I am much like a computer. I know that. I feel it. I sense it. I hear it. I take in more than most could feasibly comprehend, and spit out just as much. I need to process, both internally and externally. If I do not process, I will explode. Not literally, but definitely by means of emotional shutdown, spurting out, or losing myself in looping cyclic thoughts. I need to be heard by others, and indeed by my own interior self. I also need to reflect a form of truth.

I partake in communication akin to a hunter stalking her prey. I am in search. I am digesting the elements. I am preparing myself for future claim. I am reflecting, too, on past hunts, and bringing the memories forward for analysis. To exist is to hunt—to search for the meat of the matter and pull it outward from within, and to furthermore seek out that which is externally available for clues so that I might make my way through the forest that is my world.

Everywhere are trees. They are thick and mossy. They are stoic. They are alive. And each tree stands with a thousand secrets—some spoken and some hidden. And in this way I move about listening. I cannot be without the sense of everything bursting with input. There is a non-surrendering aspect in regards to my thinking. Gallant knights at the wheel of knowledge aching for an answer they know does not exist, and yet, they, these rouge-pages-blossomed, chase time away in a merry-go-round of maybes. I cannot stop them, and I, the someone beyond them, am left victim of sorts, incapable of surrendering for the lot of us.

The forest makes me blind. I cannot see through the trees. And the knights make me bitter because I cannot rest with them at the reins. I ache like none would know, unless too trapped in the wooded causeway, reaping what is taken in at high-speed but smothered by the incoming. I get trapped in overload. Trapped in a glass-bowl incapable of knowing what is what, what is important, what is true, what is necessary to process. A fish with no water, yet still swimming in this notorious muck of something deemed needed by some distant part of self. I can’t get out, but I want to. And part of me doesn’t even recognize I am there. Part of me can’t tell if I am even here, where I seem to live in this land.

I am nowhere, in moments, true. Essentially lost to my own buried selves—the multitudes of me who are shuffling through the debris of information. Each questioning the other for validity: “Is this the accurate representation?” “Is this a true source?” “What is beyond this source?” “What is truth?”

The knights battle inside as I move through the whispering trees—further aspects of self sprung up through the gatherings of words. They multiply whilst seemingly traversing into a battleground of truth; each contemplating while incorporating the strongest voice in hopes of victory. A win for the team. A win for silence. The totality of self pushing towards peace.

There is chaos, interruptions, non-stop contradictions, quibbles of sorts, and primarily confusion. Yet, no matter their futile attempts, brought up to the forum of exclusion, they waver away from the foundation of adequate representation fortified by truth. This nothingness of beyond bearing down its weight upon the galleries’ guesswork. And thusly, re-measuring occurs—long rulers and yellow tape stretched out in endless mayhem—judgment and discernment in regards to what is set out as evidence.

I cannot find peace here, and still I travel so. My only outlet found in emotional exhaustion, high-energy spurts of fixation, or the letting out of my soul in form of discourse, be it writing or speaking.

And so it is many times in words and tears and high-interest, I typically find reprieve. I don’t know why or how, or the ways in which I work beyond what comes forth as fragmented awakenings. I only know that I live most hours amongst the churning of selves in the shadows of the talking forest longing to be heard outside of the isolation of noise.