July 20th | Theland E. Thomas

I thought I could get over this, but I can’t. It seems I relearn every day that emotions weigh more than logic and that the brain is an emotional machine. I drove to see you with a stone in my gut and a lump in my throat, and I started to remember the apprehension I felt last time. The unformed disturbance. The dangerous emotion creeping underneath my conscious logic. My conscious logic says, Yes, this is behind me. We can still be friends. Forgive and move on. My conscious logic is a fool because in the moment it does not realize that it is a thin guise masking the irrational, emotional beast. It’s like a matador who thinks he has the bull under control. The bull will only be patient for a little while until it has enough, and suddenly the confident bull fighter has a horn through his chest.

Consciously, I ignored the patient warnings of the bull. It was saying to me, You need to stop immediately. This is dangerous. I am starting to fall in love again. I said, How can that be. With her? Impossible. After what happened last time, I can’t fall in love with her again.

See, time makes you forget what you once learned, what you once felt. What once was horrible, dramatic, and gut-wrenching doesn’t seem so bad after a while. Your scars heal, and you get over it. I saw you after months without contact, and all the fear I had evaporated. You didn’t turn into the faceless shadow monster I’d conjured in my nightmares. Suddenly, you weren’t so scary after all, and I forgot about the violence and the pain. Instead of the monster I’d made you, I saw the human being again. A human, just like myself, with all my same fears and struggles.

When I saw you, I was terrified at first, then relieved when you embraced me. We caught up. We smiled. My emotional sirens died down, and I remembered what made you so special to me in the first place. When I left, I said to myself, Everything went better than expected. I’m going to be okay.

But my emotions were starting to whisper an impossible scenario: I love her. I tried to ignore this, but I thought of you for the rest of the day. And then, I made plans to see you again. I adjusted my route for this explicit purpose and then told myself I was going to go that way anyway. I saw you again and we laughed and made jokes, and this time it was more difficult to argue logic against my tumultuous emotions. This time, I caught myself enraptured by you and gazing too long, and I hoped you didn’t notice, but then I hoped you did, and my God, how can we be friends if I act like this around you?

This time, I left beaming, unable to control my grins. I continued this way for the rest of the day, but I woke up sober. The matador was beginning to doubt his position, thinking, I need to be more careful. Emotions can’t be trusted.

So, the next week, I thought about seeing you. I thought about how you would react, what you would say. I remembered when we were friends. I remembered what happened when I wanted more. And, as the storm clouds rolled in overhead, I just went home.

This morning, I figured enough time had passed for it to be safe. As I planned my day in my head, I scheduled a slot for you right after work. I thought about you as I picked out my clothes. I wore this suit last time. I’ll wear a different tie. As much as I wouldn’t admit it, I wanted you to think about how great I looked when I showed up. I wanted you to love me.

The closer I got to you, the more sick I felt, so I blasted my music to shoo the doubts away, an ineffective but comforting technique. But the lyrics of the song only compounded my fears: You make me feel like I am worth nothing.

When I pulled into the parking lot, I knew I couldn’t do this anymore. It was time to jump out of the way before the bull trampled me. Then, I knew that as long as we’re together, I will always fall in love with you, and I will always end up bleeding because you’ll never feel the same. As much as I would like to get over this logically, I have to remember that my conscious logic only conducts the emotional engine on set tracks, and the path that leads me to you ends in a trainwreck. I drove in circles. My emotions screamed over the music: Something wicked this way comes! And this time I couldn’t ignore it; I turned the car around and drove away.

So, I’m sorry. We can’t be friends. You see, when someone bares their heart to you, and you rip it to shreds, it can never be fully repaired. It just becomes a patchwork of fragments held together by scars that tremor and bleed with each new injury.

Bus Muse | Theland E. Thomas

My responsibilities hang from my shoulders, a heavy cape that trips me with every step. This week, I have four essays and a test. Better study up. Better schedule my time. What day for what essay? What if it takes longer than I thought? Don’t forget you have work today. And when you’re at work, that needs to be the biggest thing in your life. These sales goals the most important we’ve ever had. We need to perform this month. We have to hit our goals. These goals are important to me to because I can get a small bonus even though I’m already being paid, and don’t I want that bonus on the end of the string? Who doesn’t want a little extra cash in their pockets? And we have to pass our audit. My bosses scream: NO MISTAKES! NO HUMANS! You will fail if you are a human. Are you mad? Didn’t you know this was the name of the game all along?

Yes, I want that dream on a string. That’s why I work so hard. For the dream. I want to work my way up the hamster wheel and earn enough money to live comfortably and get it all together and make my mommy proud.  We came from a third world country, and now we’re Americans. An opportunity some people only dream of. Wouldn’t want to squander that. My mommy wants me to make something of myself. Make her hard work worth something. I don’t want her life to be a waste, do I? Better not waste mine.

I don’t have time for a relationship. I’m too busy working on getting it all together so I can make a better life for my wife and kids. I don’t have room for love. I take all of my emotions, and I squeeze them into a chest. And I lock the chest in my chest and ignore it as it threatens to burst open and ruin me. Better keep it on lock. You don’t want anyone seeing what’s inside. Better to be a functioning member of society. Better to be the helpful, smiling face. Better to be a successful businessman. Better to play the role. My bosses scream: NO EMOTIONS! NO HUMANS!

Right now, I’m a student and a banker, but soon I’ll be a lawyer, and then everything will be better, and I’ll start loving life. After I get everything I want, I’ll start loving life. Until then, it’s back to the grindstone. Until then, I will continue to forget my needs. I will continue to ignore that pesky necessity of sleep. I will continue to chase the prize at the end of the string. I will continue to hustle. From one place to another. I will never sleep and never wake up. I sip the coffee. My bosses scream:  NO SLEEP! NO HUMANS!

Be efficient. Be effective. Be intelligent. Be persuasive. Be successful. Be marketable. Pull my strings. Rip out my heart. Cull my emotions. Erase my personality. Mechanize my body. Lobotomize my brain. I scream along: NO HUMANS!

A Happy Story | Theland E. Thomas

I’m sitting at my desk, laptop open before me, typing these words. The desk is at the end of my room, against the wall, and my back faces the open door. Old pens clutter the edge. I don’t know how I got so many, but I hardly use them. I type everything now. On the left of my laptop is a tissue box, complete with crumpled tissues next to it. A testament to the final vestiges of a cold I’ve fought and beaten and am chasing to a humiliating retreat. Behind the laptop is a picture of myself, age 10 standing in front of the sign displaying the library’s hours. Next to that is an expensive greeting card with that has a blue, cloth coat on a coat rack popping out of the paper. A former co-worker gave me that card when she left the company, and I read it whenever I’m feeling depressed. It tells me all the good things I seem to ignore about myself. On the back, it reads, “I hope we stay in touch!” Well, she didn’t make good on her end of that bargain.

It’s Saturday night, and I’m stuck with the familiar feeling of my time evaporating with every second. Just vanishing into thin air with each tick of the clock. Saturday night, Sunday, school, homework, work, homework, school, homework, work, and when will I have time to write again? Recently, I feel like life has become a series of tasks I have to do before I can do what I want. And that those tasks are so consuming, so taxing, that I’m exhausted when I finish. Worse yet, I don’t even know what I want. Except for tonight. I’m going to use my time tonight. I’m going to write a story.

A happy story. The prospect bounces around in my head without gaining any traction. Through the reflection of my screen, I notice my sister walk in. I turn to her, arm slung over the back of my chair. “I’m going to write a happy story.”

“Is that possible?”

I laugh. She’s really been on a roll with the sarcasm lately. I’ve never written a happy story before. The closest I’ve gotten is a story that ends with the same disappointment as waking from a fantastic dream. I don’t know if I can do it. It would be as much of a stretch as writing about love, something completely out of my frame of reference. I reply, “Maybe I’ll write a story about how I can’t write happy stories.” I open an onscreen notepad and type a few ideas, not noticing when my sister leaves. Hanging out with a writer must be boring. I slip my headphones back on, slow, stirring rock turning in my ears. Then, I open a document and start typing.

I can’t decide if writing is a reflection of the state of one’s soul, or a mere magnification of certain aspects. Those are quite limited categories, since there are many kinds of writing, so I’ll stick with fiction. Hemingway says,“there is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” This is true, in a way. A writer’s personality shines through in all his works, so when you read this, you’re seeing a piece of me. But you’re not seeing my whole soul are you? That’s preposterous! I doubt I have the skill to articulate every urging, memory, disposition, or notion of the soul or the unfathomable profundity of its intricacies. Rather, you’re seeing what I choose to show you, some subtext I include, and some that sneaks betwixt the letters, unbeknownst to me. Furthermore, I choose what aspects of life and self to focus on depending on the story. And some stories include personalities completely alien to my own, even if my biases influence how they are portrayed. But Hemingway is right, we writers do bleed on paper. I’ve never actually read Hemingway, but I have the audacity to compare myself to him.

I can’t really wrap my head around how to write a happy story. Good stories need conflict. They need action. Drama. Violence. Loss. Good stories need unhappy things. But, good, happy stories and good, unhappy stories share the preceding traits, so there must be something else that separates them. The ending! My stories all end with people dying or some hilarious body horror or a depressing twist. Well, I think I made a hopeful story once. No, I made a depressing story with a hopeful ending. So, if a tale can still be unhappy even if it ends well, what makes a happy story? The outlook. The mood, the voice, the word choice, the implications. It’s a whole new style that requires muscles I haven’t flexed. Would I drop the sarcasm? The cynicism? The commentary? I shake my head. I don’t want to write a happy story. I want to write what I feel. And what do I feel?

Unhappy. Not really as a mood, as a mentality. Here’s where I bleed on my keyboard. Sure, I smile a lot. Around people. I make jokes. Some say I’m funny. But no one would describe me as happy. I’ve heard “well-adjusted.” I love that phrase. Well-adjusted. Adjusted to what? The horrible reality of life? It just comes with the implication that the world is so startling, so crushing, that you have to adjust to it with coping mechanisms. Maybe that’s true, but I don’t think I have anything to complain about. So, if my life is so great, why do I have an unhappy temperament? Why, when I put my figurative pen to paper to write a happy story, does this blather spew forth instead? Maybe it’s chemical. Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe it’s what I focus on. Maybe it’s the music I listen to. Who knows?

I only know that I used to visualize my soul as a dark chamber filled with swirling, black clouds. A tumultuous environment of bitterness, sorrow, anger, frustration, and pain churning around the axis of my heavy heart. A place where hope is called fraud, where love is called lie, and where happiness is a pipedream. That’s the place from which my stories grow. That’s the void I see when I peek over the precipice. That’s the blackness in my blood mashed between the keys.

The stories I write are mine. They are reflections of my soul. Magnifications of my aspects. My stories are my blood shed and forged into letters, sentences, paragraphs. They are the natural outpouring from the well of my experience and perception. They are detailed insights into how I process and relate to the world. I get up and find my sister, saying, “I didn’t write a happy story. It’s not who I am.”

She smirks. “Well, I knew that.”