DEAR POETS, I ( ) YOU
dear poets, i hate love you
Recently I have fallen in love with books. This is not quite right - I have always loved literature but now - more than ever - I have been reading them feverishly - devotedly - like somewhere in the sheets the sea of ink will part and, drifting amongst the waves, I will find god. An amendment: recently I have fallen into thrust myself into books, mouth agape, screaming swallow me. I have run from my waking world full speed to hide between the margins and annotate my way into a godhead. Like my reaction to genius could count as an intellectual spark. Like proximity to greatness means that the sun shines on me also. I find that whenever I have been let down by the way things are, relegated to a realm un-ideal and an all around disappointing reality- I tuck myself in between the pages of a life far more exciting, a life that has been lived far more vividly, unabashedly, truthfully, and let the colors lull me to sleep like a lullaby. I hibernate in this cotton cocoon like a coward until I deem it fit to come out. I did so at the age of 12 when I first realized that I would not be great- and again at 17 when I'd discovered myself to be, still, irrefutably plain and agonizingly ordinary, and now that I've turned out to be all wrong about the world. Each emergence from this chrysalis I hope to wake beautiful, and interesting, and right, but with each emergence I find that I am the same as I have always been; spineless and waiting to be transformed so that I might fly away (to where I do not know). I heard somewhere, in a movie (I find that beautiful movies have, too, this power of transportation, protection, shelter) that some people are dipped in flat, others in gloss, and a small lot are iridescent. I know, painfully, that it is those of us with matte, malignant skin who ache to be made of glistening fractals, and that those who are iridescent are offensively oblivious to their own luminance. But you can’t begrudge them this: I know, too, that it only makes your own dullness more apparent, your aura that much uglier, if you begrudge them this. A person who has always been golden will think it only right that they can swallow the sun, and a person stumbling in the dark will only, naturally savagely, live their life trying to tear it out of them. It is in our nature anger and cruelty. But reading feels like penance for such intrinsic violence. It feels like forgiveness for my shortcomings lie somewhere within the binding. It feels like being made special by proxy. It is hopefulness that I too can be great, or beautifully flawed, or poetically plain and ordinary and rotten and whatever else is so undesirable that it has found a home within me. Nevermind wit, or talent, or charm. This I can do - I can read and understand and run away for as far as the story sprawls on. And at the end, I can start anew. There are infinite stories - something that cannot be said about chances. I am rambling. A talented writer would have said something great by now. Would have left the reader feeling changed and profound. But I am not a writer, an artist, or a poet. I can do nothing but consume these pages and wait to die.
-molrat
molrat, 20, a burrow ✯ IG: @m0irat
“N/A.”