“this is why i cut crushes off at the stem, and never let them see the light of day anymore; i remember the pain, I remember BEING a fool in love with some unattainable girl, and i know how useless and silly it is. if only it was just about getting laid, but it’s not. it’s about that search , that search for that perfect girl, the elusive, impossible to find, perfect girl. the one that you can wake up next to and just wonder how the world could be encompassed in that one look she gives you, or how you never felt more perfect, or more at ease, than you do lying there beside her. Sunsets, and moonlit walks, long talks and fierce arguments, watching movies and spending just that split second thinking how much better the experience is, with her by your side. Long poems and distant memories, heart-break and heart-ache, and that joy…oh god that perfect, exquisite moment when you know, just for an instant, that you both feel the exact same, as you stare into each other’s eyes. Life is never felt until you can wrap it all up into that one gaze, and feel something so much more real than anything else you’ve ever felt before.
crazy fool, stupid child, ignorant dreamer you say. Hamlet had it right, ‘life is but a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is no more.’ i walk in shadows, and live in dreams. i have memories of her, of giving my heart away as if it were no more than a heavy wasteful burden. sometimes i’m afraid, of her and me, of myself. of wanting to do that all over again; feeling as if I’m not truly living unless my heart is on the line. there’s either the perfect high, or nothing…and the nothing is so boring, and yes, lonely too.
what do you do when the pieces fit? you look at it, admire it, and hide it away. school is more important and you can’t afford depression. throw it away and be done, and remember it in a fiery sunset, or a starlit night, in a song or a dream … store it in your heart and wonder what might have been. but never lock yourself away again…just your heart. michael. ha. what a joke, an irony, a cruel self-deprecating jab each and every time … and how easily it slides off the tongue. who am I ? mike, michael or <redacted>? surely not mike, he is lost forever. and <redacted>? a lost wandering soul, struggling day to day for those things that get one through the day. and michael? a dream. a myth, a lie, a deceit … an actor, who struts and frets his moment upon the stage, and is no more.”
8 years is a long time. Sometimes I have a day dream of going back in time and meeting my younger self and sitting down with him at our kitchen table. In the dream I tell him everything of how our life will progress, of all the failures, the pain, and that the only grace is found in vows of celibacy and abstinence. How the simple pleasures of life, the hopes we cherished for so long, would become dust under our feet as we walked this path. How our life would end up haunted by a love that made the stars beat in time to our breaking heart on a moonlit dock in a forgotten town.
In the dream my past and younger self stares at me, shivering in the elation and adolescent adrenalin rush that always overcame me when I was filled with the surety of youth. He clasps his hands together on the table, straightening in his chair as he leans in, as I always did when I was at my most intense, and tells me a story. It’s a story that I have long forgotten out of a sense of self-preservation that kept me alive when cold logic failed, a story of Love. As he tells me the story I barely notice my eyes glisten and overflow, or feel my body coursing with an adrenalin that makes my hands shake, I only hear his voice and see in his earnest and sincere eyes all that I have forgotten to keep myself sane.
When it ends, he looks at me expectantly as my mind slowly flies through the years between his story and mine. Of all the mornings waking up only to realize that my dream was not my life at all, but the horrible nightmare I had dismissed as I woke to my dream. Of the lonely, aching thud of a heart that knew no elation, only relief. And the failure, the bitter feeling of giving up when I swore never to surrender.
I stare at him, and it is the terrified look reflected in his eyes that finally convinces me. He is so young and scared of what is to come, but even faced with his future self, he cannot imagine giving up what he has. He knows to give up on Love is to lose the beauty of life that echoes in eternity.
My last thought in the day dream is always the same. It is the sad realization that he would convince me that it was the only path for us. Perhaps it had always been waiting; our life raced towards its own destruction with the outstretched arms of a reunited lover.
