On Innocence, Forgiveness, and other topics that come to mind at 4:30am

I put the glass to my lips and I begin to drink and it feels so good, sometimes it feels so good just letting it all pour down and feeling it collect in my stomach. The water tastes so pure and cold, and I become new again in it. It feels like it's what I need.

I sit on my front porch and my toes are so cold because I couldn't be bothered to put on my shoes at 4 o'clock in the morning, and I pull on my cigarette and inhale it deeply inside of me and then slowly blow it out and I think about how all that I have is in this moment, with my cigarette and its smoke. I've smoked it past the point where I usually allow myself to save them, but this time I'll save it, because it's four in the morning, and I'll want only that little bit just before I go to bed.

It's hard to sleep sometimes. What a beautiful name for a band, "The Innocence Mission." Their songs are so sweet, so delicate and tremendous.

With each cough I fear to break this soft silence that has come to sleep in my room in weeks past. All is quiet now, especially at times like this, when it's so late at night, and I'm too tired to sleep. I think, well, I don't know, I guess I want to talk to someone, but I don't know who. I feel so alone. It's not loneliness, really, and I don't think I want to really even talk to anyone, I just want to be around someone. They could be doing something else, anything, like studying or reading or writing a poem or sleeping and snoring, something that didn't involve me, but just to have them there would make me smile.

I like to think that I'm on an innocence mission, a mission of innocence, to forgive and to be forgiven, and to forgive myself for things that I hold against my life, and then I could just let go, forget. It's just so hard sometimes, ya know? It's hard to let go of the things that other people have done to you, and it's especially hard to let go of the things that you've done to people.

It's not that I consider my innonce lost, as though innocence were something that one can either possess or not, like a cat, like something you can reclaim at the lost and found. Innocence is something your do, not something you are. Innocence is not an ignorance of guilty behaviour, innocence is the decision to not behave guiltily.

It's like that Bjork song, "all is full of love, you'll be taken care of, you just have to trust it." I'm not particularly a Bjork fan, but this song struck me. I guess it's nice to be reassured that life is not usually as bleak as you make it out to be, that there is always love in your life in some form or another, even if it's hard to see.

Well, I guess it's not really like that Bjork song. It's like some song, I'd bet. Maybe it's like that one I'll write someday, after all of the forgiveness and the reclamation of innocence, and I can tell everyone all about it. I can say how it made me feel, and how it seemed to make everyone else feel, and how we're all so much better-off because of it.

I hope it makes me feel good;)