When you’re numb; cold, or scabbed over. Maybe just calloused, adapting to hard surfaces and sharp edges to ease the everyday.
We tell these lies about ourselves, because the truth is quiet stillness, patient and waiting, staring from behind our own eyes. Revealing nothing, waiting to be revealed.
We tell these lies because nature abhors a vacuum, because something rushes in to fill the emptiness of ignorance, because when you don’t know what you want anything is something and motion brings change and the hope that somehow, accidentally, you’ll get it right this time.
The numbness is the lie, the abuse that stems from ignorance. From all the little things we do to ourselves that hurt. Not the big hurts, the dramatic, romantic sorrows - the little bumps, bruises, and scrapes. The slow accumulation of strain, unnoticed until you wake up one morning sore and sprained, without understanding why.
…
Numb.
I fidget with old memories, turning them over in my hands idly. Once every edge cut deep enough to scar, once the least misstep was fatal. But now they’re well worn, and my fingers know from long experience the paths safely through.
I leaf through, looking again at the odd words that stood out inexplicably, at the significant moments. Some were obvious then, the air rippling with their gravity and weight, every words carved into the scene like chiseling into marble. Some only assumed importance in retrospect, the subtle passages dripping with missed foreshadowing, with hints at revelations not yet ripe enough to taste.
I wonder if I could forgive her, I guess at the secrets she’s still keeping. I play with her motivations like pieces to a puzzle, trying to glean some deeper insight into the person underneath.
I could forgive her, of course. It’s easy to forgive, it’s easy to trust. If you’re willing to get hurt. And oh, I am.
But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t last, whatever comfort’s left for either of us to offer. We’re just old memories, rushing in to fill the present absence. Because nature abhors a vacuum.
I like her, I do. I care about her, but not enough. Enough for a few months, maybe longer if times were good, but not enough for forever.
I try to convince myself otherwise, try to justify the moment and ignore the future.
But I know. We walked some secret paths together, shared things with each other never shared with another. It felt like romance, like magic, like fate. But where I walk now, she can’t follow.
I sacrificed everything to keep going further. She sacrificed what little we’d shared for something else. Now, she thinks it was a mistake, regrets the choice, wonders if she can’t go back…
But there’s the old story about the rivers you never cross twice, and the paths we take in life are paved with them. Entropy; what is done cannot be undone.
…
It’s a petty amusement, toying with those ideas like this. It’s ugly, messy, the wrong kind of story. It lacks form and structure.
In the right story, the boy meets the girl, they get together and end tragically. The boy learns from it. He looks back with clarity, he understand what happens.
Then, he either regrets it and sets out to make things right and win her back, or he realizes it was for the best and moves on. Acceptance, resolution, and the all-important clarity of purpose.
And I did, I had it. I have it, in fact. It’s not really the kind of thing you lose.
No, it’s the kind of thing that’s always with you. The kind of thing you carry around every day.
At first, it’s a proud reminder. It stands out in the day to day routine, bright and shining. It’s new. And it means things are going to be different.
And maybe they are, a little, for a while. But then different becomes the same, and you’ve had it for long enough you stop noticing all the time. It’s still there, of course. You try to hold on to it’s importance, but it’s getting harder to.
Really, why bother? It’s not going away. It’s safe, secure. This is just life now. And there’s other battles to be won.
Then one day years later you idlly wonder where it’s gotten to. You know it’s around, somewhere, though it’s gotten buried under the detritus of a living life. Maybe stored somewhere safe and out of the way, although where exactly’s shifted enough you’re not quite sure. You’d have to go looking to be sure. But you’re not even worried enough to go looking for it.
There’s other suitable metaphors. Purpose is a heavy thing, you can’t carry it around forever. Or it’s tool that grows dull and worn with use.
…
It hurt like hell when she broke up with me. It wasn’t the worst, though. Afterwards, we sort of made up, we talked about how she needed space to figure herself out. We met up again and it wasn’t like we were together but it was hopeful, good. Really, it was better. It was tense and dramatic, a tragic romance. I must go now to face my demons, will you wait for me? Oh yes, my love.
The worst was a week later. The phone call, the tone of her voice. Trying to be cute, trying to be light, trying to pretend like she wasn’t saying what she was saying, like it was this inevitable thing that just had to happen and of course I knew it was coming anyway. “Oh you know me…” She was his girlfriend, the guy who she hadn’t been cheating on me with.
The break up had taken me by surprise, I’d cried and went numb with shock after. It was quick and overwhelming. But that one… I don’t even remember how I reacted, right after. Just a vague feeling that it was terrible in a way I couldn’t immediately feel. It was poison rotting me out from inside. It was the massive crack carving through bone - outwardly nothing changed, but inside I was destroyed. It just took a few more nudges for me to break completely.
Nothing in my life was ever as bad as those two moments. The moment the first naive fantasy of young love shattered, and the moment I realized that the budding hope that something better, something real, might be salvaged was stillborn.
But the body is capable of incredible feat of healing. And the will is indomitable, compared. The will can endure all things, and find itself again, whole. And I found myself again.
Then there’s an afternoon in an unremarkable town in Massachusetts. Idyllic New England all around. My car’s parked in front of an old church, and I’m walking back from a satisfying meal, eaten alone, from a small corner shop in the town center. There’s a little pond with it’s token ornamental fountain and ducks off to the side. The buildings are old, solid, and familiar in a soothing way. The sunshine is the sleepy haze of the late afternoon, and there is not a cloud in the sky.
I’m walking, and in a moment my fist will clench, my step will stutter, and an impossible cloud will peak over the treetops bordering the town to deliver a handful of drops of rain which will be the only solace left to me in all the world.
Because suddenly the completeness of my despair overtakes me, suddenly I’m screaming for the ache of an unstoppable emptiness. My consciousness is a hollow cavern in which I echo forever. I make no outward sound because there is nothing to say, no way to translate what I’m feeling to a world outside my private hell. I alone bear witness, as it should be.
All of this, because she wasn’t there. I knew she wouldn’t be. The trip up to that town was the hardest thing I’d ever done, because part of me knew it was for nothing. That it wasn’t about finding her, that it was about the moment I was brought to. That I knew I had to do it anyway, because of course I did.
I came back from there as someone else.
Shortly after I drove across the country to start a new life. I expected new hope, new opportunity, change. I thought what happened wasn’t a big deal. I forgot.
But my new life was stillborn, and I was hollow. Too many nights I could only get to sleep cradling my only comfort, my only hope for something better - that if I couldn’t keep going, I could kill myself, and be free.
I kept going because there was nothing else to do. Each step forward was mechanical and passionless. I played with whatever was put in front of me, did whatever was demanded of me.
And that brought me here, to now. I didn’t find myself again. Slowly I start to remember pieces of him, of what he was like. I remember the things that happened to him, endlessly, like a ghost reliving his dying moments. I wonder at them, trapped in a recurring cycle.
Some piece is missing, some fork in the circular trail I’ve worn that my eyes skip over, that I can’t bring myself to see. Or not. Or this is just the best I can manage, better than sitting in one place, because at least this way there’s the illusion of motion.
It’s been five years, and still the question I chose for a name when I was far too young to have seen any of this coming haunts me. A lasting silence?
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