Writing every night… a bad sign. But a comfortable sort of release. There’s always a blank page, somewhere, waiting for you. There was a time in my life where every moment was distilled into a simple equation of whether or not the amount of pain and panic I was experiencing was enough to handle. And if it wasn’t, I wrote. For hours, several times a day. I didn’t always feel better, but I did survive.
This doesn’t feel like that. This feels like… making up for lost time. Like I waited too long, like there are things that I need to remember to say, like there’s a lot I need to remind myself about.
It also feels like facing old fears too long neglected. You know, that sickly feeling of weakness and despair from letting demons loom too long, from hiding and not acting and wondering if you’ve just lost your nerve. Some times, these things can’t be helped. Sometimes it’s the wrong time, and that’s okay. But sometimes it becomes hard to figure out when the wrong time is supposed to turn into the right one.
It’s hard to let the facade fall. Hard to open up, hard to expose the things about myself I keep hidden and safe from outside judgement or intervention. Same old song, I’m sure everyone’s familiar. But familiar pains are no less poignant.
So, I’m alone, and no matter how well accustomed I become to that, there’s still dimensions of it which are terrifying. The ominous threat of slowly losing all the threads that still connect me to the greater world, of alone deepening to real isolation, of things just slowly getting worse with no one else to reach for… it’s not a totally rational fear, it’s still something born more from panic than sense, but it’s never really lost it’s bite. In some ways this is the price for being who I am, this is the price of many things I’ve chosen, and though I don’t regret those choices I still wonder if there’s something I missed, something I did wrong.
Hell, the real choices, the deep ones, those you make every day. I could change tomorrow if I knew what I was doing wrong.
But, well. Sometimes things are just hard, even though your choices were right. Sometimes the only way out is compromise, an idea with many edges. Compromise, synonyms: agreement, understanding, settlement, deal, bargain. Compromise, synonyms: undermine, weaken, damage, harm.
I’ve seen it go badly too many times to take it lightly. For small things, maybe, but those aren’t the choices that lie at the root of my loneliness. No, those choices are large indeed. It would be a struggle to even recognize myself after. And that’s the root of the problem, I suppose. How much being true to yourself is worth.
Truth is, when I’m not panicking I’m not terribly bothered. When I stop living in some possible dark future, when I look at where my life’s at I’m quite content.
Not that content is always enough. Stagnation is death. Life, distilled to it’s most basic characteristics, might be defined simply as the presence of positive change. Everything else decays. Only life grows.
But it’s not that everything has to get better, that I need everything about my life to improve incrementally or some similarly unimaginative shit. A man cannot serve so many masters without failing most of them.
Sometimes I think the most important thing about a person is what they want more than anything else. Of course, if you ask them, they usually either don’t know or lie and won’t tell you. Maybe it’s easier, not to know - easier to take the best of what’s offered, to not be consumed by the desire for something unobtainable. Easier, also, to miss opportunities, to be cheated by inaction out of the things we really want. Can you even process, right now, how many different things you do just in the next 10 hours? How far away you could get, the things you could set in motion. In 10 hours you could probably be in a place you’ve never heard of, falling in love with the wrong person. You could set fires bigger than any you’ve ever seen, you could destroy the life you have now completely. You could meet a friend who will change your life, you could realize something while doing nothing at all that you’ll remember forever. You could stay right where you are and watch a new series on netflix and cry into your pillow at the end. You could have a perfectly ordinary night or day, which is not something to be undervalued; a good life is made of many of those used well, isn’t it?
So in the wake of so many choices, what do we pick? And across the long trajectory of our years, the reasons that shape the choices of every moment resolve themselves into a simple question: what do you want, more than anything else?
What do we live for?
I remember too clearly the first time I had to deal with that question. It was difficult. But I was somewhere I felt safe, at peace. I was caught in a rare moment, the kind that hurts to even allow yourself into. It feels to fragile, to precious. Too easily broken. What if you really let yourself free, let your guard down and let yourself really feel the world around you, and what you saw was monsters and pain. What if everything was horrible, and you let yourself really feel that? Nothing can save you. All there is to do is treat the damage, and hope it’s manageable enough to keep on going.
But the whole thing was upon me before I really knew what I was doing. And everything was okay. Everything was alright.
Which, when you think about, is it’s own challenge. If everything is right with the world, what do you strive for? For a moment I was utterly right with my world, and for once it wasn’t inertia or some ambiguous fear of death moving me forward. My life could have stopped right there; in a very real way it did.
So what did I come back for?
There was this girl in my class. I remember the thought clearly, “I want to see how that plays out.” I wanted to see what would happen, wanted to figure out what the things I was feeling were. Of all the things I’d seen from life so far, that was the singular thing.
It feels rather cliche, to be honest. Frankly with the amount people go on about love the word’s become rather boring. I don’t mean to say I loved the girl, no. It was the whisper of something else, the first hint of something deeper. And as I’ve said, it wasn’t really about the specific girl.
And of course, now, I’m struck with all the stupid feelings of embarrassment, of self-doubt. It’s so easy to make yourself appear strong or clever or interesting, when you’re wearing a mask and pretending. It’s so hard not to feel small, exposed, and foolish when you’re honest, subject to the truth with no excuse, embellishment, escape.
But, I must remind myself, I can’t concern myself too much with whatever someone reading this might think. This is for me, and a big part of the reason I sat down to right tonight was because I need this. Need to remember myself honestly, without editing out the parts that make me feel weak.
My whole world shattered and stopped, and the deep truth of my life revealed: I want love. Love, such a poorly used, often abused word, it hardly means anything anymore.
What is love to me? It’s not just a relationship, as I learned. It’s not being able to trust someone, or feeling welcomed in their arms. It’s not feeling cared for, or being liked. It’s not being relied upon, respected, admired. It’s not sex, or passion, or excitement.
Sometimes I wonder if it feels slow and sorrowful. Bitter and dark.
Our love stories always have conflict. As though the only way to make an observer feel it is indirectly, as though it is only apparent in the chaos it creates when two people in love have to fight for one another.
But that’s just a problem about observation, not the thing itself.
I wish I could put it into words, because then I could put her into words. Because at the end of the day love isn’t it’s own thing, not really. It’s something between two people, something in them and of them.
But I’ve never met her. All I have is a ghost, the ideas inferred by the pieces that are missing. A theory, a hope. Not enough.
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