a thousand years

It doesn't matter how we met, or how long we we're friends.  It doesn't matter how long I've felt the way I do, or how long she's kept me at an arms length.  Pulling me in closer and pushing me away.  A sideways roller coaster of pure emotion.  I've been in love before.  I've felt the grip on my heart like a soft hand.  When you're young, it takes on a different form.  Puppy love they call it.  Its a fitting way to describe it.  Its sloppy, and uncoordinated.  Its cute and innocent and fuzzy.  But invariably it grows up, and becomes something else.  When you're a teenager, its more like love.  The heartbreaking, soul churning entity that stays in your head like a song on repeat.  You try to put it in perspective, but you're still too young...too inexperienced to fully grasp what it is you're feeling.  She's not the one, even if she feels like it.  You don't know her even if you feel like you do in your bones.  It get uncomfortable.  It twists you up inside.  It makes you mad enough that you want to run away and bury yourself in the ground 100 feet deep.  But its love.  

All these years later, I still look back on the girls...the ones who made me feel...and all I can do now is shake my head and laugh and cry.  Just a little.  They we're real.  It was real.  But it wasn't real.  Not like life is now.  Not like anything now.  Now, its all about survival.  About making a life and babies and living with each other in a partnership of comfort and convenience.  Love doesn't seem to mean what it used to.  Its been diluted and deformed.  Its the love you watched growing up.  Mom and Dad holding hands and kissing on New Years Eve.  The way the looked at each other after driving the kids around all day.  

I don't know what I expected.  The fantasy is so enticing.  It's like a perfect day.  All blue skies and warm sun and perfume.  Its the shape only she makes.  Its the way she looks at you and you wish she'd look at you  like that forever nonstop.  You don't want to break the glance out of fear that it'll never feel that good again.  

To all the girls, past and distant past, I thank you for making me feel something so crazy.  It hurt more than it helped.  It sent me spiraling into tailspins and into dark oblivion, but it was real.  It was my heart on the most amazing drug I ever knew.

I hope one day that I'll find a way to capture that feeling again.  To lock eyes and know that it'll be that real again.  So real.  Like a missile attack on my soul.  Lighting me up in a way nothing else can.

Until then, I'll try and keep the corpse warm.

so sweet

break in the clouds

Here I was, all ready to blog about whatever came to mind...and I've got nothing.  The hope was that I'd talk about the reason why I'm feeling good today, and avoid yet another misery laced post about life as myself.  But I can't seem to figure out a reason for why I'm feeling as fresh as I am today.  I'm still barely keeping my head above water financially.  Things at work seem to be getting more awkward, and regressing instead of progressing.  I've got issues with my car, and although it seems as if the problems on the home front that I've been cataloging have been temporarily solved, I'm using the word 'temporarily' instead of 'permanently'.  The bullies in the next building moved out the other day, and I've been told that the new tenants in our building will be dealt with one way or another...so things are definitely looking up.  But after the couple of months I've had, to go along with my continuing struggles on the job front, things aren't exactly coming up roses.  But I'll take what I can get at this point, and maybe this ray of sunshine that has finally shone down on me has encouraged me enough to cause the black clouds that seem to float overhead to dissipate...if only for today.

I want to be a positive person.  I don't enjoy wallowing.  I think at one point in my life, I embraced the comfort of being miserable, the familiarity of it...the cache I felt it brought.  It made me authentic, in a way, I suppose.  The great artists I've admired have all wrestled with their own version of despair, and the fact that my life was miserable too made me feel a kinship to them.  Legitimized me.  However, after all these years, I really don't have anything to show for all that misery.  I haven't produced any profound works, and while my perspective and poetry has certainly been defined by my moods and experiences, I can't say its resulted in much in the way of positives.  

I'm happy with me, even if I often don't like what I'm doing or thinking.  I've not made the most of my talents and opportunities  and I've made some pretty poor life decisions over the years which have put me in the spot I am now.  But there is hope, albeit small and fleeting.  I guess I've got to do what I can to continue to knock on those doors and shut out as much negativity as I can.  Its a constant battle of wits with myself...my dark self having a lot more experience playing the game than the positive, light me.  

I just have to try harder.