Life’s Shitty First Drafts
Things do not change; we change.
Henry David Thoreau
What happened to us? Maybe it was a YP (your problem) and not a MP (my problem), but it could have also been that we simply outgrew each other.
I'm talking to you Marissa, Ike, Holly, Angel (one and two), Valerie, and Raymond, Charles, Elizabeth, and Justin, Zeke, (reader you aren't required to read or retain each name listed) Kaleb, Alice, Jean...
But maybe it's not that we have outgrown one another, and instead it is my self involvement that was a causal factor for our demise. The prioritization of my own happiness, enjoyment, or peace has led me on a long, lonely, nomadic path. We all had things in common, we once bonded, and might still do so, but to me keeping a friend is truly hard. I can't bring myself to blame adulthood (despite wanting to), or believe that the wages of aging and increasing responsibilities help contribute to our shitty friendship patterns. Frankly, I have not decided whether I love people or hate them, an opinion which is synchronized with my own internal self love/loathing. I can be cynical, I can be lighthearted and gentle, cruel or kind; I am capable of personifying all these traits: things I have learned from living and creating so many different friendships. We tend to unintentionally absorb characteristics from the world around us.
At the most pivotal moment of my life I made a choice which led to a lot of pain. At the time I did not foresee what the cause of my actions would be, but in two years flat I would begin to observe the results of a life I had obliviously built. By the same hand which writes this blog I fell victim to its alcoholic escapism and retrophiliac nature as the blow would make its way from the table into my nose and Janis Joplin's remastered version of Kosmic Blues played loudly in my ears. I let myself slip into the hands of two equally damaged and jarring individuals, being shaped into a sharp edged, kinda pudgy, awkward mold who stood there like a naked monkey: afraid and itching. Shifting my weight from one misshapen foot to the other, I restlessly lay myself into my grave each night, only to wake up with the moon again. How many years has it been?
Ten years of wanting somebody to love me. That movie love, "I got your back, call me anytime" love, mind reader love, tea on the back porch love love. Back then I just wanted someone to love me...enough. I thought I had finally achieved that, in some demented way, those two friends of mine were as sad and lost as me, but we were each lost in such different ways. I was battling crippling substance abuse which caused depression and guilt, we all were, but tack on our personal issues and a global pandemic: we were living in the shittiest self victimizing rom-com rock drama and we could not decide who the lead actor was. As a result, I just began to hate all my friends, as a projection of my own self loathing, but it made things easier. No one could tell, however, I silently suffered, like an animal of prey, falling more deeply into a toxic relationship with myself. I hear that blaming people for our own shortcomings is a sign of a lack of accountability and bitterness. I forgive You. I forgive me. I have chosen to let go and forget that feeling and shed the rotten skin which I was gifted, taken from a place of rotten souls, (as I write these words I know it's only for the sake of their poetic justice).
And yet, I waited...still longing to be loved back. I still long to be loved. I still long to be longed for, longed for by You, whoever that is at the moment of me publishing this. My mind whispers: "You cannot welcome love in if it does not exist within you." I love the Earth. In a nihilistic manner I am skeptic of my love for my parents, but I do love them. I love myself, and that sometimes comes with preconditions. My predispositions on self-love arise when I am alone, (sometimes not even then--I too often desire not being alone). I feel happiest when I am alone with tasks to occupy the space and time. I want to be in a room surrounded by people but I am tired. That's all. I am tired. Tired. Tired. Tired. Tired. Tired. I have written the word so many times it's begun to look like tried, losing its meaning.
This part of life sucks, with a capital S, and from what I gather, it gets slightly easier...to deal, but not less tiring. I wish I could be a tree, a plant, an animal, a blade of grass, something that only existed to exist. After all, our sole purpose is to nourish the land, despite the fact that we fail at this time and time again, however, we are not very different from the natural world. When we are all dead and gone the mychorrhizal fungi will envelop our brains, suck out the knowledge, transform it into nutrients, and give life back once more. Until one day "we" (nature not humanoids) are reborn from the same Earth we died upon. I guess when I put it that way we are a lot more like animals than previously perceived.
I vow to make the most of my regrets, never smothering my sorrow, but tending to it and cherishing it until it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
"...and the blue bird carries the sky on its back."
