sisyphus

Transitory, I come ironically to it again,

this theme.

Always on the way to someplace else, never who I was nor who I’ll be,

there is no such thing as me.

Struggle against the weight of this thin air,

look in the mirror and try and name the person looking back.

Emily. A million of them, if you turn the mirror back on itself,

if you open the phone book.

I understand now, Stillman. That words are not enough. Emily

is not an accurate descriptor. There is not a word for me as I am.

There is not a word for anyone.

I go to the library. I read until the hunger makes the words twitch on the page. I don’t want to come back, so I try and push past my stomach. But I turn to the next chapter and realize the last is blank in my mind. This is useless.

Pack up. Put on coats and coats. Pop in music. Walk. Zone. Arrive home, fingers burning. Climb to the third floor and set down everything that weighs anything. Tremble back to the first floor. Prepare food and ascend again. Consume.

Sit still for a few seconds. The clouds move. Huh.

Lethargy beckons. You remember this. The bored dark. The gentle ache. The inability to think let alone function. Stare at the wallpaper. The pattern doesn’t make sense. This yellow wallpaper that you will rip from the wall and wrap about you like a cloak when you finally go crazy. Or have you done that already?

This song has played before, from Before. It doesn’t make sense. Go for the moon. Go for the moon.

This is familiar. And so tempting to return. It alone understands that there are no words. It alone is cold and comforting because it takes the words away. God, it was horrible, you remember that, but it felt so much easier than this uphill happiness. I am Sisyphus, and why don’t we just stop? The rock is not going to make it up.

Full circle, like the Norse. I am Ymir, hacked to pieces, and the world will drown in our blood. The World Tree will bear the weight until it rots, until Ragnarök breaks it into kindling and Sutr comes to fan the flames. The pain is not in the destruction, it’s in the coming back to life. Doomed to come full circle. Like the Norse.

They had to fit themselves in history. They had to make room for Odin somewhere next to Jesus. Too many gods in the kitchen, so someone’s gotta go, some history has to be rewritten. Where am I, the non-denominational, in the pantheon? What songs are mine? Hymns or screams or whispers? They’re all the same, I think, in the end. We all ask. We all receive. Sometimes it makes sense.

A million books. Five million?

Let’s burn them all and see if we can make it on our own,

let’s see if we can come up with one insight,

one original thought. Let’s see what we can do without our authors

holding our hands.

And then there’s this: if the book is burned, does the truth remain?

Do we need the book? Are we really all divine?

If not, then the books aren’t going to help anyway.

This is why we write things in our skin. The words can’t be burned away

without burning away ourselves. Higher than a marriage vow,

these pictures set in flesh. You cannot divorce your own skin.

Selfish, that’s the word for this. Yeah, I know. I am not unaware.

But when the circle comes back to Hel, I feel the distance

up to Asgard.

And it is simply too far to even consider a return journey.

Hel’s hall is rank, but it is here

and I am tired.

And this all starts again, at the end,

the beginning,

because I’m not who I was nor who I’ve yet to be,

because there is no me,

no word for just one Emily.