It seems that when you want someone, they don’t want you. And when someone wants you, you don’t want them. And when you both want one another, either neither of you can see what’s right in front of your eyes, because you’re too fucking blind with infatuation or doubt or distracted by a haze of tracing paper events; or something, someone, whatever, comes along to fuck everything up, to rain on your fucking parade. Whence came the fucking monsoon, destroying my own personal Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, in a sort of ironic end of the world celebration, leaving everything as soppy, mucilaginous sludge of ash, ash which, in the same way as that day's snowfall, had fallen gracefully from the clouds, to reside as a thick, treacle-esque plague on the streets, slushy and disgusting. Ash that consisted of my hopes, ideas, dreams, those brief clips of day dreams hidden on film reels inside of my head as teaser trailers of potential scenarios, momentary lapses in conscious thought and control which resulted in my secret dreams leaking out onto the screens within my mind. The ash coated me. It stuck to my skin and it clung to my organs, it choked up my throat with black, sticky tendrils and it squeezed its slime trails around my stomach, pushing the acid further and further up my trachea.
I came out of love and was once again struck down by that feeling: numbness. Sinking, sodden, cold; that wet mid-November morning when it’s cold enough for frost or ice, but the weather is damp and icky and the wetness soaks up your jean legs, creeping towards you through the absorbent fabric and no one seems to lend a smile, a wave, a passing glance, the entire world, it seems, is too far up it’s own ass to care, and you’re hit with the realization, whilst sitting an extremely difficult exam in your wet attire that you are, in fact, lonely.
It wasn’t really just the heartbreak. That was the beginning, or maybe the trigger. It was everything which came crashing down because of that vital block which had been pulled out of place, that relationship which had previously cemented practically my world together. It’s not the goodbye that hurts, but the flashbacks which follow. Some people say that one relationship can ruin the rest of their lives, or that they never get over their first true loves, that they can never find anyone better and that tears them apart. It is true, I mean, you never actually do get over your first love: you can try to, I doubt you’ll get very far, chances are you can probably recall even the minute details; the way they walked, their smell, the way their eyelashes fluttered just before their eyelids opened in the morning, the way they kissed, the small gaps between kisses where mere breaths were cast across your lips, even, perhaps, the days spent simply being. And whilst you don’t forget, and whilst heartbreak does hurt (don’t believe those who say that it won’t: they are simply inexperienced, or incredibly good liars) your world is not compromised entirely of that person and their effect on you.
Remember that you are a human being, of course. And everything else which crashes down is the vital part. When self doubt, self loathing and anger seep into you, something odd occurs. Water pools into the cracks in rocks, sitting there until the temperature plummets, when it freezes hard into ice; the ice expands as it freezes, pushing both sides of the crack apart; and so it continues, thawing, freezing, thawing, freezing, until pieces of the rock fall away. That’s a metaphor. What really happens is a longer, more painful process. You see yourself disintegrating every time you stare into that mirror, every time you pause to think or allow yourself a moment in a quiet room. It becomes dangerous to live with your own thoughts and soon enough you’re contemplating ways in which you could kill what you’ve become without physically scarring the body within which you spend your days. And slowly, that eagerness, that lust for life, begins to fade. I’m not saying that I was suicidal... I wasn’t...I simply no longer saw the point of my existence, only that I had to continue.
I could glance in the mirror and smile at what I saw. I guess I was lucky in that respect: being relatively happy about the exterior. It was almost everything I wanted it to be, and it could be manipulated at any given moment. Many girls my age would have been jealous at my apparent happiness with my appearance. I didn’t stick my fingers down my throat to remain thin, I didn’t cake on the make up, I didn’t even spend time in tanning salons. But when it came to taking a long, hard look, I couldn’t face it. My eyes would deviate away from the mirror, I’d gaze down into the sink bowl or stare at the wall in front of me. I hadn’t felt self hate like that before and it was eating me whole; I couldn’t define precisely what it was I hated, but I think it was something in between being angry and still-...
Nevermind.
It never really matters. Because I try to never really think about that second phrase after being angry, I just cover up this weird inverted anger and such with a lovely big, wide, white fake smile. I pretend, lie, fake, and cover up. In my mind, I was playing the part of who I was before this all went wrong. And what worked inside my head usually worked when played out in real life, too. I could hide from myself even inside reality. That’s a pretty dangerous concept if you think about it.
My view of the world was flawed in many ways. It was poisoned by my own experiences, twisted slightly through the lens of my values and moral compass, shaded with deeper tones by my own patchy, incomplete knowledge. Most of all, my perception was altered by the way I judged the human beings surrounding me. I had thought that the world was just full of miserable people: always pining for something even if they have everything, always crying or moaning about their problems yet not actively getting the fuck off of their own asses to do something about it. I had thought that almost every single creature on the planet was unhappy. That happiness was a temporary state and unhappiness had a certain pungent permanence to it. Unhappiness was the blood on the bed sheets, rich, red, staining. Happiness? Simply a passing feeling. A certain rush, a burst of adrenaline. A short lived smile. I mean that was my understanding, that is until I'm proven wrong anyway. And it worked. It sounded fucking legit to me, it made sense, it matched up to the people who surrounded me. It matched up to me.
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