Been here before, didn’t say I liked it, etcetera.
It’s funny. You think the past is so far away, when all it takes is a choice, an hour, maybe a night’s sleep…
And here you are, drowning in it, the same person once again.
It’s my fault. I like who I am, was, will be. When I start to drift away… all I really know how to want is how to get back.
Get back to the person who stays up too late writing, who sits alone in the dark with his fists balled up gazing into the metaphorical abyss looking for answers that always seem to be just a little further away.
Get back to the person who matters, who things matter to, who isn’t just an echo acting out it’s last set of instructions.
Except that person stops and looks at his life every so often and asks if this is enough, if this is what I want, if there isn’t something else… and doesn’t know, can’t know, and just hurts and hurts.
The other guy, he’s alright. He’ll do his job and watch netflix and play video games and go for a drive if he gets bored. And he can probably go on forever like that, because he doesn’t think too much about tomorrow, or the day after.
…
God, I hate this.
It’s rippling beneath my skin begging to be let out into the world, but I can’t, I don’t know how.
It’s just feelings, intangible and painful, I don’t know what makes this better, I just…
I fall into my bed, soft white sheets, my asylum - the mattress, sheets, and pillows bought with my own money, lying in the apartment I pay for, lease in my name. My bastion, where the walls can come down and I don’t have to be strong enough to figure out what to do next.
Where I’m just me no matter who I am, what masks I’ve worn, what lies I tell -
I fall down and the dreams start to come, and if I’m brave enough I can remember in the morning, when I have to get up and make compromises with the world again.
And I reach out. Hands stumbling in the dark, subconscious muscle-memory grasping for something familiar and comfortable and denied my waking self.
There’s a girl.
....
The same fucking story forever, the same haunting refrain. The same brick wall crashing through my fucking brain.
I’ve been stuck in this cycle of longing and defeat for six years now. The closest I ever got was itself an impossibility - a fragment of cartography sketched onto my brain in response to a desperate divination. A real, actual place where a phantasm said I could find her.
Ending with me in a hotel room in an unfamiliar, unwelcoming town, splitting open with headaches and self-recrimination.
An impossibility, but still not enough.
And every false-start breaks my heart, and eventually the prodigal ex-girlfriend returns, and I try to tell myself it was her all along, because she’s not impossible.
She’s not impossible like the dream, like the shadow flitting through the periphery of my consciousness, leaving only the impression of wild grace and the burning impulse to chase…
What can I do, when only impossible’s enough for me now?
And I mean that, believe me, not as a rhetorical question.
I mean it, because I have to, because I don’t know I don’t know. Nothing else can matter to me like this matters, and I wish it did, I’ve tried, I’ve tried to be in love with her instead and to live in the world, to be happy having conversations in bars with semi-stranger-acquaintances, to spend time with friends and have hobbies
And it’s not that it’s bad.
It’s just that that handful of moments between waking and sleeping where I can feel it again are better than all of it, the rest is just filling time, just waiting, just hoping…
And even if it’s killing me hoping is the only time I really feel whole. The only time I feel like the person I remember well, the one I worry I’ve lost…
…
So now I sit alone and ask the world how to make miracles, because it’s this or nothing. It’s her or nothing.
And sure, I’ve found a bit of an optimistic bent as I’ve gotten older. But not like this, not when it really matters - deep down I’m still the beaten down cynic, and I know.
She’s not just going to be walking down the street I’m on one day, she’s not going to be one of the strangers a friend introduces one day, she’s not going to be one of the people sitting there one day when I look up. She’s not going to stumble across this page. And even if she was, even if she did, it’s too easy to brush by strangers without ever really bringing them into our lives.
It’s miracles or nothing, and I know what that means.
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