slipfast

what i'd pay to just run away from this

Sometimes, I think about ruining my life.

I think about pulling the chord and leaving myself stranded at the center. The feeling swallows me up. Sometimes, I feel I’ve already done it — that I’m in the thick of it. I keep thinking all this fog and lack of center is my fault.

I had a tarot reading that said that some people think of me as lacking the emotional griftiness and wordy cleverness of a poet. I am so bad with words, I think, and some people know that better than I do.

The cards said I’m not making the kind of impact I think I’m making on people, and it’s all due to my timidness. My nature of hiding. I feel that I am always holding in a secret, and the older I get, the wider the gap between myself and others becomes.

Role Model sang it best, “If I was younger, I’d take a downer / Lay on my carpet, pills on the counter / If I was lonely, I’d call up Rachel / Be there in 20, jeans at her ankles.”

Time has moved so quickly in the last year that I feel I’ve blinked and missed everything. Now I’m confused about where I’m standing.

It’s true. If I were younger, I’d take a downer. I don’t drink as much as I used to. There go all the cultural critiques of seventeen-year-olds drinking until they blackout. It sounds ridiculous because it is. Who else is as sad as I was back then? If I had not faced the sharpness of maturity, like a knife at my throat, I’d lie on my carpet and feel the lines on my cupboard blur together. That’s all I knew.

But now, I know about therapy. I know of consideration and compassion with the self. I know sleeping is healthy. I know smoking is not. I know grief is validating, yet I still feel afraid to face it. If the future me knows something I don’t, can she just say it already?

When I dream of ruining my life, all that pressure finally wanes. Everyone is disappointed, but I’m not. Deep down, I think, everything I do is just a chance to avoid what I know to be true about myself. I like to ruin things a lot more than I like to admit. Sometimes, it’s mostly myself.

The universe offers me glimpses of a life I don’t know yet. Here’s the thing about abandonment, though, that I can’t explain. I might be out of the forest where he left me, but I have no idea what transpired in the months since. I’ve been blindly walking forward. I don’t know where I stand now.

My identity was fragile enough to rely on him.

He said I was everything he’d ever wanted. I let him tangle my hair in his hands and use me as a coin slot to pick at. I lay with him in the dark and tried to ruin myself, purposefully, and he was the one person who said he wouldn’t let me. It sounds weird, saying it now.

Has anyone else caught onto my jokes the way he did? Have they hugged me after I’ve cried on the staircase of a house I felt too lonely in? Have they held my hand on a lonely road in a desolate town, telling me stories? I told my friend once. I don’t know anyone else I’d be capable of sitting in the dark with.

I think some part of me is buried there, in the past. I keep returning to it, confused. He saw me as all these incredible things and then left me behind. Now I feel like I am anything but.

The boy that I went back to makes me feel small. Mostly, because I know he does not love me the way I want him to. I’ve made peace with it.

But no one has ever loved me like that.

Who else has held me as I threw up? Who warmed me up in the cold? Who has sworn to be there and actually showed up?

I keep thinking about all the wreckage I became by getting in the way of a man’s war with himself. He is happy. He got what he wanted.

Or maybe he didn’t.

Even if he still wanted me, I would forever have to deal with the fact that he took something of me with him, and I’ve lived a long time without it.

I don’t remember much of the last year.

I promised to get myself a cake on the anniversary of our quote-on-quote breakup, but now the day is getting closer, and I’m in the city again, and nothing makes sense. What am I supposed to be celebrating, again?

Surviving? Healing? I’m still the same, I think, while also entirely different. How does that make any sense?

Am I supposed to be praising my newfound sobriety, even though I use vanity to protect me in the same way smoking once did? I’ve gone back to the same habits, they’re just differently shaped.

I thought I was done pretending, or at least I thought I was, but now I’m starting to think I’ve been lying to myself.

My limbs feel loose. My weight is off-balance. I feel odd again.

Last weekend I went to a city two hours away. I went with him once, two summers ago. I was there for someone’s wedding — the ultimate celebration of love.

I had fun, I think. But my cousin kept taking care of me, trying to keep my new spindly self from falling. I had no firm weight. I was more like a feather in the wind. And then, I lay there, eyes closed, afraid to move.

I wish someone would take care of me in the way I want. Instead of trying to keep me upright, can they try fixing how thin I am instead?

I am holding onto nothing. I am afraid of everything. I’m scared to lose it all, but I have nothing that I’d cling to. It’s all one strange mess. I dream of falling and wake up afraid of it anyway.

He left me in those woods and took more than I thought. But I don’t think it’s fair to blame him when he’s been gone a year.

Maybe the problem is that I’m just too afraid to blame myself; to face the shallow waters of my own life.

I don’t remember how I got here. I don’t know how to get out.