Lightness, Falling

By Michelle Ma

This is a book about hating life and liking it.

To each is their promised land, we all work in search of something...something sublime and yet also indifferent in its bewildering beauty. I remember when I first fell in love, the world at once opened and yet closed, I discovered an inchoate world of spasms, regrets, fears, and a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page88 LLC
• Release date: Apr 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9798887644738

Book preview

Opening Essay

To each is their promised land, we all work in search of something…something sublime and yet also indifferent in its bewildering beauty. I remember when I first fell in love, the world at once opened and yet closed, I discovered an inchoate world of spasms, regrets, fears, and a most endless longing. Yet I had been in love before, with words and the regal air of the English line. Like T.S. Eliot speaks in the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he says, Let us go then, you and I. Yes, let’s go, and follow those words to a place without pain, a palace for the mind, the loveseat of leisure. Poems can make you feel good, and cherish in each second, something that you read. The highs and lows overwhelm you to a point where you are hardly barren in your personal and profound, happiness.

I have been sick, very sick, sick to the point of death. My mind was burdened and my body wept, I have understood my own death, and found meaning in one of the most hopeless places. I have looked at calendars, certain that I would never last to the next year, wondering if I’d ever be independent, wondering when the cares could be washed away, preparing to be at the end of the journey. Through those moments, errant yet secure, poetry kept me alive, I love the way the mind is forced to take the dualism of the personality and make it whole, to find meaning in each cherished word. I have a friend who died, of a similar illness, I miss him all the time, I miss his smile, his face, his voice, and the song he stopped singing, the song of his life.

Death has in its own way a coercive majesty, and in my new set of poems, I contend. I find regrets and label them in a way to make them shout of all the ways in which I have been made. The shortcomings of my life thus far are quite apparent to me, even at a glance. I wanted to be a philosophy professor, I wanted to study Merleau-Ponty. I wanted to glorify Nietzsche. I wanted to understand the humanity of Kierkegaard. Yet since the fatal diagnosis, I have made no progress to achieving that end. I have applied to not one philosophy program, and certain of failure, have no plans on that end. The degenerate curse of disease is quite and in an open way, my doom. Yet for each day that I can work, for each day that I can love and think, there is a sort of clarification that yes, I can write, and yes, each day happiness is a bit closer with each paragraph I cajole out of my mind, and herald from my heart.

I met my future best friend many years ago, his name is Thomas. I remember all those times when it felt like I had lost everything that mattered in my life, but then I heard his voice, and remembered he cared, and it felt glorious, to know that. Another person can make the most favorable, most violent indention on your life, it can crush you how much one person can change you, how much one person can make you want to speak. Speak softly, the future does not like to hear loud words. Those are words I hear to myself, every time a rant boils up and refuses to move.

I dismiss the idea that I am worthless, I dismiss the idea that I am hopelessly damaged. I think about how the world, in a most silent, particular, yet earnest way needs me, and yes, my reader, needs you. We are all engaged in a long journey, exactly to where, no one knows, but no we voyage on, and remember the end is never at hand, because it continues. It continues like a long, winding river. Death is chaos, and yet it returns, again and yet again, a cyclical half-way stop, to the next part of life. That is what I like to think at least.

So enjoy these poems, and enjoy these stories, enjoy that you may feel happy upon reading some of my words, enjoy that spasm of regret that the tale is over, and that yet, another new chapter of your life is to be begun. Life is…encouragement that you have to be yourself, and in becoming yourself, be your own master.

Stories

Confessions of a Shopaholic

I must refuse. I cannot go near the heavenly scent of perfume, the way it lifts and bends the air, at my favorite department stores. The first principle of shopping, is that your desires are always correct, as long as there is still room in your credit, to buy something more. I am a woefully inept shopaholic. Prada is to me, like a parade of majestic glory. I smile when I place my feet in four-inch heels. I smile when my skirt coordinates perfectly with my silk draped blouse. I spend more than I earn, I am a cripple. I hate myself.

That