The Fall III

Depth

Happiness, this elusive sentiment that basks in such a grotesque universe of intangibility. Standing at the peak of all mundane quests. Sought after more than anything else. But still so indefinite to say the least. What is happiness truly? A question that plagues me to this very day. Every time I try to solve this riddle, the word “love” pops up. EVERY time.

Truth be told I have always been subject to love. Grew up under the wing of loving parents alongside loving siblings. Basically, lived in a world filled with love. “Is that a problem?” Inner me always asks. “A problem? No! no!……. I don’t think so” I will often answer. But still, “is life that perfect?” no pain, no grief, no slip ups. I guess it all seemed like an illusion, fake, nothing more than a facade. My ever so present sad smile once again draws itself across…

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A LETTER TO SOMEONE I MIGHT LOVE

Letters: when last did you write one? I don’t mean an email, a text or chat I mean a good old fashioned letter. The hand-written, folded, enveloped and stamped letter that you take to the post office. One thing that litters the memory of my puppy dog days are the letters I wrote to express my “love.” The difference Now, is I’m older and with that an enhanced understanding of those feelings. If my poetic side still lives is a question I really haven’t tried to answer. One thing that I am certain remained through the years is my fondness of falling, and falling hard.

                If you must blink, do it now, take a bathroom break, or get comfortable, because once you begin you can’t afford to stop, you can’t get distracted……………………………………………………………………………………. Here I go:

 Dear…………….

                Like anything in life, the hardest part is always the beginning. I will always hope you are faring better than when we last spoke, because when last we saw seems like a lifetime. If you still haven’t found a place to stay you might as well move in permanently to the nifty piece of real-estate you’re currently leasing in my thoughts. It’s comfortably a mansion.

                Hello again my love, I hope you are feeling better than I do right now. Don’t get me wrong I do not feel bad, not even in the slightest bit, considering all that is on my mind is you. My thoughts in the morning, afternoon and night are filled with the perfection that is you, constantly reminding me of your definition, analyzing every part that was put together to be an embodiment of your being. Constantly practicing, reciting words, lines and stanzas that are obviously inadequate to describe your beauty. I know I sound cheesy, but my thoughts are what they are.

               I write, because you used to say I could be a little too succinct in oral expression. Me, myself and I keep wondering what our next conversation with you is going to be like. It’s been a year since we first saw you, which would make it nine months since we worked up the courage to talk to you. Our performance, first impression then, wasn’t so great, and so we keep practicing night and day, writing poems, coming up with lines that would woo anyone but you. Even though we know it’s a bad idea we continue because we can’t afford another failure in case we get to make a first impression for the second time. We wonder though, why we are so stalk on you, why do we still get butterflies when we see you, why no one but you has this effect on us. We have fought many such wars and emerged victorious, conquered many, destroyed tests, practical’s and exams with unimaginable complications. You my dear have proven to be our kryptonite. These are my wars and they are what they are.

                 I have made you my life quest, the best thing that ever happened to me, my one and only love, my kryptonite. There I go being cheesy again, pardon my inability to come up with appropriate words to construct proper sentences that would create paragraphs that can fully and adequately describe the perfection that is you. I fail to use similes and metaphors to emphasize the extent of your allure, because it would not be fair to use things that cannot be compared to you to describe you.

If I could, I would say:

                 You shine as bright as the sun, yet it has nothing on you, you shine so bright the only light I can see is yours, the only heat I can feel is the one you emit. Nature in its entirety, with all the beauty and wonders it holds to its name does not begin to scratch the surface of the grandeur and humdinger that you are. I write to say I miss you. How your sights matched your drive, how your tiny voice contrasted your appetite. You are the most beautiful person I have seen in 23 years. I’m sure mirrors only need voice boxes to confess something similar.

                 I am afraid my letter has come to its end, be that as it may, I have so much I would like to tell you. But I guess they would have to wait till our next meeting, maybe then I will be ready to express my deep and complete devotion to you. One last thing, you shine like the sun but it sets and you don’t.

 

Yours truly

THE JIGSAW THAT IS LIFE

While in primary school one of my punishments used to be to fix a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t mean the ones with big pieces I mean the type that had so many tiny pieces, by the time you were done the image created was big enough to pass for a big mosaic painting. The thing about a jigsaw puzzle, is the confusion at the beginning. Every piece is on its own, and you have to take your time to carefully put every piece together to create the image on the box, but there is no exact formula to fixing them. At times you start, then everything falls apart and you have to start again. Other times, you put the wrong pieces together, and you have to separate them because they are not a perfect fit.
I can’t remember the events that took place on the day of my birth.  if I was to  guess what I was thinking, I would say I wasn’t thinking much, I was probably crazy confused, but with time, I started put 1 and 2 together and I am still doing that to this day.
Now, for anyone who has ever tried to or successfully put a puzzle of over a thousand pieces together to form, say an image showing a stormy ocean, pieces of a wrecked ship with a light house in the distance, you know it isn’t an easy fit. When you are done you probably just want to frame it and never touch it again. If that is so hard, what say you about the jigsaw that is life, which has so much more than an infinite number of pieces to put together, not to mention that with it you are on a constant race with time? Every time you take a break is valuable time lost, time that cannot be recovered. Also no two of life’s jigsaws are similar. The only time you’ll try and recreate a picture is when you try to copy somebody else’s life.
                I always wondered why life isn’t straight forward, why can’t we make plans and they just work out? Questions, questions, questions. I don’t remember much of the early stages of my life, but I do know Learning to talk, walk, feed myself, eat solid food, were all pieces of life I had to put together to get to the next stage of my life. Let’s jump to the parts that I do remember, having to do everything I was told…and if I didn’t I was scolded. Learning to read and write . . . ok there’s just too much to mention. From the day we are brought into this world our lives have been planned out, ok I know I said life wasn’t straight forward at the onset of the paragraph. Let me explain, as confused as life might be there is a standard direction in which it is supposed to go. from time to time we had help, but the most important things like, talking, walking we had to figure out on our own, if we delayed it was question, questions again, so naturally we probably felt a sense of urgency to develop.
                Then we ourselves became fully aware of the direction our lives were supposed to travel. We were even able to create a desired image of our desired lives as individuals living in a vast yet small world. Now here’s where the mistake came in, we were given a formula. Remember earlier I mentioned a jigsaw has no particular formula to putting it together, what I failed to mention is that every jigsaw requires a different approach, as some are easier to complete than others and most, at times look very different from each other. In simple terms there is no one formula that applies to all puzzles. It is the same with us and our individual lives, we are all different and all have a different image of what we want our lives to look like.
                The formula to a great life, clearly stated for us, is school, do exams to determine how smart you are, then go to yet another school, then look for a job. These days it has become worse, we go to school while working, and then go to school some more, we even have people going to school their whole life. It might sound like am saying school is bad but let me clarify, school works for some and doesn’t work for others is what am saying. We all have a different approach to life, just like some of us when fixing a puzzle might want to start with the edges. Others might want to start with just one edge, some might want to start at the middle and others might want to start with a definite image etcetera.
My point is its high time we as individuals, both parents and children, realize that we cannot all achieve our goals using our neighbors method. Yes we can learn from each other and pick a few things here and there, but we are not the same. At the end of the day our individual approach to life will always be a tad different, no matter how little it might be, it is still a difference that cannot be ignored. We are our own persons as much as our lives might be connected in a way. Finally even the bible says this, not in these exact words of course but we will be judged and tried as individuals.
Now I’m calm, life isn’t meant to be easy, after all we have established that putting your life together is harder than putting a puzzle together. You know what is great about puzzles though is that when you try one method and you fail, you can always try again. It also allows you to take your time to carefully analyze it and figure out what way works for you. Life offers you the same, and confused as it is with all its pieces, ups and downs, you are allowed to make mistakes and correct them. You are allowed to use your own methods, you are allowed to think outside the box. We are all special in our own ways, the way we look, the way we think, our goals themselves and the systems we use to achieve them, are a few things that make us unique and special. Surviving, excelling at, defeating and enjoying the rigorous journey of putting together the pieces of the jigsaw that is life becomes possible, the moment we accept our individual uniqueness and stop trying so hard to be people we are not.
Yours truly.

SIGHT:MY HEAD AND EYES–> A CAMERA, COUPLED WITH A LENS

Ever wondered how possible it is to have two well-functioning eyes and still not see, it’s so severe, you lose sight of the most important things at a certain point in time? Ever wondered why a camera man really takes pictures? Why somehow a lens coupled with a camera has the ability to capture things that we otherwise wouldn’t have been keen enough to see or deem important?

I was watching an anime in which one of the main characters mentioned something about seeing that woke me up, can’t remember her exact words of course, but for those interested and anime lovers, look for ‘Canaan”. What does it mean to see, what is seeing really, when you say I saw what do you really mean? Everyone has a different meaning and a similar meaning when they say “I saw.” It could mean my brain registered the presence of an entity, however big or small, it could mean something, say a plan is an open book, in other words, you can see the end game of a certain plan or you got someone or something figured out, it could also be a recognition of the existence of truth. But this are the obvious meanings.

Am not saying there are any hidden meanings that was just my attempt to make us understand the aspects of seeing I wish to touch on.  Many at times I take pictures and when am reviewing them I often notice things I didn’t see when I was taking the photo. Now why is this? is it that I didn’t see well or I wasn’t keen or observant enough or I was so fixated on my subject I didn’t notice what was around my subject? Hell if I know. After a while though I began to look out for this things. I forced my eyes to look but I trained myself to see.

Everything in this world can be seen, nothing can really escape our eyes as long as it is in our line of sight. But even with this fact in existence, we are still oblivious to things that are staring us down. Why is this? Simple, we choose not to see them whether consciously or subconsciously, hence making mistakes hurting ourselves and by proximity those closest to us.   It is because of our refusal to see that we end up breaking hearts, having our hearts broken, fighting, and killing. In our desperate attempts to love, to keep a clearly dead relationship alive we lose sight. We probably choose not to see because of the fear that we might not like what we see. It could be that we truly cannot see some things from where we stand. It might even be that we do not see somethings because, they are not what we are trying to see or what we want to see, just like looking so desperately for the good in a person, that we fail to see how bad they are for us.

We all have a tendency to ignore what we don’t want to see. I met a girl sometime back, and instantly fell for her. She looked like everything I wanted in my miss right, except for a few tweaks here and there. She was a light skinned dame in her late teens, dark hair, slim, but had the right curves in all the right places. Her eyes were another story entirely, a special kind of light brown. I got lost in not just their beauty, but the soft yet stern look that pierced through my soul. She had slim tall legs that had a slight bow to them, so that she walked with a level of grace and elegance, I had never seen on anyone else. Yes I had the courage to talk to her, and realizing she had a few things in common with me was the last straw, and all I could see was my miss right nothing else, even when she told me not to think so highly of her because she might disappoint me, all I could hear was the sweetness in her voice. Even when, I knew, I was the only one who felt the way I was feeling, and she didn’t feel anything remotely close to what I felt for her, for me, I just couldn’t see anything else, all I wanted to see was my miss right and I was satisfied. I ignored what her absence of response, was doing to me, even when my friends told me I was losing myself. A female friend of mine went as far as telling me to my face, that the reason I held on to her was because I couldn’t bring myself to see a truth that was right in front of me. But those weren’t enough to deter me, I ignored them all.

What’s my point here? . . . I saw only what I wanted to see, what I needed to see, and was too scared to see what I really was supposed to be looking at. I was too scared to loose what I had only just gotten, a person I had never met in my life and was convinced I would never ever meet again. I was terrified beyond explanation of seeing the truth, so I held on to a lie, to the reality that was only a fantasy in my head. I ignored everything and everyone around my perfect subject, thus preventing myself from seeing better.

A camera can provide an intact, complete and unbiased visual account for later reflection. Looking back I wish my eyes and head were a great camera body coupled with an awesome lens, then maybe just maybe I would have seen every single thing in my line of site and captured them no matter how unfocused they might have been. Never accept anything for what it appears to be, dare to see it for what it could be. We all have the potential to see, I mean to really see, all we need to do is become more aware of our surroundings, and everything around us. So never ever think you’ve seen, when you have merely looked.

LATE BLOOMER

Romantic movies are a marvel, usually I can’t stand them, they make me feel more emotions than I would like to, but isn’t that what most movies make you feel. while watching the 2016 film ‘late bloomer’, a comedic and somewhat romantic, film, centered around a character who was unable to enjoy the pleasures of sex well into his late twenties, in fact he did not go through any form of puberty till he was 30 . that wasn’t what fascinated me though, yes the movie was funny, but what got to me, were my actions while watching it, most especially that fact that I smiled when the main male character finally kissed his princess.

Why did I smile? I knew how the movie was going to end, I knew what was going to happen, but I still watched it anyway and enjoyed it. i meditated on why I watch romantic movies even though I know the guy and the girl are going to end up together. why do I still sit on my couch, lie down on my bed and blush when I see them doing something cute, think about that girl I have a crush on and how I wish I could share what these characters have with her, pull my pillow close and hug it tight as a drop of stray tears finds its way down my face and get irked when one or both of them acts stupid even though I know the end is the usual cliché end for most romantic movies.

These questions keep ravaging my mind, given room to no other notion. Could it be because, I want to see the ups and downs they go through to achieve their goal to be with the one they love. Could it be because somehow they remind me of who I am or what I might have gone through? Maybe, it gives me an idea of what I want my amorous life to be like, how I want to meet the so called ‘one’ or just get lost in the fantasy of  the possibility of true love, one that my reality has denied me.

It might even be to prove to myself without a doubt that that girl I have my eyes on, is most definitely the right one even though every neuron in my body is saying no.

With so many feasibility, I kept wondering, pondering and racking my brain, for a particular logical basis, but all I got were more odds. But it is love, it’s the feeling of mystery, excitement and remoteness from everyday life, what else could I have envisioned.

Finally came to a conclusion, does it really matter why I  watch it, as long as it makes me feel something, something good, exciting, a feeling of bliss, ecstasy, elation, jubilation, joy, anger, euphoria, sadness. Wouldn’t that be the vital part? Its ability to make me feel? On these note I choose to see myself as a late bloomer and at my own preordained and perfect time, I will most certainly bloom. I guess that’s why I smiled, I felt some level of hope that I to, i’m going to tell my own romantic story someday.

 

I CAN BE HAPPY ALL ON MY OWN

​“I am always happy” a friend of mine keeps telling me. Truth be told, I have never actually seen her frown, except in rare moments when my stupidity is at its peak, or I do something she disapproves of. Of course I am not the only person in her life, so there are bound to be other things that make her frown, however whenever she is with me, she is always smiling. So I couldn’t hide the smirk when I asked, “apart from me, what makes you smile?”

 “I don’t know” she replied. Outrageous right! Honestly a simple, my friends, my family or even my boyfriend would have sufficed. Though the latter would have stung a great deal, because I have worked very hard to ensure no other holds that title. Selfish huh? I know.  That would have been an interesting story. 

I was offended by her answer even though it was mere curiosity that sprung the question.  Her answer only succeeded in fueling my curiosity, but I knew better than to push for a better answer, so I let it slide. My mind though, could not entertain the idea of letting it slide, so it obsessively pondered on her answer, “I don’t know.” 

“I can be happy all on my own,” is a mantra that popped into my mind, I can’t get myself to believe it though. In our own words we are all loners. We crave any chance to re-assert the bundle of happiness we find within but the more I think about it, the more strongly I believe that that’s a load of crap. Pardon my candor.

Can I really say I find happiness in my job? Or wads of money and freedom. Will a library of books really lift my spirits? Ask yourself, can we truly achieve true lasting happiness from these things? I can’t speak for you but personally I cannot. I doubt anybody does. I think of these pleasures of life as merely pieces of a jigsaw which has no formula. So at the end of the day they just form part of the puzzle and thus are incapable of completing it.

Look at it this way people revolve around people. Comedians are out there making millions by recounting anecdotes of interactions and not solitude. Think back to your fondest memories and you will find that they involve people in the form of friends, family or even strangers. I don’t ignore the fact that as the economy of trust debilitates we in turn want to bank on things that cannot fail, but in doing so we satisfy our joy-wells temporarily. For me when push comes to shove I always fall back to God, friends and family just to have a taste of true joy, true happiness.
Now I know I might sound like I’m selling, a fact that says ‘to achieve true joy, true happiness, you need people,’ well I could have totally sold that fact before, but now, I’m not so sure it’s a fact anymore, not after pondering on her answer – I don’t know. It took me some time but I finally figured out the true meaning behind her answer. I realized that she truly might just not know why she is always happy. A place I would love to be. Or she simply couldn’t express her thoughts on the source of her happiness in terms, I or anybody else would understand. 

As annoying as the answer might sound, I believe it’s a very accurate one for the question posed. We cannot quantify how much of something will bring us happiness. We have come to a point in our lives where we believe we need certain things and people to be happy. While this belief might hold truth, it cannot be the most appropriate way to approach our search for happiness. It would mean that whenever this things or people fail to show up neither will your happiness. That is not fair.

 This brings me to what I’ve been trying to say, we cannot afford to live a life where our happiness depends on things or people that are not always going to be there. We need to learn to lead a life where we are able to be happy no matter what, I mean happiness that still exists whether or not we are around people, in possession of the things that make us the most happy in this world or doing things that make us feel elated.

So all things considered that was why she said she didn’t know, because she couldn’t pick a specific factor in her life that held sole precedence over her happiness and that is something I believe we should all aspire for no matter how hard it might seem. I don’t know about you but that’s the kind of happiness or joy I want to feel.