Elegy, Manuscript, Trying:

This has resisted organization. This has come together and fallen apart numerous times— there are pages and pages of poetry begging to fit to one another. Some argue that when writing elegy, the poet’s thoughts break down because grief shatters the mind and contraries coherence. My memory has broken down, fragmented. Pieces halved and quartered to other pieces. I have a pile of memories translated to poetry. Scrapped, folded, and stained on my bedroom floor in a wooden crate. I placed too much meaning into objects, put too much stock in location. I treated my dreams too much like reality. I tried to fit a story together that is too vast and tangled a web to be navigated. I aspired to understand everything. I expected every realization to be the realization. I prayed to some non-god for epiphanies. I prayed to the universe to reveal itself, for the multiverse to map itself, for the stars to constellate in some way that might lend the sky to a meaning that I could record in the pages of my notebook. My handwriting has deteriorated tremendously. There is a story for that too. Everything I see and touch I can bring back around to my father, to death, to mortality, to the eye in the sky that we feel staring or blinking when two giant circles become concentric and arrive us at meant-to-be moments. There are things I will tell. There are things I will not tell. There are realities I have run from for many months now. I never confronted fully the story I wished to tell because I considered it rather as a condition. Now I see that the two are part of some hybridized one. Our condition is that we are our story and our story is the story of others. When a person takes on the responsibility of documenting truth, or truth as he or she might understand it, that person takes on more than the truth of one story. The truth of one story is the truth of hundreds or millions of others. We drift and overlap like autumn leaves, we carry and fall off the wind like dandelion fuzz. Some of us are swept into the same pile and left for the season. Some of us push up from the wet spring earth with the same stories to tell about someone we knew so long ago that the name sounds foreign on the tongue. In the fragmentation there is a great connectivity that cannot be restructured. Pieces fall across state lines, they drift to sea.