Your Mind Knows the Way Out

I am at war with myself. There is the part of myself that cannot let go, and there is the part that knows how this will end. That this is all just a broken record that we all grew tired of hearing long ago. And still I do things I know I shouldn't. I will still call, and I will still cling as hard as I can to something that sometimes seems further in the past than the statues in museums that are missing pieces. Unfortunately, I am in no museum, and my troubles are completely my own as they swirl around and fall over and over into a waterfall that never can really quite come out in tears. Instead it just rolls around and around in my head.

I am tired of feeling this way, and I am tired of all the destructive coping mechanisms I keep turning too. Getting wasted never makes me feel better. Sleeping with strangers not only doesn't make me feel better, it makes me feel cheap and worse. It's good to know that someone wants my body, I have my body, but no one wants what's inside. I keep getting used. "That's what people do." Using lines like these to gloss over a wound that only stings harder and harder as people try so hard to say the right things.

There's nothing to say. There's only time. And where is that? Where the fuck are you? Days and months are mere moments, and they're just not adding up. They're not helping, they're not distancing, they're not making me feel better.

Nothing is going to put my wings back on, and that statue in the Louvre--the one whose name I can't remember now because my mind never can quite seem to recall things I want it to, only those I don't want, of course--is just going to keep standing on its pedestal mocking mere mortals and their troubles.

I find I only write for myself these days. And sometimes it makes me feel better, and sometimes it doesn't.

I drove home and thought about slamming my car into other cars. Killing myself. Then I thought of the mess I'd have to clean up if I lived, the people I would hurt if I didn't, and then the smear on my driving record I would get for crashing a car with an expired inspection sticker. Regardless, I was clearly being overly dramatic.

So how can I be overly dramatic and not cry? What is wrong with me? Maybe my tears are spent on this one. "Sorry, Ray, let it go," my body says, "we're not giving anymore of ourself away to this one. He's spent. He's said goodbye."

And he says, "Goodbye."

I can live with these regrets, but I can't live with knowing I didn't do everything I could to stand up for love. I fought hard, and I lost. I keep saying there will be another battle, and there will, of course. There will be another war, even. But it just seems so far away when I realize I've moved back to a broken dream, and yet that dream simmers only blocks away. Daisy's green light was no less symbolic, and no less destructive.

I will just wait for everything to settle down.
"Your mind knows the way out this time. You'll be okay."
I hope.