Scribblings on the Wall

"You can still find me
between devils and deep blue seas
in the desert's hands, on a sea of sand:
a dry tidal wave over my feet of clay
on unfinished glass, looking for greener grass."

It's funny the fragments of yourself that are scattered around the internet.
Broken little bits of memory, pieces of who you used to be.

I  would've lost this thing forever, aside from an overzealous password  breach — or at least, that's what the monitoring service claims.

I have my doubts. Who would care?

Regardless, here we are. All zero of you left.

I'll migrate this to shadowwolf218.blogspot.com, if I think the memories are worth preserving.

It's not who I am anymore, that's for certain. Maybe it never was.

You can also find me on Facebook, for now, under my name, and on Twitter at
CrTrainwreck

Suits me, don't you think?

— C

Once upon a time, I was in a long distance relationship.

Oklahoma to Australia type long distance, not exactly a wise choice on my part.

But we were uniquely compatible, the chemistry was -potent-.

Or so I thought.

The  fragments of that breakup are scattered across my profiles on these  here internets, buried in blog posts and journal entries and facebook  statuses. It wouldn't be inaccurate to call it one of the defining  moments of my life up to this point, but all of that has been said.

This was, after all, ten years ago as of this April.

We  had some brief contact since then...enough to watch her move halfway  across the world, and wind up in another serious relationship. I believe  she married the guy? Who knows.

Some time ago, I  made the choice to bury whatever was left of it. Five years ago? Six? I  don't remember anymore. The one caveat I let myself keep was this: if  she ever came back, I would let her.

Weird, right? Short sighted? Pointless? Pathetic?

Don't worry, I thought all of that too. I am a lot of things, but easy on myself isn't one.

Fast  forward to several days ago, when I'm cleaning out my closet. I get to  the box that holds all of the stuff she sent back to me - a dreamcatcher  I made for her birthday, few of my old shirts, several letters, some  photographs...memories, in short. I knew it would hurt to open it, but  I'm a glutton for emotional punishment.

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Where do you find motivation after confronted with the stark reality that everything you are, everything you are capable of, is not enough?

That question first weighed on my mind some years ago. I was just getting in to high school. I wasn't ready for it. Hell, I'm still not ready for it. I don't have an answer. I don't even know where to start.

If I had known, then, that this question would haunt me and break me down into this abject and barely functional...thing, I'd have burned it out of my brain just like so many other things.

I think I can safely identify it as part of the root of the problem, at least. That's nice.

But in all seriousness, that is the worst part about being intuitive or intelligent or whatever the fuck you call me. I could have played music for a living, or became a doctor, or gone into biochemical research, or started a business. The research is the strong option right now.

Thing is, staring variability like that in the face, most people default to what they enjoy most. Following your dreams, or what have you.
My curse is that they are all weighted the same. No option appeals more or less than the other.

Once I accepted that, ages past, I realized that was a component of understanding that nothing I did would ever feel like it was good enough. I could be an amazing doctor, and lament the musical career I never had. Or vice versa, etc ad nauseum.

It hurt. It hurt a lot. I shrugged it off and played the game day by day, but it all lead me to here, and all I have left is the sum of my failures.

Some of these things, I realize, it isn't rational to blame myself for...I should not be carrying all of the guilt that I do. Knowing it isn't rational, though, that doesn't tend to help much.

Insanity is portrayed as more glamorous, and that statement alone makes me hate the world.

Genius and insanity have that close-knit relationship and everyone loves to talk about it and not quite outright claim they believe themselves in the first category, but while everyone is willing to look at the heights of achievement one can reach...no.
No one ever, ever talks about the anguish and suffering. We're all about overcoming adversity. Truth is, those beautiful achievements do very little to soothe the misery. How would I know?
Intuition.

I do mean misery. I don't notice it as a significant factor anymore because it's been my resting pulse for nearly a decade, but I am relentlessly unhappy.

Most of that is predictable, if you have all the variables.
You don't, and I am not going to give them to you.

I used to have this notion that I could overcome all of this for love.
That was quaint and pretty and so very terribly wrong, and I'd give a lot to take back the attempt because it still fucking hurts to have failed so utterly - myself, sure, but mostly the truth of hurting another in the process of my downward spiral.

There's blame number one. Or is it? See, it's hard to tell. Do I blame myself for her feeling the need to leave?

Yes.
Same way I blame myself in no small part for the deaths of all my friends who had diseases that maybe -maybe- in some tiny fantasized version of reality I could cure.

I told you it wasn't rational.

I've been doing the isolation thing again lately. I didn't realize it until I considered how long it's been since I had an honest conversation with another soul. Go figure.

So it all boils down to that question. Motivation. I want to do something, but what? How do I choose and deal with leaving everything else unfulfilled? I can't have everything. I can't even have most of it. Probably not even some.

But nothing, nothing is getting old. I am tired of being goddamn tired all the time, and my mind is stagnating. I can't help but worry about the onset of rot.

I don't know precisely what to do about it, aside from seeing that for the moment, my only real option is to open myself up to all the guilt and shame and ache. There's a reasonable chance it'll spark something inside of me.

Or I'll drown in it.

But change is good, right?

Funny notion, that.
Some caterpillars endure metamorphosis and become butterflies.
Others get eaten.

- C

Once in awhile I get these flashes of clarity.

It's like between them I'm living, breathing, thinking, existing in a haze. Nothing is distinct, everything is muted, but that's my reality so I don't notice it.

Then the moment comes and the fog clears and I see everything in my own mind the way it is supposed to be. I see the momentum I could have, the drive, the honesty and kindness and sense of purpose.

I hate those moments. I wish like hell it looked like a mountain I'd have to climb or some challenge or even something painful that I'd have to suffer through. Those I could handle. I don't have a high enough sense of self-worth to be that concerned about suffering.

Instead, it looks foreign. I recognize there is a distance between where I spend most of my time and these moments of lucidity. I can even see a path from here to there, but it's through a medium I don't recognize. It's like seeing a glimmer of hope at the end of the proverbial tunnel, only to find the air has become water and the ground quicksand. I don't understand how to travel in this medium, and so I can't move. I can only watch.

It's probably just another way my mind has found to torture itself for all the things I haven't done. I don't mind the suffering - not because I'm noble or strong, but selfish. Pain without purpose is indistinct like everything else, but pain from a clear source that perhaps I deserve, that can sometimes be sharp enough to pierce the veil of...all of this.

You don't know what that's like, and if you do I'm sorry.

'Hello darkness my old friend. '

I'm allowed to have conflicted feelings all at once without lessening the nature of any individual one of them.
I'm not a static character, after all.
It muddles things up.
I don't like it.

'The middle-man straddles the fence. He never loses, never wins, with confidence.
And more power to him.'

I like reductive logic. Things are not often as complicated as people make them out to be.

"Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, makes no difference. The degree is arbitrary - the definitions, blurred. If I have to choose between one evil and another, I'd rather not choose at all."

But sometimes things don't reduce. There's nothing to break down.
You're faced with a reality that is. Just is. All on its own. It doesn't need things to stand on.
And so you have to actually face it.

One of those realities nearly killed me, once.
Another one saved me.
Frankly, I don't know which one did more damage to my trust.

So I live as much as possible without dealing with these things.
I lock them up in rooms inside my head and leave them to wither.

Then you go and drop a grenade in the rooms and the doors are all blown off.
Now my realities are wandering around in my head and I DON'T WANT TO SEE THEM ANYMORE.

It may be the sleep deprivation. It certainly is a factor.
But the grenade was weeks past.

For awhile I froze the explosion in time. I can do that for awhile.
Watch the shrapnel flying around, and lock it in a moment. Ignore the moment, and the motion vanishes.
The momentum drops from beneath the storm.

It doesn't actually help, you know. It just gives me a minute to process things before I have to feel the pain.
Clarity is useful in these situations.

Clarity is the theme. I don't have trouble reading.
I don't have trouble understanding.
I don't have trouble seeing.



Here's a reality, one of the ten or so bouncing around my brain wreaking havoc on an otherwise...
oh fine, an otherwise desolate waste of what it once was. Maybe the fire will do it good.

But I don't particularly want to burn up. It hurts.

It hurts.

You distort my vision.
I made it very clear after last time that I couldn't tolerate that again.
But here you are, twisting and feinting and making a catastrophic mess of things.
In the moment, I can't see it. Out of the moment it's still hard to trace.
You spin things about, and I can't get my bearings.

What gives you the right?
I was supposed to be free of that.
I wept. I bled. I -sacrificed- to be free of that.

Then you.
You have the audacity to make me feel hope again.

What the hell do I do with it?


There's your truth. Plain as day, clear as swamp water.
But nonetheless laid bare from my addled brain.

I'm thinking the answer for now is distance.
I don't have a good reason to think that. It doesn't work for me that way, the way it does for people.
I don't even like the idea, which is disconcerting all to itself.
But I've gone and fucking got attached, haven't I? It's not a murder mystery.
Not yet.


But I don't know what to do, or say, and I hardly know what's okay to think to preserve whatever fragments of...something? I've got no idea.

So I'm going to step back for a moment and see if that helps.

It won't.


I meant what I said, though.

And I'm sorry for not being better.

"It is not a lake; it is an ocean."

- C