Monday February 2nd at Midnight

There’s something that I’m battling for all the time, and there is no abstaining. There are few somethings, actually.

One is a game of tug-of-war that we play in the absence of choice, never forgetting this lost autonomy as it’s teased amidst the cosmic ventricles protruding from our bodies, fibrous beams that make up the rope we tug. The cavity between us is a vat of blood and guts, which weren’t there in the first round, and there is no winning or losing because we are the game.

Another one has to do with a compass, the magnet within the compass, and the fact that without this component the device is useless. In one sense the cardinal directions are a reliably sure thing– yet so is gravity but it only takes a few hundred miles to burst that bubble. West will probably remain west but I am not always sure that sobs mean grief or that longing means desire. Nor am I always quite sure that the tug-of-war game is involuntary because we do edit our angled noses and excess pockets of flesh all the time, some of us at least, but in the end cosmetic surgery is not cosmic surgery, so maybe the choicelessness does prevail.

What I am sure of, is that we are the shell of a compass and that within us is the magnet whose flux can learn to mend with the external through proper nourishment, at which point we might know exactly where to go.  I definitely don’t know yet, and though ‘self-reflection’ aligns aptly with the metaphor, “take a look in the mirror”, I think I have stared a little too long…I think most of us have.