That Instant

you see who they're still in touch with after you had a running fight for three months about them literally sexting them and staying out after hours way too late and magically happening to run into each other and finding out they're a known rapist and telling her and still they're just firing away ... you get the "ewwwwwwww gross, what the fuck?!?!?" feeling of surprise instead of a an "oh yeah, makes sense, why am I shocked at all that her behavior hasn't changed" feeling.

That Instant

you realize you have to move your Al-Anon meeting, but you actually have to move your matinee film to fit around it and you gas at adult problems.

Dear (_____)

Dear Alcohol,

I've been pretty high functioning for a while.  I know I'll never be cured.  There is no cure.  I remember you.  I remember everything you took from me.  You took a person I wanted to marry from me the same way you took me from someone I wanted to marry more than a decade later.  It's unreal being on the other side of you and the heartache.  Feeling like there is nothing I can do to stop you.  More than a decade ago, you snatched the first person that loved me away from me because I didn't know what you are.  A decade of growth later.  More than.  I have changed and can see you for what you are.  I can see your tendrils and suction cups, your butterfly wings that look like fungus and friendly moss, your horned growths and twigs and flowers and sun beam colors.  I can see your off seasonal artisanal aromas and hellishly intriguing recipes for what they are.  Your get togethers and time cheaters and machinery and armors plated with reactive impenetrable metal scales.  I can see you and you've taken someone from me.

We are even.

We are square.

You took some of my friends, both of my uncles and a few aunts, my father's actual father that I never got to meet, my grandmother's husband, cousins, untold family members I'll never know, both of my parents by proxy, my childhood, myself away from my first real love, and my second real love away from me.

Fuck you.

I would say "never again", but the devils greatest feat was convincing the world it didn't exist.

You do.



Sincerely,

Hobbes

That Instant

you walk up to an old man with more teeth missing than present and the few still in silver capped while he's speaking with your charge and he stands up and cannot recognize your face and goes "oooooooh, what's up dog" like he's seen you before, but you know the scars on your face make you pretty god damn unmistakable and you know for a fact he hasn't seen you before, but you play along just to see how comfy he'll try to get and you almost ask him where he knows you from. 

That Instant

you realize she was never bisexual after she's drunk herself into a raging stupor and shouts at you that you are a "cock sucking faggot."

That Instant

you convince yourself that you are static, you have sentenced yourself to death and you should find a quiet plot of land with a porch and push your way in through the lattice along its side that a few enterprising rats chewed through and lay down to die.

Where the Time Went V

Banished.

Banished from the lands.  I almost said unfortunately.  Fortune has little to do with what a person decides to do with their present.  Fortune has everything to do with what and who you are up until "now", but maybe fifty percent to do with after.  Fortune has fifty percent or less to do with what happens to you after you realize what the system is and what you're in for and who you are and where you've been with an open eye.  Of course, you've still got to get "lucky" in part for good things to happen to you, but you also have to be prepared to act.

Banished and returned out of sympathy for their survival, them having flailed in the vacuum of space and been over matched by the very things they spat in my face they could handle on their own so often and myself being fed incomplete information (what I call lies and they call "telling the full truth when they're ready").  So now we are trapped into providing shelter for the wayward addict and trying to lay down ground rules in their defiance and abuse of kindness.  Few things feel more alone than living with someone who is not prepared or capable yet of living outside of their own interests, whatever those interests may be.

If you're still in the mindset of "I am a fuck up, I can't do this" and won't even honest to yourself try, you're going to miss it.  Four months long attempts at trying to wake them up to that simplicity.  Trying to be the best person I could be toward the person I loved.  Maximum effort.  Whether I wanted to or not, whether I was upset or not, whether it would cost me or not.  We had a conversation the other evening about what love is.  Is it an emotion?  A feeling?  A pile of chemicals?  An exchange of ideas, ideals, memories, and hopes?  Is it that metaphorical eternal flame of the soul and yadda yadda that keeps everything and everyone connected and relationships blossom where the connections happen to be stronger instead of weaker?  She sort of fumbled around for some time, at points fading into and out of the "a person can fall into and out of love conundrum so it can only be, but so much of this or that and" basically a word salad of chopped up experiences, tossed with a little salt and vinegarette and served halting.

Love at its core is sacrifice.  Love is willfully putting yourself second for the betterment of someone else.  Love is not whispering "I would die for you" while your heads lay on the same pillow and your faces are six inches away from each other.  Every time someone tells me they would die for me I tell them to live for me.

I'm not looking for apologies anymore.  Whatever form they come in, apologies, an acknowledgement that you did something that did not account for that action's, that decision's, that event's happening's impact on my life, or you did and chose to disregard it, or you did and it did not weigh out to enough to sway you, but you cared enough to inform me and help me better understand where I fall in your calculus and explore the otherverses of paths so that we can figure out whether we should or should not cross paths in the future, if it can be avoided.

I am looking for changes in behavior.  Whatever forms the apologies take, if you find yourself offering apologies and sacrifices to the same You, it is vainity at its root.  Isn't it?  As long as you can forgive you, everything should be good with the person you are bowing your head for the knife for.  As long as you're in the loop, you are your own executioner.  And yes, you will die in dramatic fashion.  The applause will rain.  Everyone will believe something was accomplished in the display.  The executioner will go to their home, once the crowd applause fade, and there's some sort of proclamation about sins and wrongs and the pigeons and crows will come to peck up the bits of food the audience left in the courtyard.  The morticians will get to work and the janitors too.  The executioner's phone will buzz a "hey, are you up?  Let's hang out" the following night.  You'll do your make up, cross legged on the floor, and say to yourself you must go meet so-and-so because...

Apologies and "sorry" are not worthless.  They carry some merit on their own, though tacit.

You'll befriend fall guys and walking excuses and you'll apologize later.  Beheading yourself used to mean something.  It used to be painful.  Cognitive dissonance is something for therapy couches, though.  Why respect the opinions of people that have spent their lives studying people, just like you.  With enough repetitions, a person can become anything they want to be.




///Fatboy Slim - "The State We're In" ~