So much to do. Bits and pieces that needing fitting together and missing things that need finding and some tasks that are just like a little bar you fill up a second at a time by sitting and waiting.
My life looks less like the one I’m used to and more like something approximating normalcy these days. It’s all so appallingly social.
It’s nice, but having it makes me realize it’s not because I missed any of it. It’s because I was tired of feeling trapped by my choices, and wanted to prove to myself otherwise. No, not even that.
It’s just nice because it’s different. Like a new, worse phone, where all the entertainment value comes from that peculiar satisfying feeling of peeling the plastic wrap off the screen.
As my friends down in San Diego will inevitably bring up every time I visit, I just want different things than other people. It’s symptomatic of my life, really, that these two friends, one of which I’ve known something like 10 years now, both of whom are certainly closer and have seen more of me than almost everyone else… that even to them, my motivations are mysterious and alien.
I’m salivating, starving, going mad with hunger. So I chew bark and rocks and dirt. And over the years I grow fond of it, nostalgic, because these are my people, and even if they’re not what I need, they’re the best I’ve found.
It’s funny how much of what I felt, feel for my ex is nostalgia. Not even for our relationship, but just for the periods of my life she shared. She knows what my other idiot friend is like, she knows her way around our hometown, she remembers my teachers and what high school was like. She knew my college campus. She knew what I was like, back then.
The same goes for my aforementioned idiot friend. Probably the guys in San Diego too. They weren’t what I wanted, needed, but they’re the people I’ve ended up sharing my life with. Isn’t that special?
…
But it’s not really about that, it’s about this, the vicious question: so, what now?
I still need answers. I need to know how to fix what’s missing.
I’m fading, and I struggle to be upset about it.
If this is all there is, my sacrifices mean nothing. The deals I made with myself are off.
If this is it, then there’s no better life, there’s just this. And don’t get me wrong, ‘this’ isn’t so bad. But that’s all it is. Contentment, complacency, apathy, atrophy. When things can’t get better, they just slowly get worse. And it’ll be fine, until it’s not, and then I’ll have something to fix and I will, and it’ll be fine, and round the wheel we go.
…
And I’m saying this just to piss myself off.
Because I know, I know.
There were never any answers out where I was looking, because I wasn’t. Because this isn’t an intellectual problem, it’s an emotional problem. There’s no equation to extrapolate, no riddle to solve, no chain of logic to forge together.
Just a cliff, an edge, and choices. What do you want, and what are you willing to do to get it?
Just because they look like questions doesn’t mean there are answers to be found. The answers are made because they’re choices, and the edge is choosing. The edge is the undeniable division, when the swirling mix of maybe and I don’t know is carved into reality, for which half measures do not suffice.
See, it isn’t the choice you expect. It isn’t choosing what you want, or what you’re willing to sacrifice. That choice is the lie, the little dodge of intellectual sleight-of-hand.
There’s only one choice. There’s only ever been the one choice, the one you keep making over and over and over. We give it masks and dress it up and hide from it because it isn’t a choice. There’s a clear, transparent, inevitable right and wrong.
It’s not an intellectual problem. We don’t make the wrong choices because we aren’t smart enough to see the right ones, because we couldn’t figure it out in time.
It’s an emotional problem. We make the wrong choices because it’s a cliff, and an edge, and falling is hell. And no, in this metaphor it is not a leap of faith. In this metaphor you do not learn to fly, you don’t risk it all to find yourself rewarded.
The choice, the only choice, is whether or not to face the truth. To jump. To have your life dashed and broken on the ground. And get up, and heal. To find yourself once more on the edge. To fall endlessly down the abyss, or to stop. To draw your line and say that this is the truth I’m prepared to accept, and no more. No more, no more, because it hurts too much.
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