dear kaltia

dear kaltia,

when will we have time to sit down and write again? i keep asking myself this: what ever happened to time? it's like all the writing i've ever done has become like a sketch, an outline, and there will never be opportunity again to draw its harder lines, to work on its forms, to color it. i should give up the essays, and just turn all the unconnected dots into fiction for now.

when was it last that i had the chance to notice the people around me? it all seems like they are winning this war when my spirit is absent and there is nothing to be done about the machinery of delegation and representation that possessing me, taking me over, making me do instead of breath, making me accomplish instead of remember.

i miss your company deeply. i miss your ability to listen. i miss how you would always turn things upside down, and show me — not try to convince me, just show me — that it's possible to live uncompromisingly and also happy about being alive. you had this totally different flavor of rebellion, as if they just couldn't get into your head.

yesterday someone told me i had an “us versus them” mentality. they called me psychotic and said i have to come back to reality and just try to strike the middle-ground.

i couldn't stop thinking about you ever since that exchange, it's like you forever imprinted in my mind how misguided this common sense is. i wonder what made you break from it, but from what you told me, there's no going back. it gets deeply ingrained in you. you become forever questioning, and that bothers some people who can't appreciate thinking, but what they accomplish in their acquiescence is just to uphold whatever is already set up: production, consumerism, miserable relationships. in truth, they step on the shoulders and the heads of lots of people who will never get to sit across a shrink and listen to their pathologist, self-righteous gaslighting.

family, church, psychs — all gaslighters of the state, you told me. i asked you “where do you learn this stuff?” and you replied “in self defense”.

you see, this is why i miss you. you never felt my words as “rebellious”. you never felt them as “too radical”, or worse, you never felt embarrassed and never shamed me when you listened to them. you either celebrated it or took it even farther. living in rebellion was natural to you, and your absence makes my daily life empty of that.

why do they see affection, care, feelings, always as demonstrations of sexual intent? always as demonstrations of a possessive, hungry-ghost-like feeling? it confuses me deeply, as if i had to contain my feelings. then they proceed to call you cold, distant, removed. the result of this double denial is anger. i feel anger that no measure of my feelings is ever valid.

this anger is pointless, even if acknowledged and validated, it just eats me up. it's all about who is around me, and how able they are to truly listen and give weight to my words without saying i'm trying to be special for it. those days when we could sit and talk were deeply nurturing to me, and to build such a possibility again requires me to transmute this anger.

kaltia, this is how they try to break us. by abandoning us in doubt. convincing us that you can't think against the machine and get it to spill food and coins at the same time.

i was told i'm crazy, but what do they know about that word? aren't all artists talking to themselves in some way? talking to a canvas, a block of wood, a page, to nothingness, to the sacred, to the wilderness... kaltia, my heart goes to you, wherever you are. i hope you are still coming back to check these at the old shed.

wishing you were here, wishing you are somewhere nice,

y. n. g.