Where Footprints Don't Follow

The following is coming from a place where footprints don't follow.  A place where verbal communication fails like a broadcast system during a tropical storm and rationality renders itself defenseless over emotion and a rainy disposition.

It's hard to start explaining emotions out in the air when all you do is keep them tangled within; wrapped up and wrenching down on your everything.  All I know is that it has been far too long since I wrote a word of true meaning; of true, finite emotion and I fear the build up of painted expressions and half hidden intentions have taken over the person I used to be.  Either that, or the person I used to be was never that noble after all and the idea of such a person came to me fictitiously but believably induced.

Believe me when I say that the heart is a muscle.

Believe me when I say that muscle, that heart, can grow strong with love...or strong with bitterness and hurt.  It's the black and white syndrome, sifting through your blood stream like a furious wraith, haunting your persona as if to possess the person you want to be with the person you are.  As much as I try to be one way or live a likable existence, I'm far to set in my deconstructive disconnect to recover without a makeshift montage or hail mary redirect.

Let me begin again.  I once knew a man with a cloudy expression but an honorable and polite demeanor.  He worked hard at his job and was honest and truthful towards his peers.  A man of true meaning, who spent his life working with his hands and taking care of his family.  No matter how virtuous he was, his time came and went far before it should have.  He was one of many I miss when I am alone.

I am not that man and all but short excerpts of his honor can be seen in my own character.  I am all flaws with faint hints of a human side.  All my afforded opportunities have been taken for granted and while I know I am not all sour, I also know how rotted I am and how that rot aggressively persists.  The parts of me that strive to be as inherently good as a Greek hero, has not found a way around that phantom which plagues my character.  The hardened, coiling cold of my person.  I maim and terrorize for pleasure.  I wear my faces as a costume and conceal my intentions with every locked file that fills me.

Recently, someone asked me what I was thinking, to which I deflected and dodged the question until the topic had reached it's designated time limit.  Looking back on it now, I know there was no easy way for me to answer that very simple, very strait forward question with a similar adorned answer.  I am anything but a simple man.  Call me a mechanism for I am holding gears and cogs rigged to triggers that set off a chain reaction to keep me from being myself.  Perhaps it has to do with the armor I wear under my skin.  That thick, stone-like crust I mark as invincible but is actually as permeable as a piece of paper.

My heart was pure once, I know that.  I had decency and affection once.  Years of twisting has seen to that end; years of sucking shards of misplace sentimentality can take down even the tallest giants from within.  Somewhere in me, however, is the wide eyed adventurer who thought love was the only real act of a fairy tale and living to find such a love was the only acceptable answer.  Even though the softer, gentle me is still alive, forever romancing my darkened intentions, my body is a prison and my mind keeps the key.

There may never be a real version of me, no matter how many hearts I wear on how many sleeves.  That part of me lay slain as the cynic in me holds the sword.  They are not me; they are versions of my ego, dancing around the people and places I surround as if I were a dinner show to behold.  I play a part as a jester to my own kingdom.

Somewhere in me, though, I can feel the subtle push of a heartbeat; begging to begin again.  Somewhere in me, I can see the ghosts of the people I've loved and lost forever and they're smiling.  They're happy to see me and it makes me warm again, if only for a moment before my generator gives out and the frost in me reclaims its throne.

Somewhere in me is the boy who sought to face down dragons for his princess.  The boy who did everything unnecessary to break another's tears with an inevitable soft served smile.  The boy who kept his valentines in a shoe-box under his bed, so as to sneak a reminiscent peek when he knew no one would know.  The boy who belonged to the better part of me.

Tyler Baker