No, no, no. I don’t want to.
The words fester and congeal, then fade. Leaving me like this, with nothing, just a few stray pebbles rattling in a can.
You know I chose this, right? Except I chose nothing, because I don’t know what I want. So I have it, this, nothing.
…
I don’t want to go down that road again. It’s simple, it’s banal, it’s stupid. I don’t know if I want her, or someone else, someone new I haven’t found yet. I’ve tried to make up my mind too many times over the course of the last 7 years. All I can do now is try to make up my mind about her, and with the way things are between us, that just means waiting - see what she does now, now that all our cards are on the table.
…
And that leaves me here, in this strange nowhere place.
This is what’s been killing me, the ridiculous always question, the one that never stops begging for an answer:
What do I do now?
I read, I watch television, I play video games. I go places on weekends, meet new people, which is so very unlike me.
I listen to music, I sit outside on my hammock, I stare at the sky while soaking in the complex’s hot tub.
And my insides feel like a frog getting ready for a second round with the blender.
I wander through my days half-lost. Caught in the current of my routine, but easily turned around. I find myself driving to the store without remembering why, the night-air streaming through the cracks in the windows… bringing with them memories, wistful and savage and inevitable.
Night air always made me crazy in the best ways. But these days, it’s bittersweet.
…
I need answers.
I read other people’s entries, listen to sad love songs. I remember when I used to feel that way all the time - feel connected, excited, entwined with another human soul.
Once upon a time I couldn’t write prose, could only force myself out through uneven refrains, stumbling attempts at poetry. Half of everything I’d say was just the feeling, just passion, just the grasping and the calling and the need for it.
I wanted someone else so badly, so fervently and hopelessly I was half-hallucinating her.
I can’t imagine feeling that way about her, the ex, again. Not really.
But I was back there only a few months ago, I saw her, I remember - remember it stirring up everything again, remember feelings and just wanting to be close to her.
And that’s where I’m trapped.
I know, I know. There’s something there for her still, but it’s buried under so much scar tissue. It’s almost unrecognizable. Is it too ugly to redeem?
…
There was something I read about once. You know how entropy works, right?
How you can, with a little time and inclination, make a bowl out of clay. You wet it, shape it, fire it - paint it, glaze it, whatever.
And then you drop it on the floor. It shatters. The pieces chip and deform, the glaze flecks and cracks.
You could make a new bowl easily, compared to how impossible it would be to reassemble the old pieces. And even if you could find them and fit them together, you’d never make it like it was new, like it was.
There was some practice - I think it was Chinese? - where they’d repair broken pottery with gold. Put it back together, with all it’s cracks and scars present in gold.
It leaves you with something different, special in a different way… something that’s been broken. Not like it was, but something new.
…
What we had when we were together… there was some kind of magic there. Young, naive kids, who hadn’t really put themselves into something like that before. Terror and wonder and the newness of it all…
That I wanted, wanted awfully, terribly. I listened to love songs knowing they were about us, quoted her poetry that I knew had been written only for us.
But there’s no fixing that, no getting that back.
What we have now is something else, and I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if I want it.
I wonder to myself if she’s realized any of this yet. If she’s still living in denial.
I have no idea, I don’t know what’s going on in her head at all.
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