Out of time.

Maybe it will matter ten years away, maybe it will make you think differently. Maybe you will make better choices because of this, or maybe even you will drown in the narrative of acting like you are full of innocence. Drape yourself in the compliments at 2am so that you can wear them on your shoulder and hope that it re writes a pleasant demeanor on your face. It’s easy to slip away and color by numbers those decisions and figure “oh yeah, well – as long a I come out looking ok that’s all that matters”. Because that is all we really are. Pasting and erasing our impressions over people we don’t even give two shits for. I am so beyond associating myself around this mentality anymore. I am so tired of having to justify your actions and that point of view, when I know it’s diabolically wrong. After hearing you define over and over the explicit behaviors you hated so well, then to see you go and mirror them exactly, finitely and without hesitation – I will never understand how you sleep with that painted on you. That is one expensive mask, and I wish I were that much of a superhero to have one of my own. I’m better with being labelled lost, bitter, angry and unreasonable than wearing the moniker of malfeasance.

One of the worst feelings I have ever felt is being repeatedly chastised for wanting more time.

It means not having to think.

I told myself today that if I have learned anything in thirty years of dealing with relationships it is that one day there will eventually come a happening that will spin you off your rails and decisively change you forever. It’s something that will shake your walls hard enough that every future decision you make, will pivot off of this one event. In most situations I have rallied through, it’s hard for me to believe that someone really understands the concept of loving until they have honestly ruined it themselves. Like how can I know how something works unless I tear it all apart and dissect it, to learn whats inside. It’s until you realize, and have this conversation with yourself – looking back, and saying out loud “what the fuck was I thinking?” and “what the fuck I have done?“. It’s really until you feel the ramifications and finality of your decisions spiderweb on, to digest that sense of losing a vital part of what had become of your life, I’m not so sure I trust so easily in hearing anyone say “I love you“. I’m not saying someone can’t ‘love’ someone at all. I’m saying that in time, the meaning of that word will change for them. It’s the person on the other end of that ‘love’, the receiving vessel, that I choose to challenge and warn.

Loving someone just doesn’t mean caring, understanding, and being able to bathe in a sense of well-being. It means being able to be kind, caring and understanding even when you don’t feel good. It’s un selfishness. It’s compassion and being able to feel grief in someone elses voice, it’s positively supporting the bonds when you know someone could fall apart. It’s being a mess and feeling deathly vulnerable, it’s to feel safe even when you are feeling ugly and destroyed. It’s you being there in their face even when maybe you “don’t understand”.

It’s hard, it’s all very tiring in my head. It’s like every day you are adding soft clay to a binding wire structure. Pieces fall off, some crumble and just wont stick. Some get twisted in overlapping fingerprints. Some never get smooth. Somedays you just have to chop off an entire fucking side because things are not shaping into what you want them to be. And that one piece of copper wire just keeps finding its way through, no matter how much medium you press against it. Days of piling shit on and grabbing clay everyday and pulling pieces off over and over again until one day you wake up and realize what? That you no longer have any more god damned clay to add-on when you need to just get by. Because one side of the relationship did what? They stopped. Because one side chose to no longer be there. Or maybe they walked off. Or didn’t answer the phone that day, or maybe they just woke up and something changed in them. Good or bad or whatever. When that clay is not there, all of that (your) support dissolves. Because you know for fucks sake every day needs you to be a part of that clay and what it holds together. If you want anything real, anything worth waking up to, anything just worth a second of your fucking time in the world – then you need that substance to be there.

Love or not, I just don’t bend like I use to – I know loss well enough. If you’ve lost it then ‘know why’. If you’ve never lost it then I say ‘prepare yourself’. And if you want to hold on to it – I say ‘make your choices smart’, smart like maybe that love that feels fantastic right now, might not be there tomorrow.

 

“I don’t want to hurt you” often translates into : “I don’t want to hurt you and then for you to find out about it”.

Orbit drive by.

 

Driving today, as if I was spinning. Spinning lengths of memoirs across the road as I moved on towards the place. Waves of conversations and disasters gouging at me. I get closer to it all, while it just splinters more and more. Like film across the windshield, fast forwarding and stopping at parts, to where I can see just enough of an expression, the look towards something and then the look away.

You always have to move fast, faster than it. Or it will unwind you and all of your tape, it will untie all of your stitches so everyone can see.

The ridiculous season again. I still breathe it in and it goes straight to the rooms that it knows so well. Like coming home to a well made bed. They will always find their comfort, somewhere behind the rigid edges of what you wish you were all so content with back then. There will always be a hardwood floored room and a wall of screened windows that I know remains hinged to the back of my head until the day I die. It’s just something you can never undo or unwire, like years of old paste over a cigar box. It just will never go away. It’s one of those strawberry moments that are not even worth the telling because you know, you know that other soul will never see it as you do. I tell myself I’m lucky for that.

And I know you didn’t make me this way, I stood there and took it for much too long every time. I have grown strong in empathy with that. I should have turned back sooner in every case. Every year. Every time. I always kept telling myself just a bit longer and maybe it will make itself right. Maybe they will fix the scattered and worn pieces across the floor. They never did.

I tried. I really tried. I had countless conversations with you not in the room. Over and over in my head, me versus the walls. Like bullet points, back and forth, openings and closings – judge and jury. Debating to myself that maybe I could have flipped a switch and prevented one last disaster had I tried one second harder, one second longer. Or had I sent that one last text message that I hesitantly deleted outside my patio at 3am.

But really why should anyone have to do any of those things. Why should it even matter. I gave more than I have ever given to anyone. Sealed. Waxed. And in stone. Whether you read it or not. It was always there. It was always yours. You just never came home to open the box.

It’s late everyday at my house. My nights are long. I sleep mostly when I can’t think – and if I’m lucky I get a lucid delusional dream that puts me somewhere between me and you in a place where I just can’t touch anything but I sure am able find ways to feel everything over again, like the texture of the walls stumbling through a dark apartment hall.

I made myself forget most of the good things, just enough of them to make me not want to relive any part of it anymore.

 

“I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.” 
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris | Summary & Study Guide