The Nervous Catastrophe At the Heart of the Downfall.

Nearly every priceless moment we live is spent ignorantly fighting or chasing some long lost hope of being something we are not, or labeling what we know we are. Each has our own vice... smoking and the like. Hardly anyone really lives outside their front door, they are so occupied with the comfortable and fantastic views from the inside, playing connect the dots on the ceiling or people-watching for hours from behind a frosty window in an abandoned upstairs bedroom. I am one of those people who was once miserably attached to the outside world, hardly able to bring myself to come inside at all. It just felt too open... maybe it was the breathability. 

Something changed. I am still left to be the hopeless domestic poet that I have eternally been, occasionally catching a glimpse of the outside world through the dirty and breath-fogged glass of my window. It is hard to remember the times when I understood what it was like to see and understand the world. It feels so long ago. But who has ever really understood the world, inside or out?

Would it really be a waste of time to try to change the shape of what we know to be the "ideal"? Is it just the way things are? I would hate to imagine losing so much that is precious to a world that is too blind to value and understand it. Beauty is not so subjective as people make it to be. Each possesses his/her own taste, but it is really only ever understood the way it was intended to be by those who were born to appreciate it. Its sounds so cliche, but the artists, the ones who see and hear and taste and feel things that so many others can't... they are the ones that beauty was designed for. They are the ones who are going to pay attention.

I feel an urgent need to apologize... I did a terrible thing in a terrible dream, and now I can't look you in the eye. It started: we were out on a date and you turned to say, "I gotta tell you something odd... I know I said we'd get married, but I'm already married." And that's when you laughed so hard. So I turned and swung, woke up in a shock, nails digging blood from the base of my palms. Because people are so fickle, they fall in love at different angles. So really I could lose you just as quickly as I've gotten you, and that's the kind of thought that makes me nervous. And worried if you'll really think I'm worth it. When the rush wears off and you're left with this busted person. But if you tell me you will I will do what I can to believe it. So baby all the things that I've seen last night while asleep... this morning, they're messing with me, and now I'm anxious as hell and looking for help. Something pleasant and painless, some story to tell with a through-line of calm that could stop me from being myself. -Kevin Devine