Love gone psychotic.
Love.
Happy place
Your room is not a place to me. It’s a state of mind.
When I was teetering on the brink of suicide, my afterlife delusion was your room: waking up in your room.
I’d escape from the earth under the coronado bridge and then wake up in your room.
I’m not a daydreamer, but when I was suicidal I daydreamed a lot. I dreamed about this.
Living in accordance with one’s principles isn’t “petty”, it’s admirable. I don’t know why this even needs to be said. It shouldn’t.
You’re not a rational person if you’re able to use reason in academic papers but not in heated arguments.
You’re not a virtuous person if you apply your principles to social issues but not also to your personal life.
Consistency
I will always be here. I will always be the same person I was when you met me. And if I’ve ever loved you, you can be sure I always will love you.
Everyone who has ever led a revolution or a movement and changed the world has had one thing in common: consistency. Humans are of a fickle nature, and few people possess this quality. However, those who do are the ones who change the world.
Every gothic melodrama deserves a melodramatic soundtrack.
It’s like you always said,
puberty was the beginning of the end.
(This was back when you were still sporadically insightful, not confused and lost and impressionable as you are now.)
I only felt an urgency to speak to you again because I had reached the eve of the end and I knew it. I thought this was appropriate because knowing you was the single most beautiful (now also the most horrible) experience of my post-pubescent life.
Sometimes in life, you get into completely unnecessary accidents on your way to see someone who has affected you profoundly enough to warrant frequent mention in your ridiculous (albeit refreshingly lucid) tumblelog.
They jerk you around via phone indecisively all night after initially blowing you off because they had a bad day. Finally, upon their request, you leave your house to go visit them.
In your next moment of sentient consciousness you are in a hospital bed with three missing teeth, aware of nothing except that you were on your way to see them and you never made it. As immediately as you’ve realized this, you weep uncontrollably.
When you get home from the hospital, you call around for paramedic information about what happened to you. You find out that not only did you in fact make it to where you were going, you made it three blocks past where you were going and THAT was where you were hit by a car.
God knows how drunk and confused I must’ve been to have ended up there.
This whole damn mess was like a literary tragedy. Everything about the sequence of events that transpired that night was completely unnecessary and incredibly ironic.
Such disasters might start out like this: the person may have initiated plans with you which fell through at the last minute due to circumstances outside of anyone’s control. (On your graduation night. After you canceled plans with your parents for the night. After they’d taken time off work to come into town and book a hotel room to celebrate.) And they may have promised to make it up to you, even though you assured them it wasn’t necessary. But eager as always to prove to themselves they aren’t an inconsiderate friend, they’ve insisted.
When you’re supposed to meet them again, you may be drinking at a bar while you wait for them to decide when they’re ready to humor you out of their own reluctant guilt. Eventually they will tell you they don’t feel like going to a bar and have just decided to go home, and then you will start drinking destructively. You may spend the night crying and drinking destructively at the bar, and you will even be too overwhelmed to feel embarrassment over crying in public. Or shame at your general predicament.
You eventually leave the bar and make it home completely intact.
That’s when they let you know they’d still like to see you.
You are outraged by this proposition because it’s past midnight, you’re weeping without constraint (now that you’re back in your own home), and you’re about to go to sleep. But as it turns out, you have just enough self-respect to say no to them twice but not three times. The third time you consider saying “maybe another day” but you leave it up to the weather forecast to determine your decision.
It turns out the weather will be solid crap for the projected next five days, so you decide not to reschedule. You curse the weather, and reluctantly leave your house again to see them.
The sad thing is I probably would have made it to his house from the bar just fine.
When I was a child, it seemed so certain that I’d already had it made. I was a capable, fearless, independent child… so invulnerable that it seemed impossible I might ever lose (or even come in second) at anything. Really the last kid you could imagine growing up to be a walking tragedy.
Yet, this is now my life. It’s the stuff of fables and folk tales but it’s my life.
When wounds are fresh, they seem so sure to heal. Enough time must pass before you can determine if there will be scarring, or know the severity of the scarring.
At one time, I was in the position to save you from your devastating loss and prevent my own. You didn’t let me. I’m going to stop punishing myself for it now.
(The scars are punishment enough without the additional torment of unjustified self-blame.)
tragedy/farce
In trying to make peace with all my selves and all my mistakes, I ended up making the grandest, most unnecessary, disastrous mistake yet. I lost two goddamn teeth to it and gained nothing.
All I wanted was to see my earnest good intentions realized, yet things were left worse off than they were to begin with. Through no fault of my own, I can say with confidence. It’s just that intentions only take you so far — life doesn’t always cooperate, other people don’t always cooperate. You can have the most beneficent intentions, and be sabotaged by circumstances yet.
The only thing more painful than dental surgery is being mocked by circumstance.
derp.jpg
Physiological youth is a marvelous thing, you know. When you have it, you are capable, resilient, effortlessly stable. You’re nearly invincible. When you no longer have it, you come into danger of becoming so illusioned and weak-willed that you get yourself into stupid accidents on your way to see someone who, after the fact, thinks verbal apologies by e-mail are a sufficient and appropriate way of ameliorating the situation.
The trouble with physiological vigor is that it fades at such different rates in different people. The trouble with me is that… well, you can guess what the trouble with me is.
social independence is a tremendous source of strength when you’re young and beautiful. but when either your vigor diminishes or your beauty diminishes in intensity, it becomes a potent source of weakness.
I didn’t think the end would be so volatile
But it is, because none of my past selves are ready to die. My present self is eager and willing because she knows it’s right and because she wants to prevent future selves from coming into existence.
But my past selves still wish to be known. Make no mistake, they’re gone already. They’re gone in a very literal sense because I’m no longer able to look like them or think like them or act like them — ever again. But inasmuch as they’re a part of my personal history and my consciousness (memory), they won’t actually die until I die. They’re unknown to anyone but me, so when I die they’ll all be coming with me.
A solitary person’s memories belong exclusively to themselves. No one has ever shared or witnessed any part of their lives — so no one shares their memories or has any memories of them. When they die, their entire personal histories are erased forever. My current self simply begs to be erased, but my former selves think it’s a terrible injustice that they’ve never been known. Or even really witnessed.
Two of them were breathtakingly beautiful (and equally vain) and they both resent that they’ll never be seen again because there’s hardly any photographic record of them. After all, whether there is photographic evidence of you depends on whether there’s someone behind the camera, not on how beautiful you are.
All of them lived and died virtually unseen. All of them are too angry to sleep.
just for one moment, i thought i found my way. destiny unfolded, i watched it slip away
is that victories are hard-won and short-lived.
