"newness of life"

It would be easy—more than easy—to just do now what I’ve done every other time: forget her and “move on.” The latter is in quotes because while the phrase implies forward movement, that’s hardly ever the case. One step forward and two steps back, that’s how I tend to do things. It’d be simple to paint her up as an ogre in the struggle to eradicate all feelings for her; but, really, I don’t see how this is possible, with my over-arching disposition towards her not anger or frustration but care and compassion; this itself is strange, I won’t deny that. Hurt by what she’s done, my ultimate concern remains her well-being. This forgetting her may not be as easy as originally thought, since all my tools and tricks-of-the-trade for “getting over” someone have as their foundation a negative disposition. God, so many big words. It’s true that her discontinuation of “us” gave birth to a lingering numbness replaced by a great sadness, the kind of sadness that clouds your entire day, dampens all light, and poisons every laugh and smile. In such times I isolate myself, cutting out the world so I can be alone in my pain. We’re strange creatures, we really are: we bathe in our suffering, willfully prolonging it, bitching about how much it hurts. It’s some sadistic form of cerebral S&M. We just keep holding onto the pain. Maybe it’s because feeling something is better than feeling nothing; and how she made me feel, it’s only appropriate that the End be met with such a strong feeling as sadness. If the sadness goes, maybe it’ll render all that we had invalid, just another disappointing chapter preceded by the same and undoubtedly followed by the same.

ANOTHER DISAPPOINTMENT. Maybe a better word would be “defeat.” For six years I’ve been fighting, through countless lands and with different weapons, but the end is always the same: each heroic battle met only by a sound and crippling defeat. I’ve changed strategies to find defeat lurking in every dark corner. With each defeat my will to fight lessens and my enemy—pure, unfettered cynicism—grows stronger. Cynicism: it runs like sap through my veins, and I wrestle against it with everything I have. But these defeats, they’re turning my heart to stone and my willpower to wax. It’s such an effort to hope, it really is: the more I hope, the wearier I become. My world’s growing dark, and it’d be easy to just close my eyes, curl up on the ground, and let it overcome me. It’s easier, and there’s a sort of comfort there. It’s familiar territory, I know my way around, it feels a bit like home. But it’s not home, and I know that because with her, I felt “at home” like I haven’t in a long while.

All the escapist techniques, isolating myself, seeking to get lost in worlds that are of my own creation but not mine… All of these are attempts to survive this, to come out unscathed. I’m just trying to get off the battlefield in one piece. Looking back on what we had as invalid, a passing fancy that died as violently as it began, that may be legitimate. Chances are she’ll go her way and I’ll go mine; my cynical side envisioned such a fate from the get-go (another win for the coldness in my heart). But rendering what I felt as invalid, I can’t too easily do that. I can explain it away as a delusion, sure; cynicism begs I do that. And maybe that’s what it was, pure and simple, and to bloat it with any intrinsic meaning would just be taking the spade to my heart and furthering the pain. But I can’t do that, because while what we had may have just been a delusion, the fact is that it wasn’t a delusion to me. Sure, I may have been a silly and foolish boy (as seems to be a recurring theme), but what I felt with her is no more a delusion than the sadness I feel at her retreat. If the sadness means anything, it means that what I felt with her was real. How can you miss something you never had?

“And what did I feel with her?” Half of me thinks I know, the other half knows I don’t know. Was it love? Sure, and I do love her. Not the kind of love that gives birth to 2-becoming-1, as such love must be cultivated; but I care about her more than I care about most people, and if that’s not love, then what is it? What I felt with her transcends, in a sense, one-word descriptions (even words laced with deeper meanings). It’s the sort of feeling encapsulated best in a poem or song. But I’m no poet or songwriter, so I’m left with prose, and I must do with it what I can.

I felt as if I were standing in the doorway leading home.

My heart came alive; the world, so beautiful and electric, alive with hope & promise.

My heart beat quicker and my strength returned.

A new passion for life caught me in an insatiable vice.

I was caught, ensnared, and I was being dragged into a future I had disavowed.

I craved to become the man I was created to be.

I craved to “grow up” and put my childish ways behind me.

A newfound fervor burned in my soul, and I dared to hope and believe.

I dared to believe that all the brutal defeats were simply there to ensure this stunning victory for life & love & hope. I felt like I was crawling out of this musty cave into a brand new world of blinding light, into a world reborn and begging me to explore it all. Holding her hand in mine, cuddling up with her in front of the fire… I believed that this is what I’d been looking for all along.

Those old and cryptic, half-buried dreams were resurrected with her advent.

But now in her absence they threaten to sink away into the depths yet again.

With her I saw how I’d sought to fill a void with things unreal.

Without her, how can I say what he had is anymore real than passing fancies prior?

This “newness of life”—there’s a good term—has gone now, and in its place is backward movement into the throes of cynicism. I tell myself I was a fool, a stupid & silly boy, for ever letting my heart taste something so forbidden. And, really, that may very well be it: the only lesson here is that I let my heart trump my mind, that I let myself toss wisdom to the wayside as I grappled with things not meant for me. What I felt with her is a memory now, and dwelling on it may be nothing more than an extenuation of my foolish, stupid, silly habits. Perhaps such things as these are forbidden, not for you but for me. Maybe my lot in life is to just swallow up the disappointments while watching all those around me flourish. Part of me has already accepted this, and I don’t fight like I used to. Resignation draws closer and closer. But I fought so hard for what we could have, what we could be; my heart came alive and I summoned lost strength, and though I’ve apparently lost yet again, the fact that I fought—and continue to fight, even now, as the world’s darkness covers me like a moth-eaten cloak—has to mean something. What? I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t know, but I know what I felt and I know what I feel, and somehow I must make sense of that.