Lucid

I'm tired of this. I play hide and seek, grasping at straws, the ends of which seem forever lost to my reach. I have a multitude of flaws. No, that is inaccurate. I am nothing but my flaws. My pride, my coldness, my stubbornness, and so on, I cannot be bothered to list them all. It would take days. All these are me. I am nothing more or less than the sum of these. To call something a flaw implies the existence of something greater than the thing itself. I do not think there is anything of me to be called flawed. This is not a moan of complaint, or some admission of an inferiority complex. It is merely some degree of self-awareness. I do not try to convince myself of some imaginary merit I possess, but I do not blame myself for anything I do not. After all, I have problems enough without creating more in my head. I sometimes feel like I crash through life with no sense of direction, restraint, grace. Other times, I feel I have far too much restraint. Perhaps I should simply grab a shoulder and demand to be heard. That seems to work for creating a mess, why should it not for clearing one up? Explanations are my line of work, so to speak. I am good at rationalising everything, making it seem perfectly logical and understandable. But I do not even wish to explain now. All I want is to be heard when I am sober. If I am to demonstrate cruelty, let it be lucid. I find it hard to accept blame for something I am not conscious of. I sometimes claim to read people like books. Well, the question is, has anybody ever tried to read me? Oh, people look at the cover, sometimes consider the cover art, the printing of the jacket, the quality of the binding, the writing of the blurb. But has anyone ever tried to open the book and read? I think not. At most, the tome is placed upon a shelf for display. One of those books that make up a library. In itself it has no value. It is only kept for the way it complements and supports the other items within the library. I type and I type, talk and talk, but how much of that is real? There is little truth in my words. They are made up as I go, tailored to fit the situation, created to serve a purpose. I have few convictions, few beliefs. I envy those who truly believe in things. I am not aloof because I don't like to speak. I keep my distance because I both disdain and fear the reality and life that others hold within them. I am no moth to seek the flame of others, for I know that I wither in the heat. All that is left to me in the face of such fire is to keep orbiting at a safe distance, watching the flame. When such fire reaches out to me, I pull a cocoon of ice about myself, that my core is not destroyed, even as I sometimes allow the fire to envelop me. Melting the ice? That is too optimistic. None have the patience or the inclination to try. Accept me for who I am, they say. Well, if you don't even know who I am, but only the shield of ice, and make no attempt to penetrate it, then how can you accept this which you do not know? Hurt by the ice? Well, then do not seek out the weaknesses in the shield, for it is at the cracks that sharp edges exist. Keep to the smoothness of the surface, glide where so many others have been content to before. I am not inclined to be stained by the blood and tears of those who make no effort to delve. If you want to reach beneath that surface, then simply try, for I make no effort to keep others out, all I ask is genuine desire. And if there are none with that? Then too bad.

Enough rambling.