if you doubt that moments slip away fast

take a walk with your hearts intent

strike up a conversation

but beware your lament

the brief second you studder

or trip over your though

doubt your confidence

or rethink; you’re caught

you’ll feel the momeny slip away too fast

and tumble it’s way into the past

you’ll see it sucked up in your lovers eyes

and shot out again

as you wish you’d said

what your brain thought you’d naught

the moral is not

that you meant to net a heart

but swung a strike three

rather that the moment exists

and can slip away so tenderly

I can’t get past the idea of writing to impress. Every time I go to touch pen to paper I am held back with the fear of my ego. I want to write, but I am writing with hopes that it will entertain someone. That they will read it and say “oh! how good! how wonderful!” and I’ll sit there snivelling and pleased like a rat sniffing the air at the scent of self-affirmation.

Do I simply write plainly then? Do I absolve my writing of the frills and poeticism I attempt to invoke in it? Would the trimmed fat take with it my ego and transform my writing into the utilitarian tool it was meant to be? Would that then be better? Would my wtiting then reach its final fruition and become what is was meant to be - egoless? Is that what writing is supposed to be - writing for the sake of writing, writing for its intrinsic value, writing because it must be written rather than writing to give me purpose or to make me feel valuable.

Sometimes I am struck with ideas which I would like to write about, but then my motivation to put them to paper is abruptly haulted by a writing existentialism. Why should my writing bother to exist? I sit there, pen in hand, waiting for godot, staring at the page, and although I want to write I can’t overcome the persistent question of why I am doing this.

It all just seems so self-indulgent. Perhaps a pseudonym would help, but even then feelings of egotism would creep in - maybe even at a heightened intensity. I can search for meaning, purpose and benevolence in my writing and I will likely find it - thinly clutching to some poor-formed argument that attempts to reify my notions of purpose - but it will never feel satisfying. It will never wash that wave of contentment over me that the truth always does. I could say my writing entertains people, perhaps even helps people, that my writing is cathartic for me, therapeutic even, but the conceitedness of it will always sit on my shoulder and laugh in my ear as I attempt to obfuscate reality to create the truth I want.

You can call me cynical - and in a post-modern world rife with cynicism you can even call me unoriginal- but the fact remains that I don’t know why I’m doing this and neither do you. There are a couple of premises I am working with that remain unsatisfactory, but I will share:

1. I should write with a purpose. Write stories that attempt to elucidate something or fight for justice. That is the only way to write meaningfully.

2. Everything in life feels egotistical. Writing is simply just a microcosm of that and more readily brings the concept to the forefront of your mind. Writing for me has then become a struggle with the post-modern world in which art has become commercialized, egoized, and individualized (perhaps a succinct definition of our culture as well). In my reluctance to put pen to paper I am being halted by a broader struggle than simply my writing and me. I am being halted by our ego-centric culture.

Usually my morning begins rolling over to check my phone, my hopes raised in anticipation that somebody, or someone, or something has decided to contact me. It makes me sad that my first instinct in the morning is to take another hit of dopamine, like a smoker rolling out of bed with hoarse coughs and phlegm-filled snorts reaching for their cigarettes, I reach for my phone. Every morning I am met with dissapointment from the dearth of notifications. Why I expect someone to contact me in the late hours of the night that my unconcsious body was able to leave my phone alone, I don't know, but I check anyways. This morning's different. There is a message. A message from a blocked number; I guess something decided to contact me today.

My gray bags are heavy around my eyes and I blink slowly to discern what the message says. I couldn't sleep last night, like most nights, the sound of traffic, the audible glow of the whorehouse billboard shined through my window lighting up my black floorboards, creaking under the weight of the light, the neighbours muffled yells, and the pervasive dampness that is ubiquitous through the city prevented my sleep. It was not the sound that kept me up, but rather the depression of it all. I just stared up at my peeling ceiling trying to remember when the last sunny day was; I couldn't remember. In some twisted pathetic fallacy turned reality the changing climate had made my city overcast most days - and nights for that matter. The clouds hung low touching the tops of the buildings, casting a gray saturation over the city, and made everything so goddamn damp. In particularly long bouts of cloud-cover the cold would reach deep into your bones. I would pulll my overcoat tight over my shoulders in these imes, but the cold was biting and you could not keep it out.

Last night was one of those nights. When the phone lit up my cavernous face in the blackness of the early winter morning the artificial light almost felt warm on my face. As the haze distilled from my eyes I could see it was a warning, the world was ending in seven days. I'd been receiving these messages for three years now. They all came to me in the same manner - a blocked number, early in the morning, no time stamp, after an especially anxious damp sleep. The first one I resolved to be a prank and did not show anyone - more from a lack of interested parties in manners involving myself, rather than reticence. The utter lack of social interaction left in this city made it entirely unknowable whether everyone was receiving these messages with the same level of apathy that I was or if I was alone and it was simply neurotic apparitions of my mind.

The messages came more frequently with the approaching apocalypse and each one increased my conviction of my insanity. I always envisioned insanity as a despairing, despondent, incoherent, frenetic experience, but I accepted my insanity with complacency. Perhaps it was because of my uncertainty that any of my peers retained their sanity and it felt as though I was reaching social maturity, rather than social exclusion. It wasn't the dubious nature of the messages, or the solitary isolation of the experience, but the certainty with which I knew the world to be ending that reified my notions of insanity.

I put my phone back down and turned on my back to stare at the ceiling again, but was quickly overcome with laughter. My body convulsed with uproarious laughter, it reverberated off the cold walls, and out into the dark street. I was overcome with joy at being released from the dampness. I prayed through my squealing laughter that the world would end in a fiery blaze so I could feel warmth once again. I was giddy with excitement that the flames would dry up this entire city. I welcomed the thought of descending into the warmth of hell. Oh god, please end it tomorrow, I cannot wait seven more days.

I desire desire I suppose. I desire to truly know what desire is. I had a friend tell me recently that our emotions are entirely limited by the words we have to describe them. For example: happiness – I have a general idea of the concept of happiness; I am even approaching certainty that I feel it periodically, but I am also aware that feeling happiness isn’t as simple as the definition implicates. There is much more emotion involved in happiness than the word can encapsulate. Since I have no words other than happy to describe those emotions (perhaps it’s just an issue of vocabulary) my communication is limited and therefore I will never fully express myself. Desire is the same; let’s just say the definition of desire leaves something to be desired.

Desire…desire I’m pretty sure I’ve felt. There was this one time I saw a very pretty girl in a café and I desired her – we dated for two years and she cheated on me in the end; I guess she desired something else. That wasn’t the only time I felt desire, but it’s a good example.

The desire I see in the commercials I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that. Sometimes when I see Matthew McConaughey driving in his Lincoln and he’s going really super duper fast and he smiles a wry smile at me – probably because he’s pleased with the lack of traffic – I think “I kind of want that”, but then I remember that really weird salacious thing he said “[t]hat’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age” and how his face is turning into a leather handbag and I think “No I don’t”.

My point here is that I don’t know if I’ve ever felt something without simultaneously being ambivalent. I desire to feel desire in its purest form. I want to feel unadulterated desire. I don’t even need to want it bad – like Matthew McConaughey tells me I need to feel it in the commercials. Even if I just feel a tiny desire, as long as I know I am feeling it, and I know without any hesitation, doubt, or regret that I want something. Wow, what a beautiful feeling that would be.

I would tell everyone I had done it. I would exclaim “I felt something!”. I would do everything in my power to retain that feeling. If it was a girl I wanted – restraining order. If it was money I wanted – burn it all. If I desired to be beautiful – I’d look in the mirror. Just so I could truly feel something for as long as possible. I would find a distant cave to dwell in where what I desired could never reach me. My muscles would atrophy and my clothes would tear, turn gray, act as vestiges of my past life, and I would make a shrine to my desire in the darkest corner of that cave. I would crawl up to it, like golem approaching his precious, with furtive and wary glances scared that I might accidently discover its fragility, and I would wallow in it; I would sit content knowing that I was feeling something.

People would come to visit me like an enlightened Indian guru; they would come to see the person who had finally felt something. After making the long arduous journey up the mountainside to reach my cave I would make them bow before me while I turned my head towards the sun up and away from them because I like formalities like that. Then they would ask “What does it feel like?” and I would say “It feels like… desire”.