This is what I wanted. This isn’t how I thought it would be. This isn’t what I wanted. I’m surprised, but it turned out alright. I didn’t know I wanted this. I don’t know what I want, but I know that I want.
I don’t know if it’s a girl or the words in a song or the right configuration of electrical signals in my brain. I don’t know if it’s money and a stable job or the courage to just live on a train running across cities, states, countries, and other people’s lives.
I don’t know if it’s inner peace or someone to fight with forever. I don’t know if it’s the secrets of the universe or just a really interesting question.
I don’t know if it’s just a little bit of chaos, just life as usual with weird shit thrown in, so I never have to worry about getting to the point in my life where things stop changing, where I’m just rotting in a room alone because I got bored with the friends I have and no one new and interesting has shown up. If it’s just an excuse to stay on my toes, to be ready for an adventure, even if the adventure’s fucking terrible and my life’s worse afterwards.
I like peace and quiet, after. But it’s been three years and creeping on a fourth, and there’s just been nothing. New people, new faces, but they’re all so insufferably mundane. Drinking on the weekends, what team did the most points, getting married, having babies, working.
I’ve grown up a lot, sure. It’s been a challenge learning to live on my own somewhere new. I’m better at dealing with people, I have more self confidence, I’m better in all those little ways people seem to think are important.
Basically, I play nicer with others. Yeah for me.
But I’m always going to be a bitter, hateful malcontent. And I’m realizing that this isn’t what I want, that playing nice and playing house do absolutely jack shit for me.
I want to fall in love, and I want it to be hard. I want it to be savage and vicious, because I think that’s who I am, and I’m tired of feeling like that’s some kind of wound that needs to be healed so I can become someone better. Someone who isn’t me.
I fucking like me.
I want a reason to go out and do crazy shit. I want to be scared and terrified and pushed to my limits.
After the break up, the one that tore my poor, naive little heart apart, I was a fucking shadow of a person. I was a simpering little pile of nothing wasting away because she didn’t want to be with me anymore, hanging on her every little lie hoping she’d change her mind and come back to me after she was done getting railed by the abusive prick she promised she wouldn’t sleep with.
After the shit finally started to hit the fan, I went away for a week. The Adirondack mountains of upstate New York, miles of wilderness, and a million bright stars in the night sky. And 10 feet of snow, base, -30 at night.
The cold was vicious and bleak, needles in your veins and I fucking loved it. A few hours in the dark, away from the group, and I could be dead. Or a step through a crack in the ice, a slip too close to the cliff’s edge (we climbed some mountains too, because why the fuck not?).
So I spent my nights digging out the fire pit, and lit bonfires in the howling cold. So I held my head under the freezing water when I chipped a hole in the ice over the lake, because there was a competition and everyone else was too scared, and I beat their fucking record. 30 seconds, because it stopped even feeling cold after 20, and I figured that another 10 there’d be an ambulance involved. I never really felt the cold the same way after that.
And I came back alive, invigorated, psychologically shattered but holding together out of pure, reckless spite. I hated my way through the next month, and when my ex tried to call again (her new boy-toy was gone for the weekend and she just needed someone to talk to) I laughed it off and moved on with my life.
I want that feeling back. Sure, it’s nice to feel big and strong, confident and in control, but you know what? I was at my best when I my heart was broken and everything tasted like ashes, because it was a fucking struggle to get out of bed every morning, because I couldn’t just go about my routine like a zombie, through inertia. Every meal was a struggle, I couldn’t sit still long enough to listen to some self-important asshole professor lecture.
Every day was a fatal question - do I want to keep doing this? What the fuck am I living for? And every hour was a bloody victory against entropy, ennui, despair. My life was a battlefield, and as pathetic as I felt I was never stronger than I was then.
And now everything is so fucking easy. My life is comfortable, calm, peaceful, serene. I’m afraid I’m getting boring. When I have problems, they’re not even interesting problems. I need to do more work on this project, I need to present my results at a conference, there’s an unexpected problem here.
My life’s a well crafted routine, and I started panicking a couple months ago when it started to slow down, when I started to reach the edges and I couldn’t sleep walk through it anymore.
I caught feelings again, I remember what it’s like to want and hurt and be dissatisfied.
I mean, seriously - the only reason I let my ex back in my life was for the drama. So I could catch a rerun of the heartache, because I’m getting tired of waiting for a new episode, and so much time has past that it was new and exciting and different. She’s different, she wants to try again, she misses me - oh yes, tell my ravaged heart another sweat lie, so I can find out how much stronger I am for all my scars. Remind me again what it’s like to yearn for lost love, remind me what it’s like to hope that things could work out, that things could be different and better.
And hey, we didn’t really break up properly the first time. She just left, you know, and we never got the chance to see if we were really compatible if we tried it out. Never got a chance to fight like a real couple and break up over mutual differences, which has been a new adventure all by itself.
Never could get myself to care about her the way I did the first time, though. That wild, reckless passion, the kind that knows how badly it’s going to hurt - even if everything goes right. The kind that smiles with it’s teeth - “On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?” “Will he offer me his teeth?” And so on, till the blood starts to flow.
Mmm, but I miss the taste of blood. The way it feels when it really hurts, your hands wrapped around each other’s hearts, when every misstep is mortal.
I don’t think I want my heart broken. After all, that means it’s over. No, I want it to hurt and I want the feeling of sweetness after. And I want it to hurt again, and again, I want something sweet enough to keep hurting for.
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