Instruction manual

19 Friday Oct 2012

Living only made me think about dying, that’s why I believe human’s true mission in life is to learn to let go.

Yes, you say, we never learn to let go.

Those who seem to be able to let go easier of things and people can’t even learn to let go of their previously-acquired bitterness.

Yes. Those who can let go are called bitter yet they’re only doing what they were told to do.

By whom?

Life.

Life doesn’t tell us anything.

Of course not – it whispers. If life lived amongst us it would learn to scream and the whole world would listen to the painful sound of letting go; after all, not even life itself lets go of it easily.

You fool, you say, there’s nothing wrong with letting go and dealing with loss your own way.

I know.

So how come you’re sitting here telling me that human’s mission in life is to learn to let go?

Because it’s the only thing none of us was ever able to learn.

You know what else? – what?

Irony is life’s instruction manual.

For the soldier I caught watching the birds

14 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by Alice Salles in Dying, Living, True story?

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

camouflage, soldiers, war

They will assume they’re quite aware of what you thought.

Reshape the content and alter the tone without shifting the words. They will use that shot of your weary eyes and mention how fine you looked when you smiled. They will tell your story in a matter-of-factly format and use your rise and fall to illustrate recent statistics. They will cry you a river and give your family two minutes of air time, run a segment on the ever-rising suicide rates and what the president has recently declared regarding such matters but they will never know what you felt like.

They will never imagine how you smiled satisfactorily the day you learned to watch the wind playing with the sand over there, across the oceans and lands you turned up to be. How you learned to use the blend landscapes to enhance the outreach of your fantasies, how you learned the camouflage in your fatigues was a joke and fighting grounds is nothing but green dots on a black screen.

They will never learn how you felt like when you heard the sound of your Skype account on and the alerts you received when your lover logged on. They can’t fathom how you managed to stay calm every time you saw your little one’s eyes blinking at yours on the screen of your laptop and how you always knew you were going to make it.

You were so sure.

They will reform you and reinvent you until your name is forgotten. The camouflage will remain a joke and the reasons behind your own private war will never be disclosed. The data locked away in the heavy safe of your aspirations will never be claimed and the things you’ve seen will stay memories no one will ever revisit.

Truth is they will assume what you thought and how you felt and sometimes they may get it almost right, but still

They will never know about the heavy peacefulness you experienced while watching pigeons fighting for bread that very day you left home to step into the abyss of somebody else’s misconception, with all the reasonable doubt in the world branded like a dark tattoo on your chest.

But I will, soldier. I’ll always do.

What we leave out of living

13 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by Alice Salles in Dying, Living, Whatever

≈ 4 Comments

There’s a reason for things to happen, or so I tell myself.

There’s a reason so the reason won’t escape its cycle leading back to meaning. Reasons like to find more reasons to hide or pretend to be what they are not. Reasons like to blend in with trends, file suit then fall out of fashion. Reason pretends to hide in plain sight although I see it everyday. I hear it. I smell it, and then I let it go.

I don’t intend to play its game because I’ve figured it out; empty spaces are filled with reason, crowded camps are numb and hollow. Reason only is where there’s none.

When I heard a bird stop by and sing about the kind of luck I never dreamed of having, it came to me: the luck I never dreamed of having was mine all along, I never had to dream about it in order to obtain it.

Reason is what you grasp without twitching your forehead. Reason is the know in the knowledge of being and reasoning is all we leave out of living.

We’ve been doing it all wrong, not I. Not I, believe me.