What you see before you is not myself. I am a placeholder, a proxy, a shroud coasting through your orbit, autopilot engaged. A hundred worlds bear the marks of my passage. Clues left scratched in the earth, overgrown reminders of who I once was.
I am fading by the day but you have not forgotten. You see coals where others see only ash. And I look in the mirror and see only shadows, but you remember…
I call you to me now, my cloud of witnesses. Open my eyes to see more than just snapshots. Open my chest and apply voltage. Open my clutched hands and stretch them wide. I will surround myself with your scraps of paper and polaroid, and follow the breadcrumbs home. Cut me open with your second sight and tell me what you find. Beat drums in me that I cannot ignore. Breath your stories on my ember heart and I will glow for you once more. I have learned to hold fast; now remind me how to spread wings, to offer up, to burn and to bleed once more.
Tell me who I was, and I will believe. Tell me what you loved and I will be worthy once again. Paint me and I will come to life.I will not forfeit my birthright. I will walk in the light as before.
I see with my biased eye a man hungry for steak filling up on rice, struggling between a sense of overfullness while still feeling the pangs of unsatisfied needs.
I also see a man who has been, for a while, traveling a pendulum I do not claim to grasp fully. Whether the pendulum swing will break to one direction or another and form a solid direction, or whether the swinging is an inherent part of you, is not yet clear to me. Nor to which side you would choose to travel if the swinging stopped.
I would not say I see it as coals vs ashes, perhaps more like coals versus a fireplace where some areas are alight, dancing with fire, and you wonder of all the wood will catch, or if more fuel is necessary before the full fire gets going.
I wonder if you could elaborate on that…?
Sounds like you want to wake up.
Scenes
I’m reminding you by posting something you wrote back in 2000. Here is it, called Scenes.