Midnight Walks

And taking midnight walks calms down the thoughts in your head, stirring and screaming as always; calms them down if only for a while. It smells of fallen leaves, smells of long days outdoors, smells of an innocence that went lost a long time ago. And you aim your old sneaker shoe at the piles of leaves and for a moment you remember what it was like, remember when the little things used to mean everything.
When the little things used to mean the world.
Nowadays it's dark when you are out, and you wander your routes to distract yourself from the feeling that the walls are closing in on you, that you will suffocate if you stay but a minute longer in this room. Nowadays you look up at the stars and you don't imagine space travel or different worlds with different life than here, you look up at the stars and you feel that you are meaningless. How everything is meaningless. Where in the picture does the little things come in? How can little things be meaningful? You gave meaning to all the details so you wouldn't have to look at the whole picture, where nothing mattered and where your entire life was molded by chance. How does that feel? Can you feel that knife of cold stabbing through your heart?
It smells like childhood, it smells like October, it's not yet full moon but you can see the brightest star of the sky and maybe, if you really tried, you could imagine it with orbits of planets surrounding it, planets and places and worlds where things were different from here, where maybe there were people who didn't fuck everything up, where maybe things were pretty much like here but at the same time pretty much fucking different. Even so, what would it matter when we'd never know of that world, never know of those places, and even if they existed they would mainly be a creation of your own mind, in order to tell yourself there are other worlds than these. Better worlds than these.
Maybe then you wouldn't find yourself where you don't want to be, maybe then you wouldn't get hurt, maybe then you wouldn't let yourself be used, maybe then you wouldn't be so decadent, maybe if there was a hope for something else, someplace else, someone else, then maybe.
Then maybe what?
There'll always be another maybe, another what-if, another if-only; and you'll keep backtracking your life without ever moving forward and you'll be scared of dying though you're aware you can't affect it. And every night you'll be sleepless, and every other night you'll go for another one of those walks, and every now and then you'll feel like the little things actually matter while other times it'll all be meaningless. And you will change like the seasons of the year, and still you'll always stay the same; cause everything you could never predict will make changes that never seem apparent to you while all the changes you wanted to make will be left alone and you'll swirl further down the spiral of decay, the spiral of decadence, the spiral of youth. One time things won't matter, two time things won't matter, you'll tell yourself you're only in it for the sex while all you wanted was to fall asleep in someone's arms without any demands. You'll tell yourself you only drink because you want to socialize and then you'll be looking at the stars alone over an emptied bottle of wine and you'll wonder why there's salt on your cheeks and why someone wiped the smile off your face. You'll quit smoking a thousand times and then still light one more up when you're standing on the balcony and trying to see if anyone else is awake, if anyone else is up at this hour, just so you could see a sign of life, just so you could feel you weren't the only one who couldn't sleep because you were fucking paranoid.
Does it still smell like childhood?
Does it still smell like long days outdoors building tree houses and drinking warm cocoa when you came back in?
Does it still smell like when you used to play in the woods and for once you could be who you wanted to be, you could forget about the bullies in school and that they teased you because you happened to like books; you could make yourself a makebelieve world and you could be anyone at all, anyone you wanted?
The thoughts in your head are calmed down if only for a while, and then they stir again; and then they scream to you louder than they ever did and speak to you in voices from your past. And you wonder if there was ever any innocence, even as you were young, even as you remember that time you fell down from the cliff in the forest and you fell down onto the sharp rocks below and the fall felt eternal and when you lay there you lost your breath and you saw stars, not the kind of stars you'd see in the sky but red and green stars dancing before your eyes, and everything seems to become darker even though it's in the bright of day, and you have no thoughts or feelings, just a numbness spreading through your body before it hits you that you were lucky, I'll be damned, you were lucky. And you're not bleeding, although tomorrow you will find bruises all over your body and feel like you had been pulled back from something close to death, something close to dying; words you'd never use to describe it then but that suddenly seem real and fucking true now that you think about it.
And you take midnight walks to shake it off, every bad decision you ever made, everyone who fucked with your head and everyone who broke through to you; everytime you took pills, everytime you took out the needle, everytime you ripped the skin off your lips until they bled, everytime you imagined you were happy while you knew you weren't, every time, every time, every time.
You take midnight walks and at least now it's in another place and at least this time there's someone to walk with you and at least this time you don't feel quite as lonely.
At least until the walls close in on you again.
POET IN THE JAR