Thanksgiving In Retrospect

I’m thankful for this tunnel of light I just pulled up in front of. Amidst this horrible, threshing feeling in my heart, I found that I’m not broken. I still have hope. I still have a necklace of optimism laced around my neck. For the first time in my life, I can feel that my growing up is more than ostensible. I realized that this thing, this experience that I thought would break me once and for all, hasn’t made me bitter. Not only am I alive and breathing, but I have no doubt in my mind that I will get up and walk away from this fire unscathed. For the first time, I’ve realized that nothing can take you down but you. I might be lost, I might be forever caught up in my delusions, but I’m not broken. The next time you touch me, I will be heavier, fuller, and lighter all at the same time. It’s a tragic and beautiful thing to realize how much power you really have. So today, that’s what I’m thinking about. I’m thankful for every single thing I have, and every single thing I don’t, because I am me, and I am not broken.

Copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011

The Moon On My Ceiling

I was reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, and I came across a quote that quite literally knocked the wind out of me. Kundera goes on to explain how in all Latin-derived languages, the word compassion is built from a prefix-suffix combination that means, “from suffering”. This makes the whole business of being compassionate seem condescending, like you are lowering yourself to the level of someone less fortunate. It’s a word that has nothing to do with love or empathy. But in all other languages, German for example, the word compassion is created by a prefix-suffix combination that means “from feeling”. It’s the ultimate emotion because it means you are feeling exactly what the other is feeling. You are tapping into their unique frequency as if their nerves were attached directly to you. It’s an honorable and perhaps the most powerful sentiment in the human emotional spectrum. I don’t want to be the former. What use is it to be understood if you’re just a project? If you don’t want to understand me because you love me or feel connected to me in a profound way, then what’s the point? Compassion shouldn’t be a talent; it shouldn’t be an ability that you spread around the world as if you’re doing a good deed. It should be a natural instinct, when in the presence of someone who has grown into your heart like a rooted tree, to feel exactly what they feel. You can be as complicated as you want, but that shouldn’t be a test of clairvoyance for someone who comes along. If they should see right through you like an x-ray machine, it doesn’t mean they have achieved some honorable level of greatness. It can only be rendered significant if they can feel their heel throb when you step on a tack, or taste salt on their cheeks when you cry because you couldn’t make your rent payment again. I don’t care about being understood, it’s irrelevant in most cases. I just want an invisible piece of string to connect my heart to yours. But asking that is equivalent to me asking you to shrink the moon and place it on my ceiling so I can fall asleep fearlessly at night. I believe in magic, but I think you can only create it for yourself. The rest of the world will have to find their own way to get to where they’re going.

Copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I hate that feeling where everything you are begins to slip through your fingers like sand. You build yourself up, not realizing that the foundation is shaky, and at the slightest touch the whole thing crumbles. A single breath from the lips of change and you wake up one morning having shed your skin in the night. How nice would it be to be able to trust yourself? to trust in your instincts and convictions as if they were permanent? But there's always something that we want that our present selves can't reach out and grab, so as our desires change so do we. But what are we supposed to lean on then? If you think about it, the only constant thing is the past, but if you lean on the past then your not living at all. We're left hopping from one space to the next as they shift and shake and throw us tumbling off the edge only to land, not so gracefully, into the arms of the next person who claims to "understand". Then they catch onto you and wheel around your head until your too dizzy to notice them slipping out the door with a suitcase full of your ideas and plans.

I'm just wondering why. Why am I willing to participate in the game even though I clearly understand there's no way to win? And why am I willing to lose everything for someone who is as permanent as dirt on a car windshield. One revelatory rain storm and they're gone.

I'm just wondering why. Why am I so in love with idea that I'm not one thing, but everything and everything I want to be? Or maybe everything you wish I was.

I'm just wondering why being sad can be so wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMG6W-kPk6g
Drop-Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
Sylvia Plath

"People Are Strange That's Why We're Strangers"

I have mentally regressed in age. I don't know what happened. Have I always been this sentimental? Where's my brick wall, I don't want to be made of glass. I don't want to be made of glass. It's funny what happens to a person once they've completely assimilated themselves into loneliness. It becomes more than a lifestyle, or a state of mind, or an emotion. I don't know how I let it get this far. I know how you see me. I know you think you know things about me that I don't know about myself, that you have x-ray vision. I hope to God you do. Because that's the only hope I have of getting out of this mess I've made.

It's kind of funny...but I get lonely too sometimes.

To Remember

I predicted that they would be able to read in between the lines, that I had enabled them somehow to do so. That's what I selfishly expected of them. Yet, in the meantime, I had been living with the people I created. Ostensibly I waited impatiently in solitude, yet I was leaning on the shoulders of my imaginary spectrum of personalities. I will admit I have built so many walls over the past few years, but if one were to look closely enough they would see that the walls themselves were made of transparent and malleable material, like plastic. Taking into account the actions of those around me, whom I do not believe have blind eyes, I must conclude that this facade has become a perverse reality. Against my better judgement, I feed and nourish this malicious demon and its basket of fallacies. I stand back and taste salt on my cheeks as I watch it grow and envelope each facet of my being with its shadow. How can I stand in full view of this horror? I call myself a martyr, yet cannot identify the cause to which I have bound myself to. It is well known that loneliness will drive any man or woman mad, but it seems so candid. It seems too conscious of a decent to make the trek without an anesthetic. I am wrought with a dissociative sadness that inundates itself into to every new cell that groans it's way into my pores. I drive long distances and think this through, philosophical skepticism paired with ordinary skepticism ,and no conclusion is derived. I park in the garage, get out of the car, and think "fuck, I'm alone".

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
Carson McCullers

copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011

Glow In The Dark Stars

Ostensibly, I get along better than most. I have my own world, and I fill it to the brim with the things I love. I wake up in the morning and know exactly what I want (a cup of coffee), and I go about my day with open arms. But the reality I see through my eyes feels extremely different. Hollow, empty, full, voluminous....It isn't fair to want so many contradictory things. There's nothing worse than loving to be out of control. Holding up your biggest and most dangerous flaws above the crowd, for show, leave the telling to the metaphors you hand out like paper money. You call yourself a poet because you believe in things while no one believes in you. You call yourself a poet because you write from your own perspective. You call yourself a poet because you make believe you suffer. You call yourself a poet because you play tricks on your own two eyes, and pretend that optical illusions are just a result of blind faith. You call yourself a poet because you can listen to the same song twenty times in a row and still feel tears welling up in your throat. But you're just a scared little girl who was born with an old heart. You're lost, and you love it, but you still continue to shoot up flares into the night sky just to see what will happen. You believe everything happens for a reason, and that everyone is put into your life to play the part of teacher, student, or both. The fear lives on, and the fear lives inside of everything you do. In order to understand the fear, you must become the fear. You must inundate every aspect of who you are and who you want to be with this shadow, and then maybe the light will come. And if the light should come, you ought not tie it on a string around your neck like a key, but shake hands, say hello, and watch it walk away with a straight back and unshaken disposition. A friendly encounter, a fleeting encounter, and a wound to prove it's worth.

Quixotic : foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals; especially : marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action


copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011

"One Put It On A Pedestal And Left It There"

Personally, I don't think I'm cynical. I think in order to be cynical one has to be logical as well, and I am the polar opposite of logical. I think my "cynisism" (I'm going to omit the quotations throughout the rest of my prose, but I'm sure you've picked up my drift by now) comes from thinking too much from my own eyes. My cynisism comes from too many hours spent contemplating the pros and cons of being myself. My cynisism comes from awful retail jobs and the mechanical routine of numbers, numbers, numbers. My cynisism comes from one too many late night PB & J's, in the hollow light of a lonely kitchen, against a backdrop of ominous and beautiful movie soundtracks. My cynisim comes from my mother, who cursed me with a pair of permanent and threatening rose colored glasses. A genetic mutation that romantisizes even the smallest instances. My cynisism comes from the self loathing that bites and scratches its way under my skin no matter how hard I kick, and no matter how many pieces of metal I pierce into my body. My cynisism comes from loving, too fully, the things that cannot love me back. My cynisim comes from obsession, an obsession with big and small. My cynisism comes on strongest after I've read The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by Shel Silverstein and feel that nothing in the world could be as impactful as those simple and stark illustrations. "One put it on a pedestal and left it there".


My cynism doesn't translate. It can't be talked out. It can't be cured, because on most days I hold it close to my chest. It's endearing being the opposite of endearing.

It's 3 a.m. and I am wishing I could have just one breakfast with Sara Quin. It's 3 a.m. and I am smitten with Ewan Mcgregor, and wishing I could tell him how much the film Beginners changed my perspective on just about everything. It's 3 a.m. and I'm scolding myself for loving people who might as well belong to my imagination.

It's 3 a.m. and I am feeling particularly cynical.

Goodnight.

Goodmorning?

Time doesn't exist, take it up with Herman Hesse.

copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011