It all sounds the same, after so long, but the sameness hides important things. Missed details, smudges obscuring the true shape of things - what’s been, what is, what will be. Yet my eyes keep skittering over the page, never dwelling too long (or long enough). Because looking deeper just means getting closer, and there’s a wind cold like a knife’s edge winding it’s way up my vertebrae.
And it’s the wrong kind of exhaustion, the kind that refuses sleep. Because the searching doesn’t go quiet when the lights go down, doesn’t give up the way well-used muscles do. No, it shouts and jumps, turns angry when ignored. Like the child we still are, deep down. The child refused, the child denied - the ghost of every question left unanswered, of every wide-eyed hope defeated by silence.
I’m trying, though maybe there’s something I need to change, some adjustment that could make the whole thing more bearable. And change is slow, even if I knew what to do. At this point there’s a reason for every habit, every routine. But the last few years have taught me well that things can change, and sometimes for the better.
It’s hard to write, just now. To think of how to say the things that aren’t words. The things that are easiest to talk about are quiet. Other things are too loud, and I don’t know what to say about them. I suppose it’s natural they’d be so obvious and insistent for being ignored.
I’ll try, even though it makes me uncertain, embarrassed.
There was a girl, back in high school. She was cute, and I didn’t hate talking to her, and she seemed smart. I wanted to have feelings for someone, and at some point I talked myself into thinking I had them for her. It was fun to have a crush, though it was terribly awkward. I didn’t really appreciate then that the feelings I was exploring didn’t have anything to do with the girl I was attaching them to. We never really spoke in person, though eventually through a mutual friend talked online. I hardly remember anything we talked about. She made a move eventually, and I was caught off guard because I didn’t really want a relationship with her. I didn’t understand that, though - I thought I did. So I was confused, and ruined it, and used ruining it as an excuse to be melodramatic about it and went back to thinking the feelings I was trying to evoke and express were connected to this girl I never really knew.
It was convenient and consistent, though. I kept looking for the real girl, kept looking for someone I had real feelings for. But it was calming, thinking that I’d found the girl I really cared about, thinking I could point to her in the world and say “there she is, right over there.”
Eventually there was another girl. I’d been alone a long time, at that point. Time had kept passing, and most of the people I’d known in high school passed with it. I needed to find someone new.
She wasn’t exactly new. She’d had a crush on me in high school, and though I knew there was some chemistry though I also knew she wasn’t what I was looking for. But having feelings for her was new, and I wanted to try it. I’d figured she’d moved on by then, partly because she was with a guy at the time. Safely unobtainable.
But then she wasn’t, and I was caught off-guard again. And I guess I was braver, or I’d been alone too long, or had spent so much time fake-regretting what happened with the other girl before that I went for it.
Unfortunately believing you’re wholly and completely in love, cross my stars and hope to die, is a lot more dangerous when it’s with a real person you enter into a relationship with than it is with a high-school crush you never actually interact with.
A few months later I’m alone in my room, staring blankly at my hamper for whatever reason, consumed with thought. I’m convinced I’m in love with her, but I can never forgive her, can’t imagine ever wanting to be with her again. She’s hurt me worse than anyone ever has, and I let her because I extended infinite, unconditional trust. Because I’m in love. And I realize that I’d rather be alone than ever be with her, and because I love her there will never be anyone else. And that moment is the nadir of my entire life, the darkest night without even the hope that things might some day get better.
That drove me, eventually, to the realization that it wasn’t exactly love that was between us. Eventually I came to understand what I’d been doing, eventually I stopped trying to turn the wrong people into the one.
Eventually I realized the feelings I had were from somewhere else. That they were separate from the girls, but the same. I remember the way I’d feel momentarily lost, the first time I saw her face after being away - that it wasn’t the face I was expecting.
And that left me somewhere all alone. Unquiet, restless, painfully aware of something missing but without anything concrete to ascribe it to.
It’s unremarkable, I suppose. To be lonely, to wish there was someone else to share everything with. But, I don’t know.
It’s like I’m missing a specific person. Even when I tried, and I tried hard, to attach the feelings those to my ex, I couldn’t. I couldn’t with my crush in high school, even when I was young and stupid and just the idea of having a girlfriend at all was such a big deal.
Maybe I’m broken, somehow. Maybe too many stories with unrealistic depictions of romance have fucked up the way I think real love is supposed to feel. Maybe the only thing that’s satisfying anymore is something that can only exist in my head.
But that doesn’t change anything.
Whatever the source, the feelings I have are real things. They burn like the sun, they twist daggers in me. They push and pull me, and the only choice I can make is to ignore them or accept them. And, to the endless suffering of the human race, ignoring feelings does not nor has it ever made them untrue or made them go away.
So I’m left chasing ghosts, trying to make sense of feelings without a subject. Like being soothed by the smell of fresh-fallen rain, calmed by the gentle chill of a storm front, drawn to sleep by the sound of it falling on a rooftop. All while the sun shines on like an oppressive tyrant, sky clear blue in this cloudless desert.
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