Sooner or later fear always turns into a cage you have to hate your way out of. Sooner or later not being able to move forward becomes worse than facing the world you dread.
Sooner or later we’ve all got to pay for the things we’ve done and won’t do.
…
I argue with memories and dream about simple, mundane things.
The nice moments with friends that never happened, the gentle childhood memories you fall back on when times get tough. The kind I don’t seem to have. The time when my ex was just a girl I was friends with, because we never were, because we can’t figure out how to be now.
My life feels like an old routine I was startled in the middle of. I can’t remember what I was doing when I got interrupted, or what I was supposed to do next. I remember things were supposed to be feel natural, how hours flowed from one to the next.
But now they just seem to sputter and lurch. Does anyone know how to drive this thing?
…
My head echoes with questions I never got to ask. With answers I never got - patchy, half-formed things I’ve had to stitch together from the little bits of wisdom I’ve scavenged together over the years.
My life is defined by this absence, all the things I thought life was supposed to contain.
Friends, not the people who you meet and talk to and part with, but the ones who want to know how you’re doing, the ones who want to talk because they like you and not because they’re lonely.
Romance, not the kind full of holes and questions and nights staring at the ceiling wondering if you really like her or if you’re just lonely, the kind you can’t help but feel, the kind that sweeps you along whether you want it to or not.
Nights filled with insightful conversations and people with that gleam of nobility in their eye, the ones who know that life is an endless battle against compromise and excuses, the kind that are who they are because they want to be, and not just because they’re scared.
God, this is starting to sound way too Catcher in the Rye.
…
I know it was never going to be the way I thought. I didn’t know that all the stories people told were how they wanted life to be, and not the way it was.
And no one ever talks about this.
About how little any of it seems to have mattered, about all the people and places and things you thought could become a great story that ended up just being nothing. A scribble jotted down and tossed away.
I’m not a nihilist, but I can see the appeal. It’s not that there’s nothing, it’s just that there’s so little and the world’s so big and everyone’s already scrabbling for every piece they can find. Glory, affection, uniqueness… anything that seems like it matters.
I hate talking about this stuff, because before it felt impossible to stop until I did.
Life felt conquerable back then. Like all the terrible shit, the endless banality of it all, was just a monster to be challenged and defeated. Instead I sat around a battlefield for years before I realized I was in the wrong metaphor.
…
That’s not quite right though, is it?
No, I thought I’d won. I thought I’d beat the dragon and rescued the princess. I’d stood firm and resolute for the appointed time, and she said she loved me for it, and when all her issues reared her ugly head I knew she just needed me to show her how to beat them.
I knew we were going to be victorious so I laughed at the danger. I knew this was how the story went and I kept right on living it as reality marched on behind me.
Until one day I turned around and my loss was so total I couldn’t even hurt, I had to parcel it out in chunks just small enough to eventually recover from over months.
I’ve told this story so many times and I hate it. I hate that matters, that it ever mattered.
I hate that I still don’t know how it ends, because ever since then it’s just dragged on and on, and I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next.
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