Ozz

I have moved so many times in my life that nothing feels like home. “Friends” come and “friends” go. People all look the same. Nothing special. Time spent with a degree of devotion creates those bonds, of which I have had few. There has been one. And I have felt at home there over the years. It was a place that was there for me when I had nothing. I did feel at home there. I felt I had a place to be for the first time in my life. And no one judged. It was just how it was and nobody questioned it. To this place I owe a great deal that can never be paid. I grew up there. So much growth depends on having a place to simply feel comfortable at the end of the day. It was a place of refuge. And I grew so much there.
I thought I had friends there too. If nothing else, I had a social life- a group to hang out with. But still they were only ever to be taken at face value. I never really got close to any of them. But still, there is a lot to be said for seeing the same group of people most every night for several years. If you are watching you will unavoidably be connected. But mostly for me, it was the simple fact that things are what they are, and nobody there questioned or judged it. I needed that. I was lost for many years. And that place helped me find who I was, due in large part to that attitude. But enough about this place for now. But it is important for one who wants to understand me, to understand how much I loved that place.

Fleeting Plumes of Smoke

In my chest there beats what resembles a heart. But it is not a heart; rather, many fragments of heart. And not one of these fragments matches another, for they are all from different sources. They come from tragedies of life, broken dreams, broken hearts, ect. The newest of these being the largest part of the collective till it dwindles like a dieing ember and shrinks to a comfortable size. The fire has been put out long ago, but these embers still glow; some more than others. Indeed some die out completely, becoming cold and black, while others glow warm for some time. And some never die. Some never shrink. But be ware of those that never shrink, while their glow dims ever darker than the rest. They grow cold and black, and can consume you. Few of these have I in my heart. And then there are those embers that never die… and never shrink in intensity. They only conform with the collective out of necessity. They dim their light only enough as what needs to be, yet they burn as hot as ever before. One can not rest with such a fire inside him. And yet, it can not be spoken of or disclosed to anyone. It remains only to burn the heart evermore. It burns with such passion that other fragments decay, while others are ignited again. A fiery torment begins in the soul. Passions once dormant and comfortably smothered live out wildly in sporadic and brief fleets of flame, only to smolder again uncomfortably now in the chest. The collective aches and burns in confusion because of these fits. Each one with a memory of its own. Wretched memories once lying calm and forgotten in the furthest reaches of the mind, now dredged up again like a body from the ground. With no soul they wander. They are ghosts of the past. And like smoke they must vanish again, floating again to those places we hide our feelings. They leave only a reminder of themselves freshly imprinted on our minds. . . fleeting plumes of smoke. . . eventually…every love… fleeting plumes of smoke. May the pieces of what I call my heart find peace and still the fires, so I can rest.