The heat’s finally starting to relent, the season shift.
And like always I change with it…
The summer makes me into a daylight zombie. Everything’s so bright and it feels like there’s too much to be done; months blur into periods of action punctuated by guilt for not having made enough out of the time.
Oh, but the fall is quiet and somber, without the jagged chill of winter. Not that the scorched hellhole of Southern California really knows anything about winter. Fall is shade and sharp breezes, and here it last for 6 months, tangled up with spring. And this I do not mind.
I’ve been hiding from my shadows in the sunlight. Chasing the quiet out with noise. My heartbeat’s an impatient march. I’m afraid, and I know it, but I still don’t want to face it. And it’s killing me, because I know better, because I built my whole life against the lies people tell themselves to get to sleep at night. The tragedies of the everyday, the ‘pale deaths which men miscall their lives.’
I guess that’s the funny thing about sacrifice, the more you’ve given up, the less there is left. The harder it is to let those last few drops fall.
I thought she was my whole heart once, and even though I know we’re broken, I keep holding on.
And my thoughts are so tangled up, mangled. I’ve spent so long trying to figure out if she’s what I want I’m not even sure what that means anymore. But what if I think of it from this angle? Oh, she never told me that before, how does that change anything?
I’ve lost touch with how I feel about it. And I’d only be lying to myself if I tried to pretend it wasn’t on purpose.
How do you tell the difference between a lie you want to believe and a truth you’re afraid to accept?
It’s easy.
I want to believe it, because the deep, closed off place between my ribs still remembers her, and hasn’t ever really had anything else. And it’s so afraid of having nothing but nothing, forever.
And just the same, I’m afraid to accept it because I still remember. Because the damage she did is the kind that doesn’t heal, the kind that just changes you. Because I can never be the person I was when we were together again.
It’s easy to tell because neither of those things really matter.
Either the cat’s dead or it isn’t, and the rest is just me making up excuses to not look in the box. Which is stupid, because observer-dependent physics doesn’t exist, and the truth doesn’t wait for us to catch up.
I’m so bored of this back and forth but the simple, embarrassing truth is that my heart’s still five years old and stupid, and it doesn’t seem to give a shit.
I see her and I’m all a flutter and excited, I look for reasons to keep her close and bring us closer. I leave and forget, my heart wanders through fantasies and pictures and memories of people I never really got to know.
The heart wants what the heart wants, and mine doesn’t want to grow up.
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