And then the lightning crashes again… it’s a shotgun burst from the sky into a building nearby. The rain is still pouring like it’s a goddamn hurricane or the so-called apocalypse or some bastard progeny of the two. The air is still stagnated and humid enough to wet your skin to the point of furniture being more like waterslides than seating. Every single song that comes on the playlist just makes you want to scream and jump out your second floor window and run into the eye of the storm – conveniently forgetting your lack of attire to satiate the unseasonably sweltering weather’s ken of will. Despite, it’s the usual mix of the inescapably tragic and the divinely apathetic… the sounds you hide in to comfort yourself and assure yourself you’re not alone in this torment. You take solace in it no longer, it’s lost that special something – masturbation has become a chore (physical and mental), hell, even the simple act of sustenance is low on the list of priorities. Faces are pretty much a uniform and featureless meld of every one you’ve ever seen — all except for that one that’s sticking in your fucking mind like tar, haunting every moment both conscious and not — and every friendship seems to have lost any sense of meaning.

What does it all mean? It means that life, sometimes no matter how hard you try to battle the storm, will inevitably get the best of you and leave you drenched to the bone. Plan all you want, it makes no difference… when that one perfect storm comes along, hide in the eye as you might, the path of destruction it leaves is inexplicably violent. C’est la vie, any rope to swing from will do.

Every moment of contact
is just another salt to pour
into an open, gulfing wound
- not a wound from intention,
just unkind circumstance
and rolling the tumbling dice
inside life’s palatial casino,
the table where buy-in is free,
but nobody ever walks away
with their own existence
to still claim as their own.

Man behind the table,
expectably dressed,
plastic visor,
clean suit,
little bow-tie
- the man beside me
couldn’t be more different -
cigarette in hand,
Scotch rocks in front,
face riddled with scars,
eyes telling of all that’s been and gone -
and we sit,
and we drink our drinks,
talk about the bets
that we’ve made and lost,
when the odds are stacked
millions to one.

(I still love you but it hurts me too fucking much, and I want to tell you, but I can't, so I don't, so I avoid you, and I force myself to hate you, in some futile idea that someday maybe you'll hate me enough for me to let go.)


/disconnect.

Perhaps, if I had amnesia, I could forget that you still mean the world to me.

So, one month since the inevitable unfolded. The last month has been one that has been probably one of the biggest tests in my life, overshadowed only by the 3 months that came before it. I know I should be mending and moving on, and I know I should be doing the integral and living here and now, and moving on from what we once shared – but simply, I can’t. I seem steadfast in either routine or need – I can’t define which it is – but either way, I’m just as rutted here as I was before. I coped with it alright for the first few days, it didn’t actually hit me, and then suddenly it came over me like a heavy blanket and I finally realised what had gone down. Even if I’m the only one holding onto the past anymore, as I very well seem to be, I’m not because I want to – I am because if I let go, I’ll be letting go for good, and completely turning a blind eye to the best times in my life. It only really reaffirms just how much I hate it here, and how much I really, thoroughly dislike so very much about this place. Since I’ve been home, so many days have been filled with dreary rain, bitter cold, and nowhere near enough sleep – in the order of minutes a night – and so many times I’ve been hurt by watching something crumble before my eyes. Not our time, perhaps, but still, nothing will ever compare to walking along a frozen waterfront past snow-covered beaches with the crispest and most glorious golden sunlight in abundance. I never got a goodbye, but I couldn’t've asked for a more wonderful last day, and for that time I hold out hope someday there will be a chance to build on that, and a chance to forge something solid. That, right there, is the exact reason I can’t let go, because I feel like I’m trapped in a Dire Straits song (go listen to Making Movies in its entirety if you’re oblivious to my reference there), “Oh Juliet, the dice were loaded from the start – I bet and you exploded in my heart, and I forget the movie song.. when you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong?”, the eponymous notion of terrible timing. It almost seems ludicrous that the universe could make something so incredible and yet stack the odds against it so very harshly – one of the things that made it so incredible was the fact that shit did go wrong, and still, it felt completely fucking perfect in every sense of the word. That’s got to be something pretty rare, something that feels almost like the notion of the lost halves being reunited after Zeus severed the humans into the form we now occupy (see Plato’s Symposium for reference, also, The Origin of Love from Hedwig and The Angry Inch). I guess the phrase “perfection is chasing white horses” holds its own fairly true also, forever trying to chase that perfect moment until eventually the seas encroach and drag you out into its damp underbelly and offer you a final resting place. Someday, perhaps, someday. It’s hard to put my stock in anything else until however, it’s hard to do so when literally everything else disgusts you, particularly about where you are and the opportunities it presents. Even moreso with these constant flashbacks, the ones that completely occupy my mind for days at a time, serving as a lingering reminder of what has been and gone, and taking over to the point I can’t eat or sleep or even remotely function. I guess a lot of it has to do with the overt fear of losing you, and at the end of the day, someone replacing me. That lingering fear of being replaced is something that really, thoroughly haunts the living fuck out of me, because I know if that happens they can’t conceivably live up to the needed expectation, and that if it does happen, my train will have sailed for good. That thought mortifies me. It chills me to the core and dominates everything I do. I don’t like it, but I simply can’t be happy in that notion. It’s affronting because it’s contrary to that promise we made that one last afternoon – that day I watched your tail lights linger off into the sobering distance – where we promised it would all be okay. We stood there, for the last time as “us”, huddled tight, and promised it would work out okay. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel resolved not knowing if that is going to be true, and that I’m faced with a long meantime until I can attain any sort of resolve. I had a need for resolve in the lingering question of “what if” the first time around, but this time there’s so much more left unanswered and it fucking kills me to face it every day for the next theoretical era. And I simply just can’t be happy being stuck here, being held against my will – hostage if you will – by a city who can’t even remember my name. The city is the harshest of captors, and certainly, the coldest of companions.

The notion that really cripples me above all else, however, is the one that forever shall you still dominate my heart and mind. Men have spent lifetimes searching for that thing that makes them complete, and sadly, I think I’ll spend mine trying to get my other half back. So, white horses, I shall soon see you at the depths of despair as I head ever closer to Davey Jones’ Locker.

I’ve learned so much, yet accomplished so little. Perhaps, someday, I’ll accomplish that one thing burning away inside. Perhaps. Timing never was my strong point.

Perhaps someday I’ll be wrong enough to forget.

Come up on different streets, they both were streets of shame
Both dirty, both mean, yes and the dream was just the same
And I dreamed your dream for you and your dream is real
How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals?

A lovestruck Romeo sings a Streetsus Serenade
Laying everybody low with me a lovesong that he made
Finds a convenient streetlight, steps out of the shade
Says something like, “You and me babe how about it?”