Write Every Day — 01 —Oh, This Again?!
Sunlight creeps in through the window and there is a steady stream of smoke suspended in it. It kisses the floor and the walls and the broken television that uselessly sits on a crowded bookshelf full of novels that I’ll continue to put off reading.
I met up at the bar with an ex lover a week or two ago and we made casual small talk in between sips of whiskey. This was a human being that I once looked at with such affection, with such unbridled and raw love, and I thought that I’d never shake the feeling I got when she walked into a room. The way that time stopped, how nobody else in the entire world even existed, how it’d feel when her little shoulder would brush into mine and she’d crack that devious grin that was equal parts beautiful and terrifying to me. I was hopelessly obsessed with her for almost the entire duration of my 20’s and I loved her so much that it made me physically sick to be apart from her. But I was ultimately left with no choice when she moved away and cut off communication with me. I thought I’d never fall in love again. I thought it was all so fucking bleak and hopeless and it lingered there inside my heart for a very, very long time. Up until this experience, in fact, at that little bar with all the snow on the ground and all the drunk people on either side of us; I suspected that the feeling remained dormant. I expected to fall in love all over again, wondered what it would be like now and if it’d be any less fleeting than the first go around the sun almost a decade ago now.
Instead, I couldn’t stop thinking about somebody else. Another story of unrequited love and one I’m quite familiar with at the dawn of my thirties and at the deathbed of my youth. We drank and laughed and were quite jovial. I still found her as beautiful as I did before. I still kept an eye out for that trademark grin. But the love, that rawness, had all but evaporated. She left with a group of people and told me she’d get in touch a little later that night, but we both knew there in that bar that we weren’t going to. I didn’t have sour grapes about it. I hugged her, said goodbye, and looked back at my phone.
Still no message from the girl on my mind.
How long, I wondered to myself, would it take this time? Would I go another ten years with that heaviness in my heart? Could I even handle that reality if it were the case? Why didn’t she love me? What was so special about her anyway?
I knew the answers to all of those questions, but I found it easier to pretend like I didn’t and so that’s what I did. I struck up a conversation with a stranger I’d never talk to again and I sipped on my whiskey. I got real drunk. I lied to myself.
It’s a long road out of purgatory and the heat in there is hotter than the center of hell. I’m sweating bullets and I can’t seem to get warm either. And that long road, this awful trek, is only beginning again. There is no light visible. There are no other travelers. It’s just me this time.
And you know what? I think that, just maybe, it has always been that way.
