Now here

It’s that sour feeling you get in your gut when you know you made the wrong choice. Feels like the bottom just left and you don’t know what you’re falling into. Black ice, you know it’s there and it’s going to hurt when you hit it but you can’t see where it is, but it’s always there. These are the feelings that went through my mind as I saw you leave me. I couldn’t blame you. At this point and time I feel like it might have even looked comical to a casual passerby. Me vomiting in my own living room cursing at the sofa because that was the closest thing I could turn my head to without the room spinning any more than it already was and you shaking your head and throwing, with some force I might add, my keys and saying “I hope you use them you fuck”.

Ok I retract my earlier statement I don’t think this could be considered funny by anyone no matter their level of casualness. Though where I’m sitting at now I guess humor is my only defense left other than alcohol. I can’t start thinking rationally now. If I did God knows what would happen. While I sit here and nurse both my hangover, with Lord Calvert, and my key injury, with frozen peas, I wonder what happened. Because to be frank I have no idea, I don’t mean to say that I’m a stranger to my own personality and understand that prolonged contact with it tends to rub people the wrong way.

Especially you.

I mean to say rather that I simply can’t remember. I was vacant, absent. Another wonderful effect that alcohol has on the mind, the ability to vacate consciousness from the physical body. It still moves and acts, animal like, cruel, I hate when people use that phrase, “animal like” when was the last time you saw a squirrel liquored up trying to beat up his wife? My nature is all too human. Too cruel, too evil, and the worst part of human nature is that we have the ability to regret actions. So after my drunken bravado and ridiculousness I have to look back with shame on it and can say nothing. Because it was me, albeit a different “me” but me none the less and if there is one thing I know about human nature it’s that we only have ourselves to blame for our actions. We’re not victims of circumstance or others injustice. We pick up the bottle. I pick up the bottle. I pick up the drugs.

I hurt you.

I hurt me.

I don’t want to say I told you so. Because I did. But I told you so. I told you, this is verbatim mind you, “You really don’t want to be here with me, I tend to repeat the past and as you can tell the past hasn’t been very kind to me or those who feel it’s necessary to be with me”, to which you aptly responded “I don’t care about the past I care about you” which truly melted something in me and let me, against my better judgment, to try again with you. This was on a Tuesday June 7th 2007, just to be clear.

It failed.

I always loved history too much, maybe too philosophically, because that same track seems to run over and over again. In a few months your face will blend together with the last few in a long line of failures at human connection. I have to say though that you had an amazing capacity for suffering through my particular brand of dick-ishness. You were the Russians and I was Romanovs and I guess the last tirade was enough for a revolution which ended, thankfully, not in an execution of life but rather with an execution of contact and feeling.

These are things that I’m able to deal with.

These are things I am able to understand.

What I cannot understand is why I’m writing this to you now. This is truly, in my life, an original act. All that has come before this has come before and I felt would come again. I know this is a very poor love letter. If that’s what you wish to call this. But I can’t help but feeling that that’s what this is.

I wanted to explain to you. My actions, my attitude and my horrible ability to push away those who wish to be close and I can already tell I’m failing at that. Regardless I will try to explain. I have a love affair with the past. I constantly pick it apart, fearlessly delving into things that no matter how hard I think about different routes I could have taken different choices I could never change. This is my safety net. The past, because in the past it’s possible to think about different routes, the present has always frightened me. I try to stay away from it. Whether through drugs or drink I always attempt to maintain a firm grip on anything except what is happening now. Reality is my enemy. I always wondered why I hung so doggedly to the past but now I know why.

I can choose when the past eats away at me. I can choose to relive or try to forget.

The latter hardly ever works but it’s the feeling of choice that drives me. I feel like in thinking about the past there will always be time. Because simply, that time does not exist. There it is.

That aspect of me.

Philosophy.

Bullshit.

Anything to not face reality, if I can think my way around it then I’ve conquered it; in my mind at least which leads me to stagnation and stasis, paralysis really. Because the true art of any philosopher is not to explain for others what reality and “truth” is but rather to encase oneself in thought so deeply that actuality doesn’t matter anymore. I build worlds of thought wherein I live and breathe. Actuality is a mirror only of my inner reality. If you’re wondering why this letter is not speaking directly to you, because that’s what I’m beginning to wonder about, it’s simply that I can only understand the world around me in my own terms/bullshit. Both choices are as equally true and untrue as the other.

Life only matters if thought is exerted in its explanation. Thought though doesn’t allow one to live in the present. Therein lies my paradox.
See. The philosopher takes over in order to deal with the things that I can’t deal with. I’m a coward, for lack of a better word, wait, Yellow, no that’s not quite it, Scared, yeah that’s it. Scared of you and me, scared of two people actually connecting because that’s something I simply cannot deal with. Why? Well because it’s never happened before with me. No family that I cared enough for to keep touch with. A few old photos yellowing away in a drawer. Another fight I ran away from. But that’s not why we’re here.

We’re here for you.

Or for me I’m not quite sure anymore.
I don’t know exactly how much more strenuously I can tell you that you were original. You did something horrible to me. You made me stop thinking.

And as you can see clearly that was not something I appreciated. I don’t have to tell you that this was not about one fight or event but rather the culmination of you making me feel, well, happy. I didn’t really understand at the time what it was about you that put me off so much. Now though, I see and fuck you for making me feel that horrible feeling.
How dare you.

What a fucking shmuck.

Me not you if that wasn’t obvious.

Why the fuck am I writing this, I’m not even drinking anymore. I’m just staring at this fucking page getting more and more pissed off. I’m such a poet when I’m angry aren’t I? What happened to all those letter writing classes? Lord Calvert and possibly a minor concussion that’s what happened. You do realize that I’m going to need stitches don’t you? Bitch. This is what I’ve been reduced to, yelling at paper because I’m the only one here anymore. Somehow I think this is how it will be from now on, me living in the world but always yelling at the paper in my head.

You took away my choice.

I’m not kidding myself anymore, I took away my choice. Choice. History. Thought. Words that I love dearly because of their complexity and depth but words that don’t mean shit now. I’ve explained my philosopher’s nature and I’ve been desperately trying to make and argument up, make a reasoned choice to not sit here and write this.

But I’m failing.

If logic and reason and choice were real I wouldn’t be sitting here yelling at a letter that I won’t send. That I can’t send.

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. I wish I could write it bigger than this entire letter so you could read it louder. You took away my one defense what do I have now. You took my shield and left me.

Alone.

I was used to being alone. I was used to my head. I was used to my tirades both drunken and sober. I was used fights both inside and outside of my head and I dealt with them either through alcohol or “logic” which meant I thought about them until they meant nothing anymore. It’s like saying a word over and over again until you don’t understand it anymore. Making anything into a shell of what it was and feeling nothing like the original.

I made them useless and trite. I can’t think this pain away though. It just gets worse. Like a snowball rolling down a hill in one of those old cartoons. Except this snowball is the color of guilt. And the hill doesn’t have a bottom.

The mirrors in my house dog me now.

They follow me.

Catching my glance as I walk by, always expecting you to be standing in the mirror instead of me. This is either the onset of insanity or my mind compensating for the amazing hole that you left within me.

My mind is compensating for the loss by destroying my own image and replacing it with yours.

Which honestly is no surprise. My own image never really did me any good anyway. It only taught me that I was still here. Only taught me that no matter how many others I placed next to my own image that only mine would remain.

Alone.

But if my image is being replaced with yours then what constitutes me? Was I you? Were you me? Is this letter addressed to me?

I’ve lost control.

I wander down paths I no longer wish to be. Paths that take me to places that don’t welcome me.

Your final insult.

You’ve successfully pushed my mind away from me. It has become independent from its owner who only explored the infinite inwardness of itself.

Now if you are actually reading this. If you are in fact real. Does this mean that I’m not?

This is going nowhere. Nowhere. NowHERe. NowHERe. NowHERe. nowHEre………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….If you split nowhere into two words it is now here.

Is it truly now here with me. Can I be with it. Since I can’t be with you will it keep me company.

It is now here in my mind.

My mind is with it now.

I’ve reread my writing over and over again. I can’t remember why I started this. I have become disconnected.

From whose roots did I emerge? Or rather merge?

My mind is holding together but I have no sense of direction anymore. My self….my actions….I have lost them to the deep. This is a letter.

This is a letter

The only thought I can hold is your image. The rest falls through my fingers like water. I simply cannot hold on anymore. But your image is no longer whole. It too has faded and become a phantom even among phantoms. Is this lucidity?

Does it proceed something worse?

Or is this the beginning?

All my feelings are directed to you. All my thoughts cling to what I believe you were. A stake in the ground pinning me to earth. Keeping me grounded. Keeping my mind in a cage. A cage of thought. But why now do I realize that my mind was unhinged by you. I can’t keep my thoughts in order anymore.

Damn it.

Damn it.

It’s falling now.

My mind is falling.

Like gravity.

I only needed a push.

My thoughts are few and far between now.

My letter. What I believe is my letter has gone on for an eternity.

I think.

The pages are few but they spread deep within me. And maybe they matter only to me. But I’m seeing now that pursuing this only leads to death.

Paralysis.

Death.

What I’m really beginning to think is that this letter isn’t for you. This is for me. This is my mirror. It’s hard to understand but I feel like you might have been the last straw. My last failure. I feel like I’m starting to understand that only way not to fail. The only way out of the shell of philosophy that I’m wrapped so tightly in is to not think. Which is impossible. But I always have choice. I’m starting to understand, though slightly incapacitated by my current mental state that I’m hitting on something close to truth here.

My thoughts fade in and out. But I’m here now and that’s what matters. You made me understand something. Alone is not enough. But since my company brings misery to you, the only one who has made me feel, truly feel alive than I can no longer be.

You were my negative.

And now I will be zero.

I will be nothing.

I will only be the gust of wind. Sightless. Soundless. Churning up from the deep. I will be the silent stare of the abyss. No maze of thought will hold me anymore. My mind is free. A sea of nothing.

I thank you.

Now here.

If anyone finds this. Please. Hold its ideas close and then let them go. I was unable to.