Yesterday you may have stubbed every toe on your foot and the evening before that you may have curled up with cream liqueur and woke with your head feeling like a pinball machine. Yesterday you may have fallen into every crack you encountered, and never resurfaced, and felt like every prospect had faded and every dream had escaped you. This morning you may have been paranoid and feverish — peering too intently into things better left unseen, whittling the time away writing the plot of your own horror movie, destroying tastebuds with the heat of your coffee, a burning mouth the least of your worries. You may have neglected your responsibilities and opted instead for some form of self-destruction. You may have wanted it all to end.

I think beginning again is easier than people realise. I’m sure you have heard the New Years’ resolutions and the birthday-eve promises. People wait for prominent, annual occasions to make changes, and if they fail — and they often do — they have to wait the year out to give it another shot. This has never made the slightest bit of sense to me. Surely any day is a good day to make a change. 

Today you might read a book that saves you, or drink the perfect latte, or look out the window to see your ideal sky. You might get the job, or the boy, or the recognition. You might let go of that long list of people still stashed away in the bottom drawer of your mind, haunting you at every turn. You might find a penny, or God, or that one sock you gave up on ever reuniting with its pair. You might even find yourself.

So my advice to you, if you’re willing to listen to a girl who skims rockbottom most days, is to take that unfamiliar bus route, to blink less, to absorb more, to inhale foreign air whenever you get the chance. Risk everything you have as often as you can. Brush the frost from your rib-cage and give somebody your whole heart for the first time in years. Slow down the parts you usually rush through and jump into those you ordinarily edge around. Realise the beauty of the occasional free fall, and then turn that realisation into something more than theoretical. Have the guts to tweak your circumstances until you’re blissfully content with every aspect. And never entertain the notion that you deserve any less than your top-shelf dream. 

I don’t know what to make of this constant loop we’re on. The dizziness, the déjà vu, the same scenery sliding past, the same soundtrack droning on, the words you edit slightly and call brand new. It’s hardly compelling me to stay. I try to tell myself that not all loops are bad — I think of reels of ribbon and your favourite record on repeat, carousels and rollercoasters you feed ticket after ticket into. But ribbons fray and records scratch and even the craziest of thrills wear off.

I could liken this to falling into step with you, to familiarising myself with every corner of your soul, to us reaching that comfortable stage. But all I can see is a faltering spark and all the places we’ll never go and the ceiling, dangerously low, when we’ve hardly even gotten off the ground. I’m spurred on by potential and I can’t help but get restless when I fear we’ve reached our peak.

Have you ever stood right next to somebody who looked like distance? When they cast their gaze your way you swear there are miles of highway-side shrubbery sprouting from their pupils, and you see state lines on their forehead each time they’re surprised, or mad, or baffled. They smell like it, too, unmistakably — like dusty basements and lingering scents, bitter coffee and yellowed paper, seasons long since spun. They twist everything they touch around their fingers like phone cords and the gaps between their teeth could hold a fleet of ships and every inch of ocean they would sail — all the collective “as far as the eye can see”s that a sea voyage entails.

You’ve never been good with direction but you could decipher a map more easily than their expressions, their wavering voices and the words they break on, their harboured opinions and those they allow you to indulge in. You realise how meaningless physical closeness can be when the other person’s heart lies elsewhere, wonder whether you, yourself, make it that difficult for other people trying to reach you, and make a mental note to be more present. 

But I can’t be the only one who falls for aches, for absence, for fiction and myth and beautiful shells of people half-escaped but half-restrained. Whether it be masochism, something to strive for or pure coincidence, the ones who look like distance always seem to look like home.

Some things do little else other than sting: citrus fruit in papercuts, saltwater spray, sunburn, wasps, tea towel whips and what I just heard. My most mellow spots calloused over and I fear I’m blurring at the edges, crumbling away to expose an inadequate core. I’m bent over backwards trying to regain the ignorance I swore I wanted to shed, fumbling to file this away under “misinterpretations” but knowing it isn’t one. If this is what honesty looks like, I could lie the rest of my life away and consider it a noble sacrifice. If this is what a human mind looks like up close, solitude’s not the worst prospect after all.

Soul-keeper, I have accused you of unlawfully and immorally obtaining mine. I have complained of the ferocity of your grip, of the length of your fingernails, of the precariousness of the entire situation. I have cursed your name every dawn, and doubted your every move, and blamed you for the tangle I found myself in every time I tried to flee. I have slipped into the victim mentality and rarely emerged. But I was wrong.

Honestly, there must be safer places to rest than the palm of your hand, but I don’t have access rights to a single one. As a defence mechanism — what else could it have been? — I stopped thinking about the real you altogether and started thinking about you as the embodiment of every flaw I uncovered and pulled loose and dusted off and blew up. One wrong move on your part and I was instantly halfway through churning out a tale involving that imperfection as the ultimate cause of our unhappy ending. It was enough to send the bravest soul into a state of distrust and insecurity.

It’s finding peace today, however, in the hollow of your words. I crawled in and took a nap for the first time — not quite the inhibition-less leap of faith I’m waiting on, but a start nonetheless. And it was warm there. And it was cosy. And I felt my definition of “home” broaden.

Soul-keeper, I trust you, and that trust may have come long after you got your hands on mine, but it’s no less real. Perfection on a delay, that’s what we are. And sometimes I think I am you on a delay — that you and I are made of the same stuff, that it’s just rearranged in prettier constellations when it comes to you. Certain aspects of your rocky history sound a lot like my present, and you’ve seen those same parallels. I would not be at all displeased with turning out like you — even the inferior version I have come to expect from myself. It’s nice to know one of my own kind are out there, living and breathing and breeding hope in the nooks of their teeth and the hairs on their neck. It’s nice to know “out there” really isn’t that far.

Soul-keeper, don’t let me down now.

I look around my room and I don’t see dirty cream walls and peeling maps — I see the grouchy painter counting down the hours ‘til his lunch break on off-white thumbs and the jovial cartographer with reams of paper spread out on his desk, compass in left hand, sketch pencil in right. I look at most people and I don’t see dark eyes and bright smiles — I see moonless nights seeping in through their pupils and whitening toothpaste in their medicine cabinet.

When I look at you, I forget to fabricate a history for your movements and features and quirks. I forget to link each moment to a previous one, to a previous one still, to some sort of beginning. I start living in snapshots instead. Seeing the big picture helps me to find my bearings, and I guess that’s why you leave me so disarmed, so unsteady, so toneblind and colourdeaf and topsy-turvy — because I’m too close for comfort in every sense of the phrase.

I could see our potential future inscribed in the crinkled corners of your eyes when you smiled at me. You say ‘paranoid’; I say ‘prophetic’.

You’d wheedle your way in and gnaw at the foundations, watch with a parasitical smirk as your handiwork caused it all to crumble around me. Your precise timing would have you packing your bags the day I grew irreversibly dependent, leaving only once you were sure I would plead. You would chip away at me for weeks beforehand, eroding any sense of pride until you were certain I had become weak enough to resort to that. You would hollow me out and fashion curtains from the scrapings, before drawing them tightly shut and telling me sunshine was a luxury I never deserved.

I’d love you regardless — not out of masochism, but purely out of loneliness. If you managed to be the antidote to that, it wouldn’t matter if you poisoned every other aspect of my life. I’d stick around. And you’d know that all too well. 

I would deal with realising I should have let go by holding on a little tighter. I would revere the qualities in you that would have terrified anybody with a hint of sense. I would learn that fearlessness and bravery are not interchangeable. It wouldn’t take courage to love you, because God knows none of that would remain. It would take a fool. It would take a shell of a person. And I suppose that’s why I’d excel.

I say, ‘I hope you don’t mind if I begin the wall building process and return your firework inducing smiles with frosty glares. It’s not something you’ve done — it’s something I know you will do if you get the chance.’

You say ‘paranoid’; I say ‘probably’.

You say, ‘Don’t you see? You’ve got it all wrong. I’ll be the one strengthening our foundations until they can withstand the weight of everything we’ll build together. I’ll be the one risking it all — putting every effort into helping you become strong enough to survive without me, but trusting you not to want to. I’ll be the one willing to construct drapes from the very best of me when you’re irritated by the sun and craving darkness. I’ll lick your wounds if ever you should have them, but it won’t have been me who inflicted them. I’ll take nothing of yours but loneliness and give you everything but my scars. The only thing that will scare you — or make you feel like you should be scared — will be the intensity with which I’ll love you. I’ll love you past the point of logic. I’ll love you past the point of selfishness. I’ll love you.’

Your fingertips graze mine and I flinch, avoiding your intoxicating stare so that I might give myself a chance to sober up.

You say ‘paranoid’; I say ‘maybe I’ll ignore intuition just this once’.

maybeiwasnaive:

I don’t know how I expect to ever go down in history when I can’t even remember my own story. I recall names and I recall feelings, and the rest is an incomprehensible haze – dates, faces, everything going on outside the confines of my own skull. I recall in fragments – enough for a paragraph here, a chapter there when my senses were particularly heightened. But there’s no continuity, no labels for the memories, no linear beginning or middle. Time has chewed through patches of my history, leaving it holey and incomplete, and I’ve torn out chunks with my own two hands. Too traumatising to be worth the guaranteed captivation. I can drag it down to the merchant’s and ask any price, but nobody will want it, I can tell you that already.
I remember the days when imagination, books, the crumbs on our table and an old wheezing Suzuki were all we had. I still catch the odd whiff of burning petrol in a mistreated, protesting engine and I’m taken right back to those parking garages where we sat in unspoken relief, our latest five finger discounts on our laps. I don’t know how old I am in any of these memories but I found that pink journal a few years back with the miniscule lock and key. I remember the day you presented it to me, looked me straight in the eye and warned me that the lock wasn’t worth a damn, that it was just for show, that I shouldn’t write anything in there that I wouldn’t want people to read. I guess that was the beginning of my paranoia. I guess that was the beginning of me needing more than your average amount of secrecy. The beginning of my shadows and glaciers and barbed wire fences. I guess you knew even then that my secrets weren’t proportional to my age. I should’ve been writing about ponies and princesses, not anything that required a more secure lock than what was on offer. I began to hold back that day. I’ve been holding back ever since.
Flash forward. Perhaps back. I’m standing in my mother’s kitchen. Your best friend, the magician, is pulling two dollar coins from behind my ear. She never liked him. She always called him the con man, implored us not to trust him.  I never understood. I think I do now.
Flash.  It’s five a.m. We’re up to our elbows in mud, crescents of dirt under our fingernails. We’re clutching tulip bulbs to our chests.
Flash. Forward, this time, I’m almost positive. The beams from our torches are bouncing off the gravestones. We’re writing stories in our heads.
Flash.  Raised voices and cowering in corners. A boot through the panel of glass in the lounge room. A sound like a shattering chandelier — beautiful but terrifying. They ended up boarding it up with wood and things were never the same. A dash to the kitchen drawer and a rummage for a knife. I wanted to die that night. They talked me out of it.
Flash. A brick through the window, landing where my head was supposed to lie.
Flash back. Happier times. Fairy houses and popsicle sticks and tar bubbles on the road. Swings and what you dubbed ‘one handed sky pushes’. 5:45 on the dot and you’d read to us before sleep.
Flash forward. “Happy days are here again.” A new town, a new house, a new start. You were on your own personal road to recovery. I was half grown up. She was a little more so. Those were the years. You’d think I’d remember which ones they were, wouldn’t you? All I know is that they started after the dark days and ended during a lost lull about three years ago.
Jump to current day. We’ve all been swept away. Two thirds of us are struggling against the tide. The one swimming is the happiest. But you’ve got to keep fighting, right? I will. I might.