Into the Cold Darkness

I should be writing. I should be writing and I should be doing laundry. I should be paying my bills, and cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming. Thank god for spell check, because I can't spell vacuuming, I'll admit it right now. I should be printing my story for tonight's writing group. I should be filing the stack of insurance forms that came in the mail yesterday. I should be laughing and feeling good.

I'm tired, and not because I stayed up late, although I did do that last night. I'm weary, but not because I woke up early. I'm lost, and it's not because I don't know what I need to be doing, but because I don't know what to do. I sleep, I wake, I shiver in the cold that is my skin, I cry. Repeat.

I got an email today from PostSecret. If you aren't familiar with PostSecret it's a program started by a man, I won't bother to look up his name, where he encouraged people to create postcards and write secrets that they have never told anyone, that are true, and mail them anonymously to him. He then gathered them and published them into a book. I think he has four or five books out now. Fascinating idea if you think about it, he's getting rich off of other's desperate hope to be heard.

Anyway, I thought about that, all those secrets, flowing out there through the mail, like tiny bubbles trying to raise up to heaven to be heard, messages in bottles fighting against the waves to find a shore and an eye, and a heart to understand them. Do we all desperately want to let someone know what's in those deep dark places inside of us? Yes, I think we do. So what happens when you find someone who listens, and embraces you, and reads all your secrets, catches all your bubbles, gathers all your bottles? It's euphoria, right?

Yes, it can be. You tear down the walls, you break down the doors, you rip apart the bars and bare the deepest parts of your soul that surprise even yourself. You say the things you've never allowed to be uttered outside your own mind. You let your true ugliness show, and in the process show the beauty you hide from the rest of the world as well. You are real, 3-D, fully technicolor and brilliant. You are naked and raw standing before this beautiful guardian of your secrets, and place the keys trustingly into their hands. It's wonderful, right?

It can be. In theory I suppose. You know there was a theory once that to lay eyes upon God would be more than a mere mortal could experience and they would be destroyed from the sheer overwhelming nature of what they are trying to behold. Maybe that's true about bearing your soul and all of your secrets also. Maybe that is just more honesty and truth and rawness than can be shared and understood, and doomed to self destruction. Maybe it's like that theoretical first brief glimpse of God, where it feels incredible and wonderful and you cannot believe you are the lucky soul to be given this gift and you open up so you can fully embrace the glory of what's before you and then you are just ripped apart, tissue by tissue, molecule by molecule and all there is is a searing non ending pain and you can't figure out what you did wrong but somehow you have broken a universal law of nature and now you are being punished for it. It's too late to tear free, it's too late to undo what you have done, and so you are ravaged with soul rendering agony until the final remains slam shut, and everything goes cold, and dark, and empty, and all that remains that can be felt at all is the echoing residue of that all encompassing pain.

Maybe it's better to release one tiny secret, one dim shadow from the dark places on our souls, into the universe to be washed upon a welcome shore or be lost at sea. Maybe that is all we are allowed, tiny moments, random and uncertain, released to the wind. Maybe to want more is to beg for disaster. I don't know.

I should pay my bills. I should fold my laundry. I should print my story. I should eat something, I haven't eaten all day. But I won't, because the cold is getting to me again. So I'll curl up again, and I'll shut my eyes against the light I can see but no longer feel, and I'll pull that darkness over me and pray to escape. Until I wake again.