Tuesday, February 21, 2017

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.

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