And yeah, I’m barely here, or anywhere. Standing still is how the ground gives out under you.
I’m not really okay.
My reflection, ten years younger, looks back at me wearing a smile filled with teeth. He’s standing in the undergrowth at the edge of the forest, the thick vines of Virginia Creeper and throny ropes of Japenese Barberry and Multiflora Rose that grow half a world away.
One afternoon I went into the forest, and he stayed there. Him, the part of me that could finally breathe, that could hurt and cry and ache, that could stop holding everything in, at last.
His eyes dance with glee, because he knows he was right, that leaving was a mistake, that I should have stayed.
But I know. The first sweet bite will sour. Everything good rots, and you’ll rot with it if you try to hold on.
Even if leaving means leaving a part of you… the parts that can leave is the person who survives.
It took me a long time to accept that, because I haven’t yet, not really, and can only admit it to this flickering computer screen in the middle of the night.
…
We’re sitting in a hallway. Beaten up, run down. Water damage on the carpet, everything stained some ambiguous shade of green-brown. Doors line either side as the hallway stretches into the abyss.
We’re both slouched against the wall on either side, my head’s in my hands. It’s not rock-bottom, but the quiet, comfortable despair of having no idea how much further down it is until you get there.
She’s sitting across from me. She’s not my dream girl, we’re not in love. She looks at me amused, a witness to the mess I’ve made of my life but not a participant. I guess she’s my idea of that female friend the guy always has in those movies, the one who sits them down and listens to their bullshit and says the magic cliche that fixes everything. She’s the lines from that Rise Against song - “not the kind with wings, no not the kind with halos - the kind that bring you home when home becomes a strange place.”
In short, she’s all the people I wish I could to talk to but never seemed to find in real life.
We talk about the obvious metaphor of the doors, the shitty hallway, how choosing something’s always better than nothing, than wallowing in this stagnation. She echoes things my friends said, but gentler - “you know you’ve got to choose.”
And I say my lines, that I don’t know, but it’s a lie and we’re in my head so of course we both know, and she’s polite enough not to call me on it.
Because even if I know I know, somewhere deep down - even if I know I have to know, because what we want is deeper than our bones. It’s the thing that sticks our atoms together, that hurries along the electrons that convinces our heart to beat and our blood to flow. It’s the metaphysical twitch that wiggles into electricity and propagates down my spine and through my arm into my fingers and across the keys to make these words appear.
But she just smiles, because she knows how hard it is to know something you don’t want to know, even if you know you know.
Because when things are bad where are you supposed to find the strength to make them worse? To do the hard things which are the only way things can get better.
Maybe the problem is I still have too much to lose.
She doesn’t give me any good advice, or fix anything, because she’s me and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. But the idea of the whole thing is nice, for a moment.
…
A song comes on the radio. I don’t really notice. It’s background noise, a song I’ve heard plenty of times before.
But the noise climbs through my ear canal, and for a moment twists it’s way through the folds of my gray matter into somewhere habitually undisturbed. Neurons wake up, languorously stretching action potential over dendrites.
A feeling, or the half-preserved memory of one.
I know this can’t mean enough to you, although maybe it does. I know it’s not enough, because it never has, because reaching out never satisfies the vicious bone-deep ache lodged somewhere in base of my skull, the tug that tingles down through my shoulders and across my back.
It’s been so long since I’ve even tried, since I’ve broken the pattern, the defensive wall, since I’ve just let myself speak without stopping and waiting and correcting myself.
Because I’m terrified to connect with people, because more than anything else, another person is an entire alien universe and I don’t know what’s there. The truths that I hide myself from, the lies that I loathe. A thousand reasons to be jealous or disgusted or trapped in admiration that isn’t returned. To find something I didn’t know I couldn’t live without, trapped in another person’s life. To find something I can’t bear to know exists.
Or to find nothing, nothing, a thousand million times nothing, because people can’t bear to know themselves either, and you’re all so fucking boring, so busy pretending to be empty that the pretending to be afraid of all the things that could be hiding behind those eyes are better than facing their glassy, hollow reality.
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