Gethsemane

Quiet sinks into your bones: a season of gluttony and consumption spreads out around the dirty tenement apartment above a busy bodega. We play jingly music and comforting movies, discover hidden dumpling spots and unknown breakfast quirks; the devastating cold takes a break and I ran to the end of the island at twilight without losing my breath, the city is a gift all of its own, wrapped in sunlight and promise. My roommate asks for rent money and I see again the waste of my life's potential, the gilded security nets of my contemporaries fortifying around me. Today I sat with an old, worn copy of a revered book, and remembered a teenage self so enraptured with its twisted, sharp wordplay that it changed her own words for years. It seems a selfish pursuit, this, spending all one's time on creative rollercoasters, hanging on for just a morsel of something pleasing, when one could be out saving the world or similar, building up that savings account or enrolling in the society approved rat race, but here's the thing: we live entire lives on hope alone, because if one day we could string together enough words that meant something, there's a chance they could make a bigger difference than you ever could in that 9-5, however comfortable, however good it made your parents feel. Sometimes I wonder if Jesus was just a mortal hippie, whose parents shook their head that he refused to live in the box, when he was simply trying to find a better way to spend what little time we have in life. Religion sprouts when we refuse our insignificance.

let them hate me, hit me, hurt me, 
nail me to that tree

My money runs low, disappointment high, this isn't the life society would ask me to live. But if I do not write, I waste away. And what is fifty, sixty years of emptiness, to even just a flash of fulfillment?

I return to the word processor. Whisper my gratitude to the blinking cursor. Remember again (again, again) why I came, and
more importantly,
why I stayed.