Plastic Heartbeats

It's been a long time.

I feel like I've lost you.  I've lost everything.  This initial burst of nostalgic recompense is far more dire than I'd like it to be.  Coming back after so long should be an awakening, of sorts, and I guess it is.  I didn't plan to awaken from a dream into a nightmare.  But, I suppose, we cannot control what guides us, and what flows to us.  A realization, in this moment, that I am a vessel.  Sorrow floods to me, even though I dam it, nor demand it, nor request or desire it.  What causes have I given to be forsaken by my own mind, my own power.

Oh.  So empty, too.  It's as if I was never there in the first place.  Home again, but far away.  A stranger in a once familiar land.  I did not expect to feel grief for a moment.  Or for an object.  Or for a tool.  Grief struck me, hard and fast, like being choked by the cold wind.  The gale making me turn my head to relieve my insides.  I owe nothing to my pleasures, I thought and assumed, but my body now tells me I was wrong.  So easy it is, was, continues to be, to shuffle along; empty, hollow, afraid.  How simple to wallow and regress.  Impeaching my thoughts, accosting my actions.  Simplicity is the mother of apathy, and melancholy it's sister.

Ever creeping now, is a fanatical dogma.  The fusillade of torment at the start begins to wane, notwithstanding I wish it upon myself, fraught with the candor of ease.  So, I chance, to give way to new feelings.  One step was pain, two unbearable, but the third gives hope, the fourth burns with envy.  Envy of the light, the cream, the soil.  Each step gone has now changed.  Where from the bottom of the staircase loomed black peril and muck, a heightened view instills a dominion of sanguine disposition.  Even now, as I trudge, as I force myself bare and plain, I breathe the air of attrition.  The downfall of banality.  The rise of fascination.  To be enthralled with oneself, one's things, one's thoughts, once again.  Beauty is thrust into me by the spear of persistence.

How quickly things changed. For the better, perhaps, for the future, for certain.  And in that short span, that quick step, that lolling indefatigability, did I have the world turned for me.  Out of the depths, my fingers grasped upwards, yet onwards.  Not yet reaching the top, but soon enough.  On the way there are suddenly several paths and the pit becomes a corridor.  That reach was meant for sky, but I grabbed forth instead.  What was once a deep hole is now a tunnel.  Long, for sure, but easy walking.  My fingers pulled me at first, the credit belongs to them.  Scripture forged almost against my own will, pushed into me, not divinely, but by circumstance, by inevitability.

Now I no longer question my person.  My self is true, as it always has been.  Staring into a vandalized mirror only shows a spurious reflection.  Untruths sat on the surface, deceitful little lilypads, now brushed away by the wake of time and the steadfastness of axiom.  And I think, finally, eventually, and all at once:  Has it really been that long after all?