It's to safe to say you've left a mark, quite literally, on me this week. As the darkness wanes, I can't help but wish for the sharp, fresh pain to come back. Clean and jolting to the touch. The first seconds of the aftermath is always so exciting. Before the dilution of doubt, of analysis, of hope.
I wish I could stay in that moment. The first seconds of coming down after having been so high. The lazy drift toward the ground. The certainty of what just happened, and what will surely happen again. The unbelievable entitlement to such delights and their future promised recurrence. I struggle to keep Hope from slipping in, for she is always a double-edged sword, beautiful to the fortunate and oh so cruel to those who are not. I run around shutting all the windows and doors and nooks in my brain, so it would not sift in anywhere. Still, as I whip my head around the middle of the room I know it would come, after which my fate leaves me, either to plummet from great heights or to be mercifully kept afloat.
A shutter opens, and I see it edging closer. The thing about Hope is that it will be the last certainty, after which nothing is knowable, but before which even a fool will sense its coming. I touch the mark you left absentmindedly, its pain already dulled to an afterthought as I stand here, waiting for Hope to flood my windows and doors, waiting for it to defeat me.
**
Friday, August 31, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
secrets
What's your secret?
For the first time in my life, I'm scared the path I've chosen for myself at 5 years old is wrong for me. Not because I reject it, but because it keeps rejecting me, like a bad organ transplant. I wonder if anything can substitute natural aptitude--a question that rarely occurs to me because I've so often had it on my side. For this, I do not.
The older I get the more my tears are for things, not people. People change. People can be left. People are also fundamentally good, their first mantra always to do no harm. Things make no such promise. They are hard and immutable and devoid of moral value. My secret is that I've attached my desires to the wrong category. Perhaps to the wrong Thing. My secret is that the sunk costs have become insurmountably high. My secret is that the option to quit (never an attractive one) is no longer available. My secret is that I can only fight. And that I might lose.
**
For the first time in my life, I'm scared the path I've chosen for myself at 5 years old is wrong for me. Not because I reject it, but because it keeps rejecting me, like a bad organ transplant. I wonder if anything can substitute natural aptitude--a question that rarely occurs to me because I've so often had it on my side. For this, I do not.
The older I get the more my tears are for things, not people. People change. People can be left. People are also fundamentally good, their first mantra always to do no harm. Things make no such promise. They are hard and immutable and devoid of moral value. My secret is that I've attached my desires to the wrong category. Perhaps to the wrong Thing. My secret is that the sunk costs have become insurmountably high. My secret is that the option to quit (never an attractive one) is no longer available. My secret is that I can only fight. And that I might lose.
**