It Always Feels So Easy

Audiovisual version of this text, with music and layered vocals over the reading.

"It always feels so easy... 

To just sit here and be nothing, feel nothing. 
To lie awake and stare at the ceiling, 
Just counting the minutes for the night to settle in my body 
And for my eyes to close temporarily, 
Before they learn how to close forever. 
To wrap myself up in this blanket of lonely apathy, 
Of emotionless introversion… 
Such a perversion of the self. 

It always feels so easy to have a dreamless sleep, 
Or to not sleep at all and just think; 
Think about the times when smiles didn’t have to be forced, 
When tears actually existed because there was genuine sadness, 
Instead of a void. 
This void. 

It always feels so easy to embrace it. 
Embrace the quietness, the dark, the melancholy. 
Play some ugly music with hysterical vocals and messages of hatred. 
Something with a piano. 
Something more emotional than what I can be. 
Romantic. 
Sexual. 
...Human. 

It always feels so easy to not be human, 
To not feel the ability to love. 
To not care about anything, not even myself. 
To think about death and not wish for it to come soon, 
But not run away from it either, 
Always pouring that extra drink, 
Smoking that extra joint, 
Cutting that other wrist that still looks too pretty. 

It always feels so easy. 
But I’m choosing the hard path. 
I’m choosing to fake the happiness, 
To act out the compassion, 
To dance and trance myself out of this hole I call a life. 
I’m choosing you over me and all of them over the two of us. 
I’m choosing to cry again for no reason 
And for all the reasons I can’t write, 
I can’t say out loud. 
I’m choosing to scream until I have no voice. 

And then, the silence won’t be so heavy. 
It won’t matter as much. 
The silence will just be that invisible rope 
Tying us to one another 
And making us feel alive. 
Making us feel human. 
I’m choosing to be human. 

Because it’s not easy, 
Because it doesn’t have to be. 
Because before a shadow, there is always... light."

Author's Note

It's a basic text, of course it is. And only half personal. A third, maybe? But it was the best I could come up with to test out this idea I had. And, interestingly enough, if you just listen to it instead of reading it, it already feels so much better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJbcf-dTAyI

I'm proud.