luckylocit

[luckylocit]

A Pedestal For Your Lonely Heart

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A lonely heart can drag everything in the dust with it. Stop trampling on it! Stop stumbling over it. Lift it up, put it out of the way.

There: place it on this pedestal. In this little alcove in the brightest lit wall of the nicest living room of your mind. Walk by it every day, greet it, give it something nice to toy with, a biscuit to nibble on, a bouquet to sniff.

When it starts to whine and sob, don’t distract it with screentime, meaningless chatter, or booze. Instead, sit a little while with it, dab at its tears with the softest handkerchief, and the softest touch. Give your lonely heart a pen and a sense of wonder: let it learn what’s good and beautiful, perched high on this clean, sunlit pedestal, seen and cherished by yourself first and foremost.

Give it a name. Make it your friend. It’s your one and only heart.

[luckylocit]

Dear massaging foam rollers,

I had been writing for 3 hours about how I don't like the principle of you.

Then Tumblr did a whole white page on me.

I had not saved, and this place doesn't offer automatic saves.

Right now I'm madder are Tumblr than at foam rollers.

[luckylocit]

Dear anybody,

Paris, 2021.10.19

I am told that I write well. Personally I think my writing tends to become so fanciful that it sounds pathetic, pompous, and bloated, but you tell me.

I've had this computer for nearly 4 years now. I had originally bought it to make videos, to vlog and talk about... myself, I suppose. My thoughts, beliefs, experiences. Random stuff. To leave a mark, probably—against every certainty I hold of the ultimate futility of leaving a legacy. Well, maybe true to my deep-seated nihilism, I haven't produced any video worth having a computer for. (I might be using the word "nihilism" wrong, but I don't care to check at this moment)

I had forgotten about this blog. This repository of letters posted to the great void. I might as well have written in my paper diary. The echo from the past would be the same upon re-reading. What really is alarming is how little I have changed since then. Some circumstances have, but ultimately I grapple with the same questions and dread.

I wanted to document my life, but it is both so slow and so fast—and so empty—that really, making videos of it wouldn't have helped a lot. Or would it? A diary produces echoes within, it's a discussion with the self. A video on the world-wide web may produce echoes of a different kind. Maybe I would have realized that my life is worth telling about, if it impacted the lives of others, and drew an echo from them.

One concept I have relied on for my recovery from depression and loneliness and meaninglessness and purposelessness... is that All life is valid. By which I mean that no matter how small, damaged, uneducated, immature, or limited one life might be, it is never truly worthless. A child dying before its time did not live or die in vain. Same applies to a victim of abuse, a perpetrator of abuse, or the billions of people living in the normality of mediocrity. We're all part of the tapestry. The tapestry itself may be meaningless and limited, bound to decay and be forgotten; but the threads that make it, the colors, the patterns... there is none that doesn't belong in there. A human will understandably wish for all that's evil to simply vanish, but it wouldn't understand what it calls "evil", and what the disappearance of the thing it calls "evil" would really mean. A human will wish that people would not be so ignorant, that they would understand the world the way it does, and stuck in this righteousness the human would fail to see that every other human is just as sure—and just as insecure—of their worldview as it is.

What I mean is: in all this mess which I abhor, I belong. I may feel like an alien, I may want to escape; to find an oasis that was overlooked, left untouched, yet is hospitable; to retreat into a world of my own... but I would be missing the point. I belong everywhere that my life can be sustained. The cocoon does not tap into the full palette of me, the way that adversity would. In a way, I belong less in peace and comfort than in strife and struggle. Or maybe I belong in a pendulum movement between the two. Life is more bearable when you have a home to come back to, and to escape from again. The thread goes in and out, in and out, in and out. If it's too much on one side, then it becomes liable to catching onto something, and snapping. We don't want to snap before the thread has been used up, do we?

*

The past year and more, I have woven myself in and out, in and out. I dabble in this and that, straightening out some bad habits, paying attention to when I need to retreat, and when I itch to put myself out there. The attempts are still timid and unsustained. I have trouble getting out of myself.

I write well enough. I draw well enough. I am crafty and intelligent enough. I present well enough. I even sing well enough. I should be able to do something with all this. I am no worse than any other being here. No less worthy. I should just be less scared. Why am I still so scared?

One thing at a time. I have learned to do the dishes regularly, at last. It'd be fine if I died, even having just learned to do that.

Not really no.

If ambition and greed belong in this hellhole, then I want to embrace my share of them. I want to be alive again.

[luckylocit]

Dear mom,

You left me so many things, and precious few memories—most of which aren’t very good, hence why I am not too sorry that you’re gone. For all your faults, you were a mother all the same: you fed me, put me through school, supported and protected me in the ways that you could. What an ungrateful daughter you have! How should we reconcile, now that you’re gone? Your urn, presiding in the corridor, doesn’t bring any closure: though I wanted things to be different between us, they couldn’t be. Now that your path doesn’t wind with mine anymore, I fumble for the remains of you, of who you were really, and of what mattered truly.

You were a realist. You crushed my childhood fancies very early. I don’t remember believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. I also don’t remember believing in myself. You wanted me to get the best in life, like any mother would, but that meant I should focus on science and money. But your vision was limited and warped, and neither of us was wise enough to figure that out. By the time I left high school, it was clear I was not destined nor prepared for either blessings—and I’ve been lost for the last 15 years. Every opportunity for my own blooming I passed, and came to forget even about what I used to want. An ache like no other took root, dug into my core—it formed a canopy, like a lid over my desires and a shield against the world, and plagues me still with white noise: “I can’t”

Mom, every day is a struggle. I am not even equipped for housekeeping! I need to sort out your things, but every day comes with its load of chores, they pile up faster than I can keep track of. I make lists of tasks, but they are so big or repetitive (I do need to remind myself to do the dishes apparently) that I am exhausted before even tackling their items. A whole year has passed like this since you died. A whole year with things strewn about, barely able to take care of myself.

And I am alone. And I am lonely. Everyone moves on with their life, and the best friend I was clinging to is also drifting away. The help I get from social services does not fill up the hole in my chest, it barely even helps with administrative stuff. The weight is on me. The weight of sorting the trash is on me. The weight of reaching out for help and companionship is on me. Nobody comes to me. And I have learned nothing else than to feel sorry for myself. A stone around my neck wouldn’t drown me any better than this.

I could never talk to you about these things. If you could hear me now, you would say that God would help me, and never take the trouble to sit and listen to me. You were absent long before you were gone. I was a lonely, crippled, useless child all along.

Now I become a ghost. I thought the world and the people around me were becoming immaterial, inconsequent memories; but I was wrong. It’s me. Can anything bring me to life again? When the chores are done, when your things are gone, when I earn my bread like everyone.... will there be something worth living for? Is this what you made me for?

2020.02.02

[luckylocit]

Dear somebody,

Paris, 2019.10.06

When are you reading this? Who are you?

I’m a lonely person in the most beautiful city of the world. The history of Paris spans centuries, though it only became this big and urban in the 20th century. Paris is a collection of villages that were frankensteined into an haussmanian marvel of paved streets and dainty, low rooftops. It’s like the baby reached its prime. Hopefully it might last a bit more—but we know that greater civilizations crumbled to dust millenia past, and I sincerely doubt our current world will be perennial (even without the mention of climate change etc.)

My history feels comparatively short and uneventful. I was born from a French man and an immigrant woman, who made the mistake of making a baby and marrying (in that order, but it was a mistake regardless of order). Their marriage was short-lived, and only recently did I gain a fuller picture of what their life together was like. I do not have memories before my 3rd or 4th year on earth, when I spent 10 months in my mother’s home country. I remember my 5th birthday, during which I cried because I lost a game of musical chairs against 2 other kids; it was in London, I remember the (literal) icing on the cake, and the star-shaped Polly Pocket pendant I was gifted. I noted fairly quickly that I cried during every one of my birthdays, and not of joy. I haven’t entirely lost hope of having one good birthday, but I’m drawing on 30 now and people don’t celebrate your birthday at this age unless you feed them.

Paris has seen almost all my years, and despite that I know it very little. Needless to say there’s probably too much to this city to get to know in a lifetime, but I’m not even there. It’s like we brushed past each other, catching only a glimpse of the color of our apparel, a whiff of our scents—and are too soon forgotten.

I might never have the time or inclination to deepen our bond. External circumstances may bring it to its knees before my own time is up. But just the other day a friend acquiesced in understanding when I said I had reduced my world, out of necessity, for survival. Curiosity and wanderlust bring their own share of desperation, as the endless possibilities and the boundless realm of the unseen taunt the spirit, and drill into the soul the sort of void that no air or light can reach. Most of all, the sensation of not belonging is suffocating. I’ve been given beauty beyond compare, too many options for a single human being, the finest foods within arm’s reach—yet always felt a stranger to it all. And worse, I grew up not knowing where to place myself. Do I belong here? or somewhere else? Do I need to search this place? another place? within me? In what way do I matter?

It is reasonable to say that we don’t matter, but also reasonable to advocate the idea that life has meaning; otherwise nobody would function, right? The mind needs its myths, right? The myth of Reason being the cure-all for human evils is completely bogus however, and I would argue it’s dangerous. It’s another half-baked idea that entirely dismisses the hugest part of human psyche: our emotions, and our irrationality. This myth is dangerous because it tells us we have control: over our choices, our surroundings, that we only need education to see farther and better and clearer. It’s shaped our politics and the way we chide each other. It’s burdened every human under this law with the responsibility of all-encompassing knowledge. “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” is a delicious example of it, though in French it better reads “No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law” (which does introduce its casually distinct bit of nuance, if I may pedantically say so, but would only develop upon explicit request). We’re expected to know, we’re expected to understand and follow. And so we’ve prescribed our entire lives under the diktat of Reason, refused to acknowledge stupidity and ignorance as the norm, painfully struggling against the human condition... and for what?

I don’t know when you are nor where, but from where I stand I’m still one of the lucky ones. Reason was used to the profit of this side mostly, rationally creating unreasonable expectations and desires to be met by rationally-engineered unreasonable pseudo-solutions, all for the sake of our irrational drive to a more comfortable life—because our brains are wired like this and we are entirely subject to our biology. (yes I would argue that morality is only relevant once considered in the framework of subjugation to biological impulses.) And this has begun to lay ruin to our planet; and we’re not stopping; because reasons; because we’re shortsighted and biologically wired like that. I won’t be the first to experience the downfall, it’s actually already begun in less clement parts of the planet. But it will come, and hence I wonder: why try to find a place in here? Why make or build anything?

I’ll close this letter with this interrogation in suspension. Here is the world, here I am. I still enjoy the taste of fresh meat and greens, photos of fine jewellery, and the old ironwork inlaid in buildings and streets. These halcyon days will end, and hopefully I get to enjoy them—though beyond the dusk there might be something for me as well. For us.