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amulWell, I figured out what I've been avoiding.
It is hard not to have thoughts. I've told myself I'm done with them. Thinking. It's never done me any good. Angel used to tell me that when I was sixteen, and in my twenties I came to believe her. Except, it was in my twenties that she told me, in full light of day, that all my Deep of the Night Thinking had been for true, just as I was finally learning the trick of not believing myself. Not believing in myself.
It is hard not to have thoughts, when your fingers are idle. When your eyes are not focused on a goal, it is hard not to look around you. I try, I tell myself I am through the dark woods, out the other side. I tell myself I'm in a clearing beyond that painful terrain and there are no shadows here, no dark places that I must peer into.
But there are thoughts. In my head. And if I sit still, they begin to whisper. In truth, I think they're always there but usually I cannot hear them. They drown out in the roar of mass transit devices. They cannot be heard over the tumultuous cries of a future urging me to reach for it. I immerse myself in music, in projects, in grand schemes, and drown their tiny voices out.
I've been sitting still, staring at a computer screen. I've been breathing the heady fumes of D-76, and no matter how used to it I grow, it still feels like magic to watch pictures appear from silver halides converting to silver salts. I blast my music and I make photographs, and I do not let myself think. I've been sitting still, except that really, I've been running.
Someone asked me how long it's been, since I ended things with her. February of 2004, I told him. I'll resist the urge to count how long ago that was. Except I don't need to count. Every month, I've watched the day pass by, the grim little anniversary. It's been twenty months since I called a dead thing by its name, but the ghost just won't go away.
There is such a profound difference between giving up and holding on. When I cried uncle, nearly two years ago, she wasn't ready to let go, couldn't bring herself to accept that the love we'd had died long before. She wanted to hold on, and the last time I saw her(14 months), she was still clutching. Trying to hold everything, trying to take, to keep, to cling. She was rotting in a filthy pile of dead dreams, and you could almost hear the thought running through her head, "No, really look, there's parts of this that are still good."
Have you ever sat in one of those "electric chairs" at arcades? Three thousands volts run through your body, they claim. The game, they say, is how long can you hold on? But I've only ever seen a handful let go in the middle. Most people just don't even play, and I think that's the real game.
It'll hurt, is the unspoken promise. Wanna try?
How many years did we twist knife blades into each other? At what point did it stop being about Now or The Future Together, and suddenly became about seeing who would flinch first? There's just no way to know, or at least that's what I keep telling myself. Don't think about it. There's no way to know. But it's hard, hard not to have thoughts when you're sitting at a stop light, when you're eating alone for the twelfth time this week, when you're lying in bed. It's hard not to think, unless you throw yourself body and soul into even the most insignificant tasks, but you can't keep up that pace forever and sooner or later, you're just going to run out of juice. You'll just tire out, and in that split second that you pause to take a breath, that's when the thought will make it's move. You hit pause on the stereo for just a second, and that's when you hear it whisper:
Happy anniversary, Christine.
Hey, so I'm a few days late, but I was really busy with this thing called avoidance, you know?
Eleven years ago, we were the only two in the room that didn't like the movie. You spent the night as a joke, to piss off your roommate and the girl who'd dragged you there. It was a dumb joke we carried too far and by the next morning we were dating. Nine years we spent arguing whether our anniversary was that night or the next morning, and I don't think a single one of our friends ever heard the love in that constant debate.
Of course, if I brought it up today, you'd tell me you'd been sick of that joke for years, that it had never been funny to you.
The problem, My Little Petri Dish, is that all we ever did, by the end of things, is react. Neither one of us had the balls to take the first step down a different path.
I've spent sixteen years watching a friend mourn her father's death. It'd happened over half her life ago when I met her, and it's been another half a lifetime since I watched it that first time. I used to mark my school calendars in red highlighter (oh, all my highlighter colors meant something) the month before on through to the month after. "Warning," it told me. "This is when she starts to get crazy." By the third year into it, the pattern was pretty easy to see. For a good decade of that time, I would clear out my schedule. Just in case she needed to call, I always made sure that I wasn't doing anything important for pretty much all of March.
It does me a little good, thinking of that. She's so much calmer around spring now, it's more like a mild throbbing where the limb used to be. You get used to amputations. I watched people learn, so I know it'll get better. What's good, is knowing that I helped, just by listening to her rage and scream. I mean, obviously the bulk of that was her getting over it on her own, but my little piece of it? I own that. I helped. You can make a difference in another person's life.
But right now, I'm still in the thick of it, I guess. Oh, I'll be fine for most of the winter, and I even did a pretty good job over the summer. I wonder which anniversary will ultimately end up hurting longer, the beginning or the end?
Don't worry, there'll be plenty of time to place your bets.
It is hard not to have thoughts. I've told myself I'm done with them. Thinking. It's never done me any good. Angel used to tell me that when I was sixteen, and in my twenties I came to believe her. Except, it was in my twenties that she told me, in full light of day, that all my Deep of the Night Thinking had been for true, just as I was finally learning the trick of not believing myself. Not believing in myself.
It is hard not to have thoughts, when your fingers are idle. When your eyes are not focused on a goal, it is hard not to look around you. I try, I tell myself I am through the dark woods, out the other side. I tell myself I'm in a clearing beyond that painful terrain and there are no shadows here, no dark places that I must peer into.
But there are thoughts. In my head. And if I sit still, they begin to whisper. In truth, I think they're always there but usually I cannot hear them. They drown out in the roar of mass transit devices. They cannot be heard over the tumultuous cries of a future urging me to reach for it. I immerse myself in music, in projects, in grand schemes, and drown their tiny voices out.
I've been sitting still, staring at a computer screen. I've been breathing the heady fumes of D-76, and no matter how used to it I grow, it still feels like magic to watch pictures appear from silver halides converting to silver salts. I blast my music and I make photographs, and I do not let myself think. I've been sitting still, except that really, I've been running.
Someone asked me how long it's been, since I ended things with her. February of 2004, I told him. I'll resist the urge to count how long ago that was. Except I don't need to count. Every month, I've watched the day pass by, the grim little anniversary. It's been twenty months since I called a dead thing by its name, but the ghost just won't go away.
There is such a profound difference between giving up and holding on. When I cried uncle, nearly two years ago, she wasn't ready to let go, couldn't bring herself to accept that the love we'd had died long before. She wanted to hold on, and the last time I saw her(14 months), she was still clutching. Trying to hold everything, trying to take, to keep, to cling. She was rotting in a filthy pile of dead dreams, and you could almost hear the thought running through her head, "No, really look, there's parts of this that are still good."
Have you ever sat in one of those "electric chairs" at arcades? Three thousands volts run through your body, they claim. The game, they say, is how long can you hold on? But I've only ever seen a handful let go in the middle. Most people just don't even play, and I think that's the real game.
It'll hurt, is the unspoken promise. Wanna try?
How many years did we twist knife blades into each other? At what point did it stop being about Now or The Future Together, and suddenly became about seeing who would flinch first? There's just no way to know, or at least that's what I keep telling myself. Don't think about it. There's no way to know. But it's hard, hard not to have thoughts when you're sitting at a stop light, when you're eating alone for the twelfth time this week, when you're lying in bed. It's hard not to think, unless you throw yourself body and soul into even the most insignificant tasks, but you can't keep up that pace forever and sooner or later, you're just going to run out of juice. You'll just tire out, and in that split second that you pause to take a breath, that's when the thought will make it's move. You hit pause on the stereo for just a second, and that's when you hear it whisper:
Happy anniversary, Christine.
Hey, so I'm a few days late, but I was really busy with this thing called avoidance, you know?
Eleven years ago, we were the only two in the room that didn't like the movie. You spent the night as a joke, to piss off your roommate and the girl who'd dragged you there. It was a dumb joke we carried too far and by the next morning we were dating. Nine years we spent arguing whether our anniversary was that night or the next morning, and I don't think a single one of our friends ever heard the love in that constant debate.
Of course, if I brought it up today, you'd tell me you'd been sick of that joke for years, that it had never been funny to you.
The problem, My Little Petri Dish, is that all we ever did, by the end of things, is react. Neither one of us had the balls to take the first step down a different path.
I've spent sixteen years watching a friend mourn her father's death. It'd happened over half her life ago when I met her, and it's been another half a lifetime since I watched it that first time. I used to mark my school calendars in red highlighter (oh, all my highlighter colors meant something) the month before on through to the month after. "Warning," it told me. "This is when she starts to get crazy." By the third year into it, the pattern was pretty easy to see. For a good decade of that time, I would clear out my schedule. Just in case she needed to call, I always made sure that I wasn't doing anything important for pretty much all of March.
It does me a little good, thinking of that. She's so much calmer around spring now, it's more like a mild throbbing where the limb used to be. You get used to amputations. I watched people learn, so I know it'll get better. What's good, is knowing that I helped, just by listening to her rage and scream. I mean, obviously the bulk of that was her getting over it on her own, but my little piece of it? I own that. I helped. You can make a difference in another person's life.
But right now, I'm still in the thick of it, I guess. Oh, I'll be fine for most of the winter, and I even did a pretty good job over the summer. I wonder which anniversary will ultimately end up hurting longer, the beginning or the end?
Don't worry, there'll be plenty of time to place your bets.
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no subject
Date: 30 Oct 2005 18:54 (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 Oct 2005 03:55 (UTC)