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Journal Entry: Thoughts, September 19, 2017

gotham, and all those toilets [CC0, billie grace ward]

I’m sitting on the toilet in my Manhattan apartment. This alone is a significant life achievement relative to my modest origin, that I’ve been sitting on toilets in Manhattan for 12 years and in relatively nice apartments should speak very well of my accomplishments as someone who advanced beyond the circumstances of my beginning.  And yet I look ahead to lives I may never lead, indeed that this one may come to an end sooner than I expected is a curious but welcome reflection on Billie of now.

I count among those who know me very wealthy people, very famous people, very accomplished academics, very powerful people. And they know me not as a nuisance but as a source of light. At least that’s how I believe they know me, though perhaps their opinions differ in some way but most likely not as a negative influence.

And yet I am not satisfied, nor able to relax or rest. The ladder vanishes upward into the distance and compels more, more.

What is life then but an endless climb without respite, ending not in rewards but nothingness?  I do not believe in gods but I do want more from existence than some number of decades followed by oblivion. I curse the unknowable space between my ego and the future beyond my lifetime.

Spirituality is a salve derived from knots in our mind’s reasoning.  When I close my eyes there is darkness, when I quiet the inner voice there is silence.

Journal Entry: March 1st, 2015

The trains that run through this passage pass now two destinations of emotional import. One of great loss, and one of great promise. Both are far from home, relative to a New Yorker’s pedestrian sense of distance. The superposition of my heart, both light with infatuation and heavy with trepidation, marked the scene with an indelible emotional impression.

“I woke up in the Ditmas Park neighborhood this morning feeling at once fear and excitement and longing. A night of intense chemistry gives way to the sun and the call of our separate lives. And yet I tried to hold them back until we could not.” – March 1st, 2015