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Casual Mournings (Of a Six-Night Escape)
All you need is shame
Permit me a few moments of self-indulgence. Sometimes, one has to wallow in the sticky mess of one’s own personal dramas. And it hardly hurts to make the spectacle publicly accessible.
Once upon a time, a friend informed me that to love is nothing other than to consciously and willingly suffer. Since then, I have been unable to imagine another way to define the verb.
Tonight, I am heavy with longing — for the right words I could have found, for the better self I could have embodied, and for one specific person whom I barely knew.
Here is what I regret.
. . .
That it’s so damn hard to smash through another’s walls. That it’s considered so impolite, when all I want is to flail my fists and see how big a dent I can make in you.
That I had the chance to get to know a conscious being layered to the core with insight and memory and emotion, someone who is not me but in whom I catch glimpses of a world that has always been within my sight but out of my reach, and squandered it as quickly as it came.
That I wanted so badly to cast aside that film of ego that warps and limits most everything I do, and all the churning tangles of jealousy and self-loathing beneath…
