On Giving Up

Or letting go. Or whatever.

I used to speak. A lot.

I’d tell all sorts of people all sorts of things.

My history. My life. My stories. My lies. My. My. My.

(My.)

But I have no story.

I have memories, sure. All sorts.

Heroics, tragedies, all sorts of comedy contrived through bias-eyes and a once hardening heart.

Once, I told “my story” to a dear friend and mentor. It took a lot of time and many words. Too many words.

“That’s quite the tragic tale of woe you must live up to the rest of your days,” he told me.

Well I have no tale to tell. No bone to pick. Maybe those things happened. I can remember them, if I try. Sometimes those things are the more remembered when I don’t try.

Well, I don’t try — or not try — anymore. And I release my grasp on all that was never mine to hold onto so tightly. Well, I loosen my grasp…

…I once wanted to write a book about it all, the stuff I remembered. I even started writing that book. Really, I felt I had to do that thing. And I was sure, somewhere deep, that it would be some huge glory — to match the endeavor it was to live through and also to have survived it all. I don’t know whose want that was. I don’t know much… No — I don’t know anything. That much I know.

I have a self, but I am not that self, and I am not the concerns that did or didn’t occur; the personality’s tastes, likes, dislikes, loves, the grief, or the grievance. More, maybe… but it feels like less: lighter, alone not so lonesome, here now — not there, not then. Here, at the intersection of past and future, nexus which is the only real thing at all, right now, right here, right now.

Here, right? Right now..? What is wrong right now? What is wrong with right now?

Today I read a letter addressed “Future Ryan,”. Written in a prison cell, I can hardly recall writing it. Must have been some other Me. Another time. Another place. Another Ryan.

I’m still writing a book, I guess. But it isn’t about me. Well, it isn’t about what happened to me or what I happened upon others. If anything can be said to have happened to anyone at all, ever. The illusion of anything but Now existing keeping us in the delusion — anchored, sheltered — prisoner, harbored. Safe, sort of… like a ship without a sea.

I don’t know what it’s about, this still-book. It hasn’t quite told me. And I’ve received no letters addressed “Past Ryan,”. But it’s alive, somewhere in the ether, our collective consciousness or whatever. It breathes a bit sometimes, and on some days it rouses me up and out of my self, the times when I am doing and thinking and not being, not present in the moment-reality, the present. How much presence is missed by not being present. How few presents go gifted.

If time doesn’t exist outside the human organ’s surety that it is so, maybe the fear is we won’t either. Won’t exist. But who hasn’t wanted to not exist? Not to die… Just simply not exist? What could be more divine? This has to be heaven.

We’ll go on creating pasts and futures and living in and for one or the other. Maybe if every beating-heart-having human alive were to come forward into the Now, even if only for a breath, we’d be able to see what senses cannot: this is heaven. It has to be.

And we are missing it, writing our very own and personal Hell into existence. I guess we are creators, co-creating with —

Maybe the book this one writes will be about how he once wanted to write a book but then changed his mind, and decided to live his life instead. I hope you’re in it.

However it shakes, I’ll be here. Right here, right now. I always will be. And I’ll see you when you get here. If you want.

requiem:

I used to think the only way anyone could love me would be if I was dead. Well, this isn’t a suicide note. Quite the opposite. But what is the opposite of suicide?

If suicide is one’s choosing to die and making it so, what is it called when one chooses to live and then does? There is no single word that describes such… How amazing that we haven’t come up with one.

Maybe we can do that. You and me. Will you help me do this thing? I need to know. I need… I need…

You. It is You I need, dear reader. We won’t be whole, not if even one single spirit isn’t here and part of the whole. Only holy if we are whole. Holy. Hole. Hollow. Sole.

Soul.