The hurt is distilled into clear grains of pain where you
know exactly where you hurt and why, all pretences of a self-sufficient heart
having fallen away. The music is played with some desperation mid-week in hopes
of gathering together some scraps of the mind and threading them together with
a semblance of logic. The day barely registers, you can see the urgency of work
through a haze of swirling emotion, and pretend to be assertive and know
exactly what you want. But those who know you know you are nowhere. They try to
yell some sense into you, and you nod and respond, but in your head, they might
as well have been talking to a sock puppet.
You smoke many cigarettes, unregistering of the health
impact. Because it’s summer and you can, and because you will give in to any
impulse that is a genuine impulse, because it is a fully-formed feeling.
You want to listen to the crystal clear notes of Oscar Isaac
and T-Bone Burnett. They are precise and full of feeling and twang your hurt in
exactly the way you want it played. Pink Floyd leaves no impact, Boyhood’s
soundtrack feels too immediate and related, and silly.
In all of this, of course, there is an enclosing sense of
irony at the stupidity of your own actions. How it defies all sense, logic, and
how conscious you are about the irrationality of your behaviour. You also
wonder in passing whether he passed on this state to you, like a contagion, because
it is exactly as he had described his own behaviour, and you had been glad then
that your mourning for your broken relationship was so finite and controlled within
the scope of that one year: terrible grief from March to September-ish, but by
December we were done. How you had prayed and told yourself that you could not
possibly mourn this for years on end like that woman who wrote on that online
forum, no way.
You have stopped wondering today how the casual liking
tipped into full-blown crazy some time yesterday, so that you haven’t even
needed much action on the part of the offender to fully confirm that he did
not, absolutely did not care. You have, in fact, reached the crest of this
mountain, and will soon start the walk downhill towards uncaring-ness when it
will not matter anymore. You also remember, in glimpses, about that one guy
with whom you made a royal hash of it, and what a good thing it is that this is
all happening in your head and the person in question will never have any
intimation of it.
You don’t, in fact, always remember what he looks like.
