Invisible Pathways

Once again I sit, defunct, and brooding, encased in that ever-enchanting forest of regret.

And I wonder why the time has come again for me to embrace such fruitlessness, such emptiness, with an only somewhat open heart.

Despite my efforts to the contrary, my brain has dangled a certain vision of coupled life before my eyes, and I reached for it mercilessly, as a slab of beef before a mongrel. It has become obvious to me, after my years of romantic torment, that a perception only clings to reality inasmuch as that reality has been fully realized. Inevitably, I construct pathways to fulfillment before I've scaled its terrain, touched its soil, tested its ground. And of course this is no path a whole person takes, but instead a meager attempt by one whose yearning for wholeness has led him astray, surveying the great fields before him, while stepping across piles of sand.

In this instance, the sand was mere discourse and the fields the possibilities beneath. But I have yet to learn that experience, if not traversed properly, only serves to entice me into a security I have not yet earned -- that of 'understanding'. For while I assure myself I do, I do not understand what is really there. My efforts to transform sand into roots and panorama into possibility echo the tangible darkness of my brain's work far better than comprehension allows. If I truly understood my failure, I would become a willing slave to its opposite, and rewards of such magnitude are never instantaneous, as one always decides they must be.

I've committed egregious sins upon my soul, falling prey to a cozy mind-state that favors submission over action, spite over respite, love over truth. And at last I remain the bystander of love, an owl fixed upon a branch she grasps but does not bother to see. To see love is to see truth, for love alone is a charlatan, twisting threads of truth into reality's noose, tickled when the ego snatches the fantasy from beneath it.

Love has yet to beckon me with truth, its crafty accomplice, whose crime is only discernible in the ease of its absence.