It is bad enough to breed promises to those we love, who fall to their knees in city bus stations, beg us not to follow fanciful, flighty paths. Those who love us more deeply than we anticipate, or can replicate, and realize only when this draws blood from our hearts.
Breaking promises to ourselves, however, cuts somewhat deeper. I see it in my own actions, in the steps that carry me east, that blow back in my face the most unforgivable fact of all: all that I want, that warms the smallest, truest part of me, lies parallel to my past. It is not a replication, but only slightly altered, by circumstance, by time, a new regression to what I find innate or learned. Am I re-learning the smallest of steps, to walk again in a manner much more true to myself, to allow in, perhaps, in whole and unforgiving ways? To stop wagering on possibilities, stop turning my back to not a blank but dirtied blanket of honesty? These moments still breathe fiercely inside of me, wake me in a manner akin to the ache in my arm, burrow themselves, icy--engendering a splintered, spent warmth. They seem to me insurmountable, to want to come back to me no matter how I try to put them out, to write them out, to reach out to other aspects of myself. I am still stuck on understanding how I have lied so fiercely to myself, how I have wounded, how I have waded so deeply in hipocrasy.
My excuse has been sorrow, has replaced other excuses with a force un natural to my times. It is sorrow, or the emotive, however, that I have past played upon, embraced with my bitten tongue and bred into my fingers so that I could write. It is my only inhuman love, or unliving love. It is the only art that brings tears to my eyes, that breaks open the parts of me I need most. And it is in this crashing of waves, waves of longing, lust, unearthing a past of pasts. It is where I find stregnth, an unstrategic path to soft redemption.
I can write about forgiving, even when I cannot forgive; can write about a past of pigeons and love, even when I cannot look upon the photographs that brought me there; I can write about my father, create my own manifestations of his ghost. But still I seek to trump such possibility, afraid perhaps of a Russian doll effect, a wound, inside a wound, inside a wound. Or a need to live through stories, not truths, to build my life upon the canine teeth of fairytales, from the outset smeared with beauty, but so fast to fade away.