reconcil
The older I get the more apparent it is to me that sadness can no longer be glorified as some testing, self-cleansing, insular experience that (in light of the fog of misery or the undulating choke of desolation) absolves me of any responsibility to proactively fix myself. The reality is, against all inclination I must call on the reserves of energy I have to put on a socially desirable front of calm neutrality and measured concentration, attending to commitments, fulfilling scheduled appointments, conducting everyday tasks of survival, progression and order. There are so many routes toward independence and self-sufficiency that I'm taking that come with the dispiriting prospect of enduring another year of aloneness, mind-numbing routine, thwarted new beginnings and only partly clean slates. Everywhere I go I keep recreating the same identity, carrying with me the same timidity and shame and inhibition, the unhealed scars from repeated betrayals, flimsy declarations that disintegrated with the slightest tension, sparing hearts like revolving doors or flowers that bloom every few years. I've come to accept the nature of your impenetrability as a trick of the mind, a quality I've exaggerated or dwelled on because of my fixation with wholes and vulnerability as a measure of love and undivided mutuality. But there is something gently devastating about forging on while fully aware of the rocky path that lies ahead, marked by the same dangers of distance, the heavy presence of the unspoken, tiredness, doubt, half-truths, idleness, forgetting. Every recent memory remains sharp and fresh at the forefront of my mind, a wash of bittersweet poignancy and premature nostalgia; skin-on-skin, pitch dark to dawn, and single beds for two. I want to take advantage of the paths ahead... and I want it to be a happy ending.. for once. And hopefully a lasting one.