Feel small. Vulnerable. Prone to abuse. Willing to let myself get trapped in a bad situation, a bad relationship. Willing to let it happen with a feeble crutch of an excuse that I am a free person of no responsibility who can exit a situation at any time. Only I am not that swashbucklingly nonchalant in just leaving. I need the abuse. The constriction. But I’m too selfish a prick to be anyone’s soldier, their lackey. I’m like a toy people play with, but only for a little while. Then they put me away, see me only when a closet door is occasionally opened, or a dresser drawer plundered for socks or shorts that certainly survived. The shoes I wore in college, still on my floor though they’ve rotted away such that wearing them is a painful chore. But I do it anyway, with triple layer socks and a fool’s determination to walk like I did decades ago, with heavy shoes that made my travels seem critically important, more important than yours, I feel I’m being used but it’s deliberate. I chose this. I am free to leave at any time. The pills have me staying. I think my hunger for them has increased. Reliance. They have saved me some anxiety and panic meltdowns but yesterday nothing could have stopped the trigger, the one which I don’t even know what brought it on. A slow-speaking, presumptuous woman, thick Russian accent, I could barely understand her through the useless barrage of supplementary information, the backstory to the backstory, the laying out of her life lamentations as if we were not just a phone call but a destiny, a sure thing, a guarantee in a world of singular uncertainty with respect to companionship and singularity. How much of our interactions, commitments, promises and exaltations, how much of it is lies, fantasies, fabrications? We compromise in accepting character flaws and shortcomings, maybe because the dick is good or the fucking righteous in its ways of attacking childhood’s daddy traumæ. My vulnerabilities are internal. Unseen. Not the muscles we praise and fawn over, the muscles of the athlete and the well-walked. These are the muscles of the silence, the interactions it engages rarely connect to physical acts or obvious consequence. These muscles can behave badly. Very badly. Like persistent, unwanted erections slapping me inside my face. Or weak, unresponsive fingers too lazy to lift a word from its premature coffin.
…
Tonight I hope to meet her again. Tonight or tomorrow. A sure thing, it seems. She looks like organized chaos. I’m more like chaotic organization. I make sense out of chaos. She crafts chaos from standard sensibilities. Do I even know this?
…
So many other jobs to be had. So much more life to live. I say that against a backdrop of encroaching mortality, knowing my time is limited. I think sometimes about those who think something that happened 10 years ago is forever symptomatic, and forever connected in the continuum. To me a day is a day, one which can be its own defining epoch, a generation contained in a single 24-hour calendar cube. That day disconnects the past from the future, severing their familial bond. To them life is short, but I find it long by their outlook. Life is longest when it is finished.
