Gallery of Memories

They say the eyes are supposed to be the windows to the soul. That thought often makes me shutter because they can become blinded by small, flip folding white lies created by a stranger and it allows yourself to be opened by the pull of a string. That wasn't good enough for me so I took the drifting thoughts of my pain body and built a door cast by a chain made of irony and a horrible metaphor. It was only crazed, maniacal laughter that shattered the peep hole I used to peer through a battered pith, often confused with the heart, because nowhere does it say in the myth it is also enclosed in the soul of your window. It is so much easier to agree it is meant to wither when cold. Through the years my heart has been blackened, overly seasoned on a griddle between the equinox and the solstice, marked only by the condition that I sealed my door without permission. Now, it ages like a gut rot fairytale, bolted and locked in a keep safe box. Three inches tall and four inches wide, an unknown name on top with red velvet inside. I always thought loving should be a piece of cake. My center, stowed away and imprisoned under a word unable to release or enter the gap between perception and reality. I am left trapped behind a gallery of memories. Still, I collect them and distribute them irrelevantly on a piece of paper entitled 'Today' and at the end of every Today, I consider it a rough draft, crumple it up, and toss it away because I will make tomorrow's Today a more pleasant essay. Solitude has become an illusory sense of identity guarding the door like a hungry fiend, craving and feeding with a bleeding tongue of tension and staggering beliefs. Fighting off whims and attacking precious moments when primordial error could be wiped clean. I can feel the vibration of waves on what they say, but the depth of basic sounds do not reduce it to embody my deepest truth. I rely on energy that entangles itself accidentally in the shield of my adversity. A backwards time travel thought process, self wilding on a reverse assembly line in the natural evolution of relations. But, resistance somehow makes the world feel more real. In actuality, what is being kept safe in my box, is a yearning for the name on top to come along, place a bullet in the monster's head, catch the door before I slam it shut, actually try to open the blinds and help me replace my gallery with something a little more beautiful.