Private Agony Melange Public Posted

I’ve been seething for months, working it all down like a  rolling boil. Trying to reduce the elements, right? Trying to make a sauce out of pan drippings, only it’s coming out all bitter. I leave it on too long, the bits go past burning. the whole damned mess gets too thick and I have to throw it out with the rest of the garbage.

My only reprieve then is that I don’t throw out the garbage every day. I can’t be bothered to leave the apartment when it’s particularly one way or another, too sunny or too grey or too cold or rainy. Sometimes, too much of anything is far too much for me; you haven’t lived until you’ve had it in your mind that it’s far too nice outside today, too nice for you. You have to, simply must stay inside with the dust and the unopened mail and the things like you.

And for these past few months, I’ve had work to dip into, the busyness of business on my mind as I crank out bit after bit of stuff that could very well be commercially viable, but I don’t feel a bit of it in my heart. 25,000 words written, and I don’t feel a single one of them. The words “love,” “fucked,” “forgotten,” “died” were all used, and not a single one of them felt. Whores feel like this. Their hearts, their backs remember the slams and thrusts, but their minds don’t see the passage of such feelings, such grave and meaningful words turned to ash before them.

Breaking free of it, I find my world no different, which is why I feel like tall buildings collapse inward upon me next to a Starbucks I haven’t entered. I’m under rubble, so many piles of rock and intent, and all I have to keep me company some days are the bits in the trash, all the sauces gone awry. It’s enough, but it’s not like living a life of “enough” is always worth living.

Take the day you find out you’ll never be first. Better to learn that at 20 than 30, right? And plenty of people do, and they go off to live whatever horrid, mean, grasping lives they can, selling you whatever you’ll buy and fucking whatever says “yes.” 20 years from now, you’ll forget the beasts they were and see the pillars of the community that they are as they ask for your business, your patronage, your vote. Give it all to them; after all, they learned that they were scum before being scum was cool.

But you, me, we spent a long time as dreamers. Believe enough, work enough, want enough, and what you want will be yours. It’s not the American dream as much as it’s just a dream of making the efforts of your life have power, which seems universal.  See that dream die in front of you. Feel bound in trying to help it, helpless in trying to save your own mind for half a fucking second. Watch things burn.

Wait a decade. I was young when I feared that those I loved and lost would someday become so famous that I couldn’t escape their faces. I feared I’d never be able to outrun the ghosts of the lives I’d once wished I had. So imagine my shock when that Blade Runner reality happened while I sat in a room made out of walls that stood when Eisenhower was fucking his first hooker! Imagine the terror!

Horror doesn’t wear a mask and kill with a knife; it just keeps you up nights, making you think you’re an insomniac when all you actually are is afraid to close your eyes. The waking world won’t leave you be and the sleeping world won’t let you rest, so what is there but to sit up, have a TV on for the noise and company it provides and pretend that what you’re doing matters?

I realized I hadn’t seen her move in 13 years when I saw the first video. I had a picture, a photo won in a trade for a picture of myself I wish I still had, but it got old in a different way then I did. Wrinkles vs. dust, I choose wrinkles, and I couldn’t have them, not ever with a photo.

She looked like she always had, only better. She moved as always, only smoother. Everything about her made more sense than when we were kids, and a hard burn in me that I hadn’t felt for her in a decade was back in a second. Fucking hell.

She wasn’t the same, she was the same. The only joy or solace in all of it was that technology had come to meet me halfway. I was able to figure out what it actually felt like to have that inescapable face before me, long before it found fame and all the avenues in the world with which to meet me. The great fortune in it was finding out that she was as amazing as I ever thought, that feelings inside me were as chaotic as they’d ever been…and that, just like that day down the road where she’s everywhere, all I have to do is not click the link. Not watch the show. Not read the interview. All I had to do, this one time, is remain ignorant to things, and I’d be fine. Shut down the journalist and stay alive.

But then, again, you find out you’re not first. A night is spent jocking for position, talking in a bed. Things come up, just things. Sex, love is mentioned but not intended. It’s all fog in the air, something to take up a space.

Still, in that, everyone else is mentioned before you. The chance to read speech offers clues like, “Well, I’ve always been into…” and, “I always told Rocco and Siffredi that….” All of a sudden, you see that the person with whom you were just having one of those hypothetical-filled conversations is trying to cover tracks, mince words, throw you out of a contention you never expected.

So then it becomes about, “well, what the fuck is wrong with me in the first place?” Maybe I didn’t bring it up, maybe I should have. What I left feeling is, “oh, well, I guess I’m interested now…,” because I was shot down before I ever had the idea of going for some gold. That’s followed by, “whoa, what the fuck? What’s wrong with me?”

Nothing. Well, plenty. Plenty’s wrong with me. Too fat for some, too short for others. Some people love my nose, hate my eyes. A few love my eyes, nose, and mouth but hate the fact that I shave my head. Some think I’m gorgeous and just really fucking hate my attitude.

But all of those fights aside, I’m still me, and seeing a person, actually witnessing them try to wriggle out of a relationship that had yet to even exist, was the real mindkiller. Original, lucid thought shut down when compared to the sight of a woman visibly putting up walls to being attracted to me. It just left me dumb and spare in the mouth, everything out of the pantry and the kids clutching at crumbs.

It’s important to be first in someone’s heart, I realized. The second you realize that’s impossible is probably the second you should run for your life in the opposite direction, and maybe life’s about finding the fastest routes to doing that before you die. And then publishing them as a road map for others, right?

But then comes the best frustration, the thing that simultaneously brings on the urge to rip the brain from the head and laugh at the silliness of an often-male heart. I saw a picture today, just a picture of a woman. And where I loved people before, loved attitudes and smiles and conversations…where I used to love ideas, at the very least…I found myself falling for a picture in the same way I’d previously fallen for real, actual people. It’s the ultimate silliness and the ultimate creepiness at once, a thing for laughter and shock. Give it a bag on Halloween and let it get all the candy in the world, then sit at home and choke on it, because that’s where the spiral leads.

What’s left when a picture fills your mind with all of the thoughts and feelings that actual trials and tribulations once did? Not much, because the next step is a story, or a song. Inflection. Just a word. A breath. Nowhere’s safe, and because of that, nothing’s safe. Trapped under a building, and your proximity to it makes you fall in love with the building? Let it crush you. It won.

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