It all comes crashing down, sooner or later.
You can dig your hole and crawl in and let the worms set to work digesting your heart, but sooner or later they’ll pull you out.
Sooner or later someone will stumble through the membrane of mundanity you cocoon around yourself, stumbling and bleeding and screaming, while you sit there wide-eyed, wondering “what the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”
Because I’ve slowly boxed up anything that ever really mattered to me, quietly distanced myself from anything that feels like anything.
And it’s funny, you know? Because I was sure I wasn’t that person. I don’t shut my eyes to what’s in front of me. I stand by that. I let it in, and when other people fall over on my doorstep bleeding, I don’t worry about it staining the carpet, I don’t turn away.
But I can’t take it, all the time. These days… the facade I once built up to keep me from being destroyed by everyone else’s little pains, from having my own suffering dragged out of the box I’ve buried it in, let the worms take it all… the facade is paper-thin.
I can face it or I can function. I can sit awake all night staring at the walls trying to find something that’ll let me get past every new tragedy, some compromise with reality that will let me move past my outrage, betrayal, horror, or dread. Or I can go to bed early enough to wake up in the morning, and I can do my work, and I can keep to myself in the empty hours, keep away.
Most days, weeks, months, I get into my routine. I function well. I move on with my life, keep supporting myself so I can keep making my own choices and moving on.
Sometimes, for just a couple hours, I’ll write on here. And it won’t mean much, just an echo, just a memory of something acting itself out. The action alone, empty, without any real substance behind it.
But sooner or later. Sooner or later something will break through.
And I want it to. I miss it.
…
I’m still in some kind of broken love affair, not with my ex but with the person I was after we broke up.
That was the beginning of the end for the facade, you understand. I’d let someone in, for the first time. I couldn’t pretend anymore, not really. All my secrets, spilling out.
It was funny in a desperate sort of way, for a while. I just didn’t care anymore. I said everything. To anyone.
I was hobbling around, the wreckage of my life trailing behind me drips and puddles. And I didn’t care who it happened to get on.
I remember sitting in a Friendly’s, at the mall, possessed by this manic sort of misery, alternating between eating some enormous abomination of ice-cream and syrup and bananas and scribbling cartoons on napkins. Stupid little things with captions like “The octopus is sad because love is a lie,” a frowning T-Rex with a speech bubble “She never loved you,” a sun saying “everything you ever love will die.”
The friends I was with spent a lot of time exchanging worried glances and watching me closely around sharp objects.
Everything was so wrong. The jagged edges of my life screamed with pain at every sensation. Every sight and sound, every heart breaking song. Sunrise and sunset and waking up in the morning and remembering everything all over again.
…
I never healed. I figured out how to get along with my life. I got closure and perspective and all those things that are supposed to help you deal. I dealt with the causes, I forgave my ex, I got my life back to normal.
Sometimes I wonder if it really was about the break up. Or if it was just incidental.
The walls came down, and when I was with her that was okay because I could believe her when she said she’d be there. Because I could share this ocean of misery and despair with her, and she knew how to make it better, we just needed a little more time to get there.
And it wasn’t that I was so hurt by her betrayal or getting cheated on.
It was that I was left alone with all this again, and the answer I thought I’d found in her was a lie, and I just didn’t know what to do now.
And fuck me, I still don’t.
…
Maybe I’m just broken inside. Maybe it’s the price of trying to be honest with yourself and see things for what they really are is letting it murder you every day. Maybe it’s both, maybe the things that matter to me are just the things that hurt.
Death doesn’t bother me much. Lots of the stupid problems people have don’t touch me in the least.
No, it’s the special, personal kinds of tragedies.
Sites like this, opendiary before it… this is how I get my fix, when I’m desperate enough to go looking. Usually I’ll just glance at the headlines, write on my own, avoid any kind of contact besides the uncertain, indirect contact of wondering if someone else is reading what I’m writing for the same reason.
But then sometimes I’ll go searching. Even here, where people can open themselves up as deeply as they’d want to, most of it is nothing. Empty words, plastic problems, descriptions of events of days without meaning or purpose. People writing entries the way they’d talk to their mother over the phone, or a work acquaintance at lunch, or anyone at all, afraid even here to let the dark stuff out.
But sooner or later, it’s always there to be found. The real stuff, the vicious truths, people bleeding out on a webpage because there’s nowhere else left to go.
And it kills me. I want to run and hide. I want to tell myself it’s probably fiction. I disconnect myself and turn off the computer and forget.
It’s perfect, after all. It’s just a website. And people who are really letting it out here, there’s usually reasons they’re doing their bleeding here and not somewhere else.
It’s probably got something to do with being hurt when trying to open up. With being able to say something without having to talk to the person you’re telling after. Like abused animals, desperate for contact, running at the first sudden move. Or maybe I’m just projecting.
In any case, it’s easy to stay away. It’s much easier than getting close, the few times I’ve been tempted. I have a curious sort of friend I met on OD a long time ago. We’d exchange a few notes in a week and disappear for months, or years. Since the site shut down, I almost never hear from her, and then out of nowhere this person who’s basically a stranger to me will send me a long email about the most desperate struggles of her life. And disappear just after.
It’s great. But strange. Like the ghost of an actual friendship. It’s easy to forget about ghosts, to not see them.
…
I’m writing this because I’m moving. Because the little apartment I’ve lived in alone for the last 3 and a half years, that’s sheltered me from the world, is being taken away.
And everything’s different anyway, but it’s one more thing, and I didn’t think it mattered until I realized I’d been sitting in my empty no-longer-bedroom staring at the all-too-familiar walls and feeling something I wasn’t ready to admit was pain.
I didn’t realize I’d been stalling packing things because once I did they’d be gone and everything’s so comfortable and familiar, I’m safe here, but I can’t stay.
Not like grad school’s going to last forever either. Won’t be that much longer until I’m dragged somewhere else.
And I hate that I’m like this. My life feels so heavy. Like I just need to let go, like I need to find a cliff where I’m one step away from freedom.
I miss flying into Dublin with no plan and a lonely planet guide book to the whole of Western Europe in my backpack and just going wherever I wanted.
But it’s all the same thing. Running, or staying and hiding. Looking everywhere, inside and out, but never finding.
I could be a thousand different people but they’d all just be different kinds of me.
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