Your waves,
they crashed like gorgeous tragedies.
With your white-tips folding over
like secrets into sand pockets,
I found relief in your soothing sounds.
My cuts,
they were from lifetimes before.
But I loved the way your salt tasted,
so I let it seep into my wounds with ease.
Together,
we scarred my skins so beautifully,
for today I swim through the air.
I remember your suffocation...
it allows me to breathe today.
Just the other day, I watched the Rochester rainfall again...
But only this time I wasn't aloud to complain, because although I simply cannot stand the sounds of storms, it hasn't rained in an unusually long time here. I sat in this summery lookin' chair that my mother cannot stand (she says it doesn't look good with the rest of the porch). Sitting in a still sort of silence, I listened to the way the raindrops exploded as they hit the sidewalk. I didn't understand how such a minimal noise could pierce my eardrums so beautifully. It was as if every time they landed against the pavement, they were creating a song together, and I feel like they wanted me to sing along.
My toes began to feel much warmer than before, my legs started to tingle like they were going through acupuncture, and I dreamt I was being pricked with tiniest points of needle tips. With my body sound asleep and my mind racing at uncontrollable speeds, I endured this ecstasy and began rollin' within the memories I began to feel. Once I allowed this unknown touch to take over, my legs were lifted, and I remember leaving the porch like something allowed me to fly back in time.
I was thrown back four years ago to a time I like to consider the demise of my inner-existence. There I was, sitting on that same porch- my porch, the one I've written about on many occasions, I watched myself there as if it is possible to sit somewhere in reality at the same time as a time before. With a handle of Nikolai at my waist, a familiar pen in hand, my face dripping sweat or tears onto loos-leaf pages, and eyes redder than hell itself, I was watching me watch myself. Him and I, I and him... we stared at each other, completely unaware of who each of us were, is, or what we would become.
I remember those days though... I remember him; the old me. I was just a boy who had his whole world unfold in front of his eyes. It was because of broken love that left me so lost and confused with life- what it meant to live. What it meant to move forward. What it meant to feel, and what it would eventually mean to die. Bottle after bottle, pointless poem after pointless poem, I felt the death of my inner self making it's way to the surface. My motivation was ripped from my bones, and I simply could not stand in the sun anymore. The night became my heartbeat, the stars became my drugs, and I got high off the way they managed to shine through the darkness. The moon would tell me stories every night, when only he(r) and I were awake, and there were endless amounts of lessons within these many words that fell from the sky.
My arms became frail, my stomach became weak, my hair grew long over my ears, and this rugged looking beard began to hide my lips. I forgot how to speak. I forgot how to listen. I was gone, cowardly hiding behind nothing. But I felt myself inside myself, somewhere screaming from the tunnels of my heart, and when the answers eventually started to squeeze from my valves, I knew what needed to be done.
Some would call it running away or escaping, but no one will ever understand what it has grown to mean to me. I realized that Rochester, my home, became a place of melting storms and depletion, and quickly decided that leaving is the only way to recover my love and appreciation for this place where I once released balloons into the air as a young boy. I wanted something different, a new way of living if you would. I felt the ocean calling me, screaming my name over and over, and with each folding wave I heard crash against an eastern shore, I knew their was freedom somewhere in the unknown depths of the Atlantic.
I left for Coastal Carolina in search of myself, or at least the answers to my endless list of questions. Still, after almost four years of living there, I never did find exactly what I was looking for. But it was the fact that I didn't find myself that allowed me to live again. I remember all those sunny days when I would just let the southern sun burn my body so beautifully. I remember all those nights walking the beach with my toes touching the soaked sands but barely grazing the water. But the moon, (s)he would never speak to me like before... as if silent beauty had become its only purpose up there. I felt lost in what it meant to be found, and I embraced it like the idea of death accepts disease. I killed my own inner-demise and was reborn there.
After realizing it was never about "finding myself again", I came to the conclusion that it was always about growing, and sometimes with growth there needs to be change. Miss Atlantic, she purified my heart and flooded my dreams with purpose, and she wrapped her oceanic arms around my body tightly, and squeezed me until I disappeared, until I depleted to the tiniest grains of sand. I remembered this feeling of suffocation, a time when Rochester dug its fingers deep into my neck until I could no longer breathe. But only this time, it felt different. What was once a feeling of demise became a feeling of re-birth, and I was caught in an undertow, being tossed around in breaths of realization.
Sometime after that, at night somewhere on the beach... the moon began building something out of sand. Packing it closely using the water from a high tide until this formation of a castle was finished. The castle was the new me. My arms covered in fight, my eyes lit like stars, the upper left part of my chest cut opened, and a silhouette figure was tinkering with my heart. I awoken to the slightest sounds sweeping the surface of Miss Atlantic. They were whispering something about how I was re-built to love again.
It then began to rain...
and I remember thinking how I will eventually grow to love that sound.
Your waves,
they once consumed me.
I dreamt of the wonderful
white pockets they created,
and hid there for a while
until I was brave enough
to be again.
To be
meant to breathe
and to breathe
meant to drown.
You killed me...
in the most liberating way.
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