Strength, Loyalty and Compassion

My baby brother & me
You know how they say you can tell what you aspire to most in yourself be determining the qualities that you admire most in others? I've concluded the things I aspire to most are strength, loyalty and compassion. I realize that these three will inevitably overlap in some regards, but I believe them to be sufficiently distinct to list them out as separate ideals. I've learned from my mother and my aunts the importance of being strong for your family, for your men. The men in my family are weak; they fail at laundry, they fail at ambition, they fail at leadership. It is up to the women in my family to lead and to protect. It has always been that way. I have learned from my brother and his friends the importance of loyalty. Betrayal ultimately breeds isolation, and life is joyless when lived alone.

 Finally, there is compassion. I'm not sure from whom I picked up on the importance of compassion. It is not an attribute that is particularly encouraged in my family. Perhaps it is based upon a collection of experiences, wherein I was treated with unexpected kindness or generosity. Perhaps it is merely a projection of my own frailty, a need to feel that the universe will extend forgiveness for my failures, because I will surely fall to be strong and loyal when I am called upon to be both. Regardless, though listed last, I think compassion is the most important of the three qualities to which I aspire, because it is the most difficult. I sit here, claiming my heart aches for this or that, but I refuse to do anything about it. Compassion entails discomfort and pain, and I abhor both to such an embarrassing degree, I fear I will always be deficient in this regard. 

Unspecified


She wake up in a bed. It could be her bed or maybe it belongs to someone else. It doesn't really matter if she opens her eyes alone and shivering, or if she's sweating because of her close proximity to the warm body that still asleep next to her.
She just lay there with her eyes partially open. Her world is just a blur of soft focus and too fucking bright. It doesn't matter how dark the room is, it just always feels a notch too bright. She made it through the night, she's about to face another day.
She sigh, and it's hard to tell if she's relieved or disappointed. It's more like a mixture of both.
So, she coax herself to consciousness, trying to be mindful of all the things that need to get done today. All of those urgent, but not necessarily critical tasks that she has been shuffling from one to do list to the next. She try to bribe herself awake with the intention of breakfast. She try to guilt herself with the notion of responsibility and the undeniable fact that for all of her indulgent bullshit and irrational fears, she's still qualify as a functional human being.
She laugh and it's hard to tell if its amusement or bitterness. It's definitely a mixture of both.
Maybe her physical just lay there for a while longer, or perhaps she's actually shuffle away from the bed. Either way, she is too awake to go back to sleep; she is too asleep to be awake. She pull her laptop over, or sit down in front of her monitor and nudge the machine to bring it to life, because it makes her feels like she has a life, or at least something like it.
This is how mornings come and go. Trying to quite the sulky little voice in the back of her head that keep asking annoying question like: What the fuck am I doing? Don't you know that this is wrong? Why are you doing this? Why bother?
She try to drown that pushy little voice that keeps mumbling in her ear, with the sound of keystrokes and mouse clicks. She try to tell herself that: You are content with your life, even as you're scrolling for something to distract you from considering wether or not that's true. Has that ever been true? Even as she is looking for the next sentence or picture or video or bit of smut; the next thing, a new thrill.
Sure, she has had some laughs, good times, weird experiences. She remembers times when she felt alive, but that feeling always fade ... eventually ... and then she has left trying to suck the marrow out of crack dry bones of the memory.
Truthfully, there's no amount of happiness, sex, intrigue, excitement, money, drugs, love, success or any thing that fills in all the spaces. There's always room for the maddening feeling that she is not really feeling anything. The soul-numbing feeling that she is just going through the motions ...
Sometimes people call this ennui, but maybe she was started to wonder if that's too optimistic of a prognosis
The though that keeps her awake at night, which if part of the reason mornings are so rough for her. Is that maybe this is just what life is: A series of dull moments and tedious tasks broken up by fleeting sensations of something actually worth living for.
For as long as she has been chasing them, she doesn't even know what causes those sensations. But all she can do is keep reaching for them. Sometimes it's impossible for her to name things that are actually worth living for.
All she knows is that she desperately wants to be more than just the measure of an unspecified number of breaths and counting.

Her

She's a prose painter, some of them will like her words, some of them will love her words. Some of them will not stand her words, but then again she's not here to please the faceless maddening crow. To them who truly know her, she's like a European sensibility mixed with the sensual abandon of a woman lost in a world of Pablo Nerudian sensibility. 
She's the one who likes standing on a moving bus or going into a library and using her outdoor voices. When she go over to the dark side she always bring cookies and tea. Sometimes when she's really wild and crazy, she'll even bite into a piece of fruit without giving it a good rinse first.
Does it taste sweeter? You bet your sweet ass it does. She believes one of the most courageous acts you can do it think out loud. She does it often. Sometimes she does it here. With her own words.

 To her, words are sacred as they are profane. Each word is a small story, a thicket of meaning. Words are such sacred objects to her. With words she explore all subject that cross her strange and dark mind from herself to madness, hope, memories, childhood, regret, courage, fear, nature, love, sex, reading, writing, life or what drifts through her cerebral cortex on any random morning or afternoon.
Mostly with cookies and a cup of tea. 

Glass

His  heart is made of glass. Whether it looks half empty or half full. It all takes up the same amount of volume. Sometimes he pours or drink too liberally. He's quickly inebriated, hopelessly intoxicated.
He gets excited, when in his drunken wisdom, thinks he knows what it was. But then, clumsily trips over some careless words that were left on the doorstep. He drops the glass and it shatters, leaving wet stains which could be confused for tears.
It's alright because similar to him, it's part of n interchangeable set. We can always buy more at the shop, if the store runs out, they can always order more from the factory. They build them on site, in their workshop.