-Flickerstick

My internet connection has been as jumpy as a grade-school playground during jumproping championships, so I'm not sure if this mess of 1's and 0's will ever reach anyone. Let's hope so.

The series of combinations of human interaction is so vast and wonderful. Think of each human personality as a number. It's hard to quantify, and since in theory there's no two people alike, the number of possible personalities is as large as the amount of people that are on this earth. And yet somehow, in this mess of numbers, there's always an oppertunity for connection. The level of it can range everywhere from a simple greeting to kissing someone who you love. The pool of chance overflows, sometimes, with a surge of potential and realizations.

"I won't let go, I won't let go. Even if you say so, oh no." -DNTEL

So via chance or fate or karma or whatever you happen to trust, you eventually make friends, relationships, and as previously said, connections. It's a firm belief of mine that life exists largely for those oppertunities, which are simply numberless if you let yourself be open to them. Make eye connection when you walk. Don't be afraid to embrace. Compassion is one of the highest virtues. Allow yourself to love even through layers of previous rejection or heartbreak. The heart cna mend faster than a bird's bones knitting. And even if not healed, love has a nice way of being a healing process that outraces the strongest drug that science can create. And the danger of overdosing doesn't exist, although you can certainly be drunk on it.

"It turns out, no one gets left behind." -Sense Field

After a while, my ambition was to always be sublimely on fire, heated from the desire to connect, to love, and on a basic level, feel. The human experience isn't about a job or money, after all. It seems as though, sometimes, the pinprick of divinity for all of this can rest in something as simple as the spiraling fissures of a seashell. If they're viens for experience, then the representative object would be lined and re-lined with the steady indentions of canals of new things that cleave back and forth so much that the texture of it would be a miniature scale of every canyon that stretches along the world. The depth of the fissures depends on you.

"lover, you should have come over." -Jeff Buckley

But I can't tell you how to live. For some of you reading this, I'm just a series of keystrokes at the end of a cable connection. For others, I'm a friend. For one, I'm a boyfriend. For a few more, I'm an ex-boyfriend. For all, I'd like to be some semblance of a connection. Balance is where it's at. The yin/yang, the dark and light, the soft and rough, all of these are sensual exchanges that can take place in so much media. After all, energy is never really lost: it just changes form. You can watch it be channeled through everything from kung-fu to poetry. This world is a reactor. React, then.

"It's the gift that you're given. It's the hand that you're dealt." -Curve

I consider myself a lucky person, on every scale from me finding 10 dollars today to the amazing fact that I'm still here even after a very complicated birth. Connections are a part of luck, but life isn't. Life doesn't play fair, but the key is that you can have any many aces up your sleeve as you can carry. Sometimes it feels like I've laid my entire hand on the table with some stray aces in it as well, since luck sometimes careens into me with total disregard for the path my life is taking. It's a delightful collision.

"Essai lo. Essai lo non sai lo." -Sigur Ros

To you all, then, my friends who have been in my life everywhere from since birth to just days ago: thank you. Sometimes my insides blur with warmth and my toes curl, even if from stray looks, even if from a touch or unintentional compliment. Dreams are great, but sometimes living just eclipses any perfect daydream. Sometimes.

"Dream you're alive, and feel, feel, feel." -Ours

I can barely keep my eyes open at this point, as not sleeping has certainly caught up with me. The bed can be lonely even with the weight of my body: combined company makes for more than just two forms. It makes for breaths that lull me to sleep between the smell of her skin. It makes for invisible hands of heat that thread themselves through the blankets and curl around me at the best times, and since it's sometimes in-between alertness and dreaming, I can never quite pick apart the touches that I swore were there, and the ones that were just swimming in the haze of nameless dreams. Yes, it's kind of the best that way.

"What is - just is." -Lamb

And sometimes it's not that easy to take it as such. Isn't there just meaning running through everything? Isn't there a function for every X, a trajectory for every Y? No. No, there isn't, and if you can relax and steep yourself into it and go along for the ride, I certainly can't predict where it'll go, but it will be new. There's no value for that sort of thing. Mathematics and science will never track the chemical makeup of love. I wonder what our DNA would look like, a double-helix of mixed elements that spirals and twists like the fibbonacci sequence designing a seashell. There's math to that, I suppose. But not to you. I hope I never figure you out.

"Cameraman sways to remember how the eye dances." -Soul Coughing

I don't dance but my ambitions do. They fall away or rear back up with the regularity of a flame on a wick. Yours do, too. I hope I never figure it out.

"Did I dream / I dreamed about you?" -This Mortal Coil

Hopefully I will, since that's still being near you in a sense. In a few senses, actually, but only actual contact can give the other senses something tangible. And yet your fingers skim along me like wind over water. Tangible but mystical. May I never predict the movement of your fingertips. Trace shapes on me that do not exist.

Poetry tries to spell it all out, but I don't think it ever will. But we still try, which we have every right to do:

and so we brace ourselves for the heartache

that pulls at our feet like stray tides

fissioning fusion foaming up around the toes

lazily licking down the shore

never did I dream

all of these things someday would pass

it makes the present hard

but you just dance, just glide just

dance just

it's not too late, you see;

I concentrate and bury this transmission

in the rich spaces between the summer night

fireflies will take pieces to your windows

monarch butterflies collecting and gathering

inside your closet while you meet me in the street midstep midthought

reverse embers velocity of kisses I'll never know

pull me into the dark center of my bed

I wrap myself in hope and christmas lights

let small dots of warmth speckle and press

only you do this to me

to all of me.

Goodnight.

random and aiming,

Jared