Floods
I'm not there and I know that it bothers me more than it bothers you. What does that mean to and for me?
What is a connection between two individuals? It seems evident that the real connections are found rather than forced, but how do some come so easily? Form so effortlessly, exist so naturally, wilt so wordlessly.
Some strange filament winds its way through the complexity of everyday existence to bind the part of a person which cries for a counterpart to another just long enough to be cut at one end. Feel the air rush from your lungs as that cord slides out of your grasping hands and cruelly slashes into your chest, sending you staggering backwards while desperately choking for air. Feel this coarse and abrasive new reality permeate every inch of your existence, sapping your strength at every juncture, every interchange, every point at which its pervasive message of involuntary upheaval is allowed to saturate and impregnate your form; twist the knife as each new conception messily executes the one it has supplanted in the public square of focused conscious attention, painfully snapping bones, rending flesh, and inculcating the deep-seated emotional confusion necessary to the process of destroying a no longer relevant man and creating a new animal altogether. Every point at which the present and undeniable state of the world collides in a shower of sparks and half-felt injuries with the increasingly sonorous weight of a past riddled with self-doubts which multiply at every subsequent re-evaluation fills your ears with a cacophonous chorus of self-imposed torment that seems to arise at every turn purely to twist and tear and torture you for some unnamed crime, some unspoken and evidently unspeakable offense.
So where am I now? Not there, not any longer; not where I want to be, but no longer hopelessly mired in the aftermath, where I need to not-be. This new place is oddly hued and strangely constructed, full of questions and confusion.
I want what I need - everyone does.
I want what feels right - who wouldn't?
I don't need what I want - I would be selling myself short to claim otherwise.
I don't need what feels right.
When my father died I stopped needing anyone. The brutal reality of waking up and no longer having what everyone else had, what I had always had, what was supposed to always (or at least for the next 30-40 years) be there to rely on taught me to rely on nothing that I couldn't make happen for my self. Did I forget that? I don't think so. Appreciation is not reliance. The appreciation has been there as long as she has. The reliance never has.
What is a connection between two individuals? It seems to transcend the physical world and its' petty concerns easily enough as to be a purely ephemeral flash of light, bursting into existence and burning brilliantly as a star for the briefest of moments. Better to look to the next than the last, but impossible to turn away from the confounding beauty which has just unfolded in a complex explosion of thought, meaning, communication. A light so radiant that the mere afterglow outshines the rest of the sky.
I held an unconscious bag of meat in my arms and felt it shake and choke and cough pathetically for air while limp as death. I wish I didn't know what that felt like. I wish I hadn't felt it before. I wish I could say that I hold hope that I will never have to feel it again. I pray that I will never have to watch someone die on the floor.
I wish it hadn't been her.