness.
I know I am wrong. I know it.
But I am who I am.
And if I try to change myself for someone,
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they do not stay.
And if I don’t change,
still, no one stays.
So much time has passed this way.
They ask, why do you need someone.
But when you have told yourself you don’t need it,
why does something inside still reach,
for someone who will untangle this knot,
who will bring all these branches that grew from the same place into one,
because those branches carry no leaves.
And I am not even the tree.
Someone make these lines,
one coming out of another, leading into another, into another,
into one single line.
But then the rest would have to be erased.
So when I already know all of this,
why am I still like this.
Why am I still not right.
Why does it feel like even my own people cannot understand me.
Or maybe this is just what happens.
Maybe this is just what a person is.
Or maybe God made certain people this way,
that they are only thoughts,
that their entire existence lives inside thought,
that that is the only place they are ever truly present.
Not in friends. Not in family.
Not in passion. Not in love. Not in stillness.
This is what I am.
Not a prison. But not an open sea either.
Not a mountain, mountains stand at the highest point.
I am not the highest.
I am not on this road while I drive it.
I am not with my family while I sit and eat with them.
I am not with my friends while they laugh and play.
I am not in the weight I lift.
I am not present when I pray.
I am not at the table where I work.
Maybe this is the truth,
that I only exist here. In these words.
Or maybe even this is just another awareness.
That I am only thinking I am here.
