on looking over

i remember when/how you {could open nearly everything i write}. today i prefer to begin with “i am hopeful that”, “today it seems”, “the challenge of”, “i love when you/it/they”, or “when i see you next”. i fancy myself someone who prefers a challenge over the comfort of what has past.
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alas, i remember when you put a penny near the stylus of the record player to offset an uneven end-table. when you made chili with oranges to brighten the vegetable flavors, and how it did. you sat with me and cried after telling me that i “only see the world as wrong and broken”. when you made a baclava for six of the longest hours. i remember Greece, and the “maybe” of Canada. i remember a sense of longing to be more when you didn’t wash you clothes for years.  i remember loving you the way it feels to finally vomit and take my life back from fear. i remember when we kissed in front of your girlfriend, who later never mentioned it. i remember the political spectrum became a circle and we only wanted to know where the wick of the thing was kept. i remember loads of cussing and dirt and how much we needed all of it then.  i remember you having sex with partners of friends while i had sex with your X. drinking as we drove to the desert . we smoked weed and went to the halloween party with far too many people. i remember how you drove with two tires in the inside ditch. i remember what they thought when we all slept on the floor together. i remember driving 3 hours one way to see you. the day before you moved away they called us communists for reasons they couldn’t understand. i remember the conversations about ant and insect philosophies as they disappeared into the concrete. i remember the lasagna/Elvis Costello/smell the day i moved in with you and your partner, down south. i remember how big it felt to love you because i love you something like that right now.
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maybe remembering is as much of a keystone as it is a crutch. maybe it just feels good today.

philosophy is confusing because it's real

i am in a morning writing sit at the moment, and had a thought i wanted to share. it's one of those that feels as obvious as it does complex and impossible.  

though 1: dying is inevitable, and therefore not worth a great deal of attention. without the ability to affect levels of change on something there is less of a need to put much energy into it. this is all part of the base for existentialism, yes? philosophers were concerned with inevitable truths and religious categorizations of morals. folks who ended up "existentialist philosophers" were at first simply saying that some things are inevitable, and therefore not asking us to give them too much attention. this has always been my understanding, and largely i agree with it. death and dying are largely for metaphor, and less for dwelling.   

thought 2: if an ache, or some sort of suffering, is as necessary in a human experience -- should the ache warrant as much attention as death? or should it warrant all of the attention, as a primary driver and influencer and motivator? or none? or some? 

some - feels right today. 

none - feels impossible.

all - feels like what it wants, if my ache experiences desire.

all of this is to say that i am trying (again) to have a better relationship with my ache, and possibly give it a little less control when it becomes entirely tyranical.