onyxsnake23

[onyxsnake23]

Oh I don’t think I could actually tell you the exact moment that I realised we were done. It wasn’t made up of a single moment any more than a person is made up of a single interest, it felt more like a thousand thousand tiny things that cascaded into an avalanche under which the relationship got buried. No headstone, just a casualty of the climb. Maybe one day somewhere in the future what remains of us together will be dug up and discovered by some impartial observer and they’ll realise that we were never going to work out “long term”. Whatever that means.

I imagine that at some point in the cold future I’ll reflect on what happened, much as I am doing as I sit here now and wonder why I didn’t try harder to save us. Instead I’ll ache for the cold, detached feeling I was once so willing and able to hide behind, nothing is quite as easy as it used to be it seems.

I sit here, 20 something years old and think back on the last few years, wondering to myself in my loneliest moments “how will I ever survive a lifetime of this? of remembering people for far longer than I have ever known them? And in these moments I feel like I’m shattering into shards of longing and regret and lust and rage. Forever waiting, I suspect, for someone to pick up my pieces and tell me that I am worthy of living, that I am worthy of love and to know in that moment that they meant every word. Much as you once did. But it does no good to dwell on such things, there are people to fuck and music to listen to in the meantime.

I remember when we each bought a bible and told each other that we would read them and that we’d annotate the bits we found hilarious and send them to each other. We never did of course it was just another promise made, another for the pile of things that slowly became our relationship and I think of you every time I see that bible on my shelf. Even though I don’t believe a word of what it preaches it doesn’t seem to matter when it connects me to you through time like that. The barrier of passing time dissolves and I’m sat in my bedroom in 2020 texting you that the bible arrived with butterflies in my stomach waiting on your response.

I read a little while ago that the face you have in your current life is the face of the person you loved most in your previous life. When I look at myself in the mirror I often wonder what kind of person could love someone like me, with all my failures of character and my blatant self loathing that seems to seep into every facet of my life and slowly degrade each aspect of it like the rot that eats away at the house. But then I eat something and drink some water and go outside in the sun and am reminded that I am young and learning to live. Maybe I am not an irredeemable monster with an evil heart, maybe I just haven’t learned to love myself yet, to see my positive aspects, perhaps one day I’ll see myself in a mirror and say to myself “hey, you did great, everything will be okay”. I desperately hope that one day I will be that person and my hope extends to you too.

What’s really crazy about that particular stretch of my life is that most of the time I am convinced I was in love with myself and the moment I was in and not the girl. I was doing well at my first job, finally getting attention from girls, had money, discovering new music all the time, things were great. Kind of a clash with the supposed “national spirit” at the time, Covid 19 was fucking England hard at this point. I didn’t care, I was in a bubble of drinking and sex and music and thinking I might be falling in love with a girl while I was in the middle of sex with a girl I had just met at a party I was invited to last minute by a girl I worked with who also had a thing for me. I felt incredible.

Tell me you love me and watch it break me. Tell me anyway and build me anew from the broken pieces of me that are left behind, with any luck you’ll leave the worst parts of me shattered on the floor.

What’s really maddening about being alive so far is that for all the methods of communication mankind has devised over the last however many decades and centuries, there is no way to communicate all of yourself to another person.

You can’t just open yourself up and say this is what I am, take your time and learn me so that one day you might appreciate the full picture.

You just share bits and pieces of yourself with countless people over your life but in the end I don’t think you can ever truly know a person.

In fact I don’t even think it will be possible to truly know yourself by the end of your life let alone in time to actually make use of this knowledge.

Inside you are infinite, endlessly complicated and flawed, ruined in so many moments by so many things and yet still moving forward, running headlong toward whatever it is you think will finally let you say “ I understand myself now”.

I don’t know anything for certain. My brain just tries to convince me every day that understanding isn’t worth striving for.

The true battle, my true battle, is to continue onward and carry the weight of my infinite self into a future that might just be better than what has come before. To be a true warrior, to fight a battle that’s worthwhile, win or lose.

What do I do with all this leftover knowledge I have of you? When I see something I know would make you laugh, or make you excited for the future? Do I just hold onto it? Let it rest in my head with all the other things I’ve learned but no longer have use for? I wonder if I’ll forget eventually. Part of me hopes I will, but the braver part of me hopes that I am strong enough to carry it with me, to remember you even though you aren’t mine anymore. I hope you’re doing well in your new life but I hope that I never hear a word about it.

Diane said that there are people in your life that help you become the person you end up being and that you can be grateful for them, even if they were never meant to be in your life forever. I like that sentiment, it’s comforting.

That show has saved me a few times now.

I miss people when they leave. I often wonder what they’re up to, hopefully they aren’t as confused as I am about things, it’d be nice to if someone in this world had some clear idea of what they are doing. Even if I doubt it’ll ever be me.

No love, of anything, however brief is a waste.

Do anything that makes life a little more bearable, so long as you aren’t harming someone else in the process.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for you to have forgotten something and left it in my life so that when you remember and come back to claim it, you look around and realise that this might not be so bad a place to live after all, maybe we were just twenty back then.

I don’t know, maybe it would just be nice to be remembered fondly by someone, a warm thought instead of a bitter memory.

You know sometimes when I feel shitty about myself I pretend i’m someone else, someone confident and bold and unashamed of being themselves. It helps a lot, makes things way fucking easier to deal with sometimes.

What I hate most about myself is my ability to convince myself of anything. It has led me to some of the best decisions I have ever made, it’s made me more confident than I have ever been. It is the sole reason that I can talk myself out of being sad and more often than not it is what makes me sad in the first place. My mind is an unreliable narrator and a perfectly objective judge of every situation, discerning when it is doing which thing is where my trouble usually begins.

There is very little left of me that I recognise.

I get the feeling that everything in life is a celebration of living.