It doesn’t have to happen because it already happened. My love, I wish I understood. It’s always just happening. It has always already happened. Yes or no is just a question because you asked. The honest answer is yes but also no. It changes faster than the literal speed of light. Much faster than I can explain. Indeed, time is a construct. We have taken the arbitrary distance this planet travels around the sun and called it a year. We measured the distance this globe makes during one revolution and called it a day. Then we divided that day into arbitrary parts, and divided those parts into smaller parts. Then we kept dividing. There is nothing inherently true about a nanosecond that we did not arrogantly declare to be true. What is has always been whether or you or I bothered to notice.
Stubborn thorns
Here’s another irony. When I’m calm the things I say cause the most chaos. I’m just riffing. I like how words feel in my mouth. My girlfriend called me disgusting over some bad poetry. Feel the divine, dear. I can change if it helps you love me. I can’t change the word no. That one is a stubborn thorn.
Vocabulary is a handicap
There was an emptiness with her. It was a squalid, bleak emptiness without her. She prompted existential questions. Is this it? And then I found the lack of her prompts troubling. Who the fuck uses the word squalid? Who even knows what that means? Vocabulary is a handicap. You can’t feel something if you can’t think it. But what if you can think of everything? Walk in my parade for this block.
The ghost of you
The ghost of you is horrific and often returns to me in dreams. Even to this day. Even last night. And so it can’t be real. You in my dreams must represent something else. There is nothing visceral left between us. Any physical pleasure your body brought mine has been forgotten. The mind is a terrible thing to taste and even harder to erase.
Until something goes wrong
I wish to think that we’re not just slaves to dopamine and serotonin levels. The cynic in me recognizes chemicals and their resulting imbalances. The part of me still capable of tricking the rest cries, “Love!” I listen to songs or I read poems and the words shuck and jive, as they should, but sometimes one or three land a punch to the celiac plexus and still manage to draw my breath. Just like the literal and metaphoric heart, the diaphragm is a muscle that might work forever without your notice. Until something goes wrong.
Hold it
Now that you have done it, see if you can hold it. What are you really losing? And anything you lose, anything you feel about this is completely within yourself, and therefore completely within your control. The actual pain is long gone. Nothing you do can ever turn that past into a win–nothing short of a miracle anyway. And thereʻs no point in making her lose too. Sheʻs doing a pretty good job of fucking up her life without you. You canʻt save her, especially because she doesn’t want you to, but you can save yourself.
Donʻt feel bad, thereʻs nothing to feel bad about. She will only recreate the worst of you in her mind no matter what really happened. She will keep giving the benefit of the doubt to the people just using her to fuck.
You are real; there is no taking away what you are and what you’ve done. It cannot be cleansed. You cannot change anymore. If this ever has a chance she would need to be the one that has to change. I swear I swear I swear I hope Iʻm wrong, but I’ve been right with everything else.
Full color at high speed with no filter
I’ve asked myself what it is, and I guess it’s more a kind of darkness. There was enough distraction when I was younger and preoccupied in the establishment of a life, that I was able to ignore it, with situational exceptions. Other proclivities like sex and alcohol sometimes made it feel like there wasn’t even anything to worry about. What I’ve come to learn is that unhealthy sexual shenanigans (if they even exist), or alcohol, or sometimes drugs, were not in and of themselves the disease, but were, in fact, the telling symptoms of something far more dangerous that was just waiting for me with its gangrenous soul, and sad, sad heart. But, oh so pretty to look at.
I guess my misguided attempts to always live in full color at high speed with no filter, and in possession of a ferocious, single-minded intensity I sometimes used as a means to those ends, my life became double-edged, semi-charmed, yet, more and more, self-destructive. I can also say that I’ve been to more cities than I can count on Trip Advisor know more about the subtle nuances of the human condition than I had previously thought was possible, felt deeper feelings (good and bad) than anyone I know not suffering with a serious mental illness, and been in situations that I know most people will never see, want to visit, or even believe exist. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself in a random house or hotel room at three in the morning with some random Mary Magdalene, contemplating what to do next and thinking to myself, “How in the fuck did I end up at this moment, in this place, watching what I’m watching? What’s my play here?”) But everything bad that happened was happening too often to be a coincidence. Is still happening in some respects. When the darkness finally rose above, it came swifter and stayed longer than I thought was possible, and consequently damaged and collaterally damaged much more than I could pretend not to care about; everything in its reach got and gets caught in its velvet web
The argument can be made that my experiences have helped make me the person that I am. And for the most part that’s a good thing. I love madly, forgive quickly, feel empathy deeply, laugh hard when I’m happy or sad, make others laugh and smile, and easily make real connections with people. But there’s an opposite side to that same coin that doesn’t sound like charisma, though it has as its source the same dark energy. I catch myself crying spontaneously at almost nothing, hurt intensely with an emotional paralysis, wander the streets lost and lonely, and strike back hard with words when I feel that I’ve been damaged intentionally. Yet I know that I don’t do evil things because I’m not inherently evil. I take action that looks evil not with premeditation, but by following the paths of least resistance and instant gratification, without regard for any consequences, good or bad, until they happen.
Someone I love dearly spoke of me once to another person I loved dearly (when I wasn’t there) saying to her, “He’s super smart, kind, and engaging when he’s in the mood, and seductive as he wants to be. But there is a dark side.” At the time I was mad at that spilled, heretical revelation. But it’s difficult, disingenuous, and ultimately pointless to speak anger to truth.
Specific unmet needs
I trust my dreams in a way I don’t trust myself. In my head, I am a pathological liar. I know better. My dreams know better. It eschews pronouncements. And instead suggests a tone and other vagaries. The familiar hurt that doesn’t shake. Still hours next to you. Sleep finally dies. In the dark. Eyes closed, the feeling remains. I can hear your breath. I can feel your naked skin. They fail to reassure. “Your touch repulses me.” Only spoken in a dream sounds like something you might say. If you weren’t holding back. If you didn’t think this way is easier. And only temporary. You turn your back to me and lie flat on your stomach. “It’s how I like it.” But it’s not. That’s not how it ever was when it really was how you liked it. I wonder how you were two months ago. When you were looking for it. And how it would be if you didn’t still have specific unmet needs.
Evil Dead 2 again gives life lessons
So many things in pop culture, and so many things that surround me currently, have exacerbated my normal obsession with mortality. Which, counterintuitively, has made me thankful for the life I have left. There are so many things I’ve been mad about for so long now, and so much damage I’ve done to my life by honoring that anger. Until relatively recently I believed it to be righteous, when, in fact, it was self-righteous. It’s like that scene in Evil Dead 2 when Ash thinks he’s choking an evil, undead antagonist, but when he looks over his shoulder into a mirror he’s actually choking himself.
I’m grateful though for the things I have and have had, even if some of them, at least for now, are lost. I’m grateful for the times that life could have punished me, but instead, let me off with a warning. I’m even grateful for the times I wasn’t guilty but was treated as if I was. I’ve learned the hard way how to deal with these situations should they arise in the future, and they will.
My son-shared birthday is next Tuesday so as a present to myself I’ve been watching videos of him and his sister from the impossibly cute and precious ages between three and five when I was lucky enough to be a daily part of their lives.
I am melancholic, but I am grateful.
Dead leaves and the dirty ground
Love, or any of these other huge emotional factors that matter so much in our lives often involve a chosen, shared cognitive dissonance that manifests in dysfunction, sadness, and pain. Why do we do this? Why do we spend so much energy looking in one direction when we’re running in the other?
The dead leaves. The clutter. The things that seem to matter so much at the moment. Why do we have self-awareness, but are unable to step out of ourselves? Why the impatience? Why the impotence?