Second to second best.

Browsing through anxious faces; their eyes frantically scanning ink-stained sheets to prove their overpowering success or disastrous failure, one easily forgets that they too belong among that sea of hope. And then suddenly, before you’ve had a chance to digest, there it is staring you in the face – elation. One very easily forgets the ales they carry buried in their own heart when joy slices through the air of dread so easily, so sharply… However, contrary to popular misconception, this is called denial not selflessness.

Looking back through my life, I fail to pinpoint a singular instance in which I wasn’t petrified of letting someone down. Tired of searching the vacant eyes of many whom I idolized for a reassuring acknowledgement of well doing, I eventually became my own worst critic. That, however, isn’t altogether true. One may even suggest that the entire concept of ‘my own worst critic’ is simply a defense mechanism; to alienate yourself from the reality of notorious judgment that will inevitably follow you throughout your ‘knowing’ life [I refrain from using the term ‘adult’ as that signifies somehow that adolescents or youths experience little or none of the aforementioned ‘judgment’, which I recognize to be highly untrue if not, sadistically dismissive!] The reality is, the opinion of those you love will haunt you most of your living life – I should imagine even thereafter but that so far remains an inexperienced terrain…

Anyhow, failure is inevitable. Life, like tennis, serves up so many matches or games that we are obligated to play that it becomes impossible to always win; or as the pessimist bluntly puts it, to disgracefully lose/be beaten/FAIL! The infamous horse analogy has plagued the minds of many determined, strong-willed individuals; ‘get up again!’ their subconscious screams – even if the fall fractured the spinal chord and you’re lying there paralyzed… such, however, is the nature of the human mechanism. ‘Paralysis or not, I WILL mount black beauty again’… I had that tale on my bookshelf when I was young. The illustration on the front cover was beautiful; a stunning, black stallion; muscular and forthright, with a wild yet altogether tentative look in his eyes. His mane was pictured swaying in the wind that one could only imagine how he ripped through the skies; the air parting in fear of his obvious determination to overpower. The clear blue sky above him was tantalizing; it served as a reminder that I could have anything I ever wanted, just like black beauty – as long as I worked at it with fearlessness, ambition and desire. Black beauty never came with a manual for life, however. There was no chapter entitled ‘circumstance and how it may throttle your will completely’!

Still, circumstance serves as a reminder that experience can never really be wholly relied upon. How often we fall and how terribly every fractured bone and muscle of pride aches… Stripped of the bravado confidence so convincingly aligns across your invisible armor, it’s either fight or fall. Which do you choose?

Nothingness

There is nothing at all so grand about nothingness; nothing quaint, chic or even remotely liberating.Vacuums exist to be filled, supposedly. Though we appear to relish so marvelously in emptiness sometimes.

There is nothing in so much…

The train door opens and a complete stranger appears; suddenly there is somebody, anybody – right there. He is nameless, unrecognizable, and incomprehensible and yet, I know him. He becomes an extension of me; my thoughts, my emotions, my vision and perception of the day; the time, fate, the redness of the central line, the angle of the sunlight as it hits his unknown yet altogether familiar face…

I lift my eyes, ever so gently – as if my face were made of porcelain, my eyelashes; flickers of cloud. I peer into his nameless palette. ‘Hello’…. I spell the word before my eyes…Hello. I part my lips, the word does not form and it cannot form. A blink. His face evaporates –

He is no one, nothing at all – yet, as the doors of this rocket ship shoot open, I turn back. Do I expect to bid him farewell? Maybe. I dare not defy convention.

Defeated, I walk away from the waiting doors; exasperated in their pursuit to unite me and the no-named someone. I peer through the dying concrete of the crumbling station; am I so easily sold the fictional reality of x-ray vision? Light shoots past my eyes and when I regain focus, I am left with the train track imprints – on my nothingness.

Isn’t that just what nothing is…?

Nothing is the first gush of air that hits my artificially concealed face like a million tiny bullets; mercilessly ripping away the material flesh to conquer buried vulnerability as I gently protrude my head from the giant hole in my wall – sunrise.

Nothing is the poised, arrogant seduction of jazz at unforeseeable hours – the caress of sounds all too familiar, which taunt indecision and cackle boisterously at the word ‘cultured’.

Nothing is the arch of tiptoed feet on cold, uninviting marble as the mind seeks nourishment in the undefeatable darkness of the schizophrenic kitchen.

Nothing is in the uninhibited, formless sway of the candle flame that caresses the warm midnight air, illuminating empty eyes in golden brown and orange – speaking poetry in the form of dream, aspiration, endless opportunity…

Nothing is mine and everything I want it to be.