too much

Oh boy did I have a moment today.  Driving home after visiting my parents, I cracked.  I started talking to myself in an angry way.  Full of frustration and anger and confusion.  So terribly alone, feeling the air being sucked out of my lungs and I railed against the world I find myself in.  Stuck.  Denied.  I don't understand any of this.  So much noise.  So much useless, distracting noise.  The talking.  The product placement.  The embarrassing and pitiful need for me to buy in.  The long hours.  The exhaustion.  It's all catching up with me like a tidal wave racing for my heels, ready to pick me up and swallow me whole.  I've got nothing to grab onto.  Only words.  Brilliant, scary, honest words.  I'm clinging to them like a flimsy paper life preserver.  Disintegrating under my fingers the instant I touch it.  Right under the surface, right there, is so much pent up anger and bitterness.  At my choices.  At everyone else's.  At the world in general.  There's nothing left of the world I knew.  It's gone.  The memories don't comfort me anymore.  They only stir up rapid heartbeats and sweat on my brow.  A kind of hollow queasiness that swirls in my stomach.  A jagged restlessness that shakes me awake when I'm so damn tired I just want to lie on the floor and curl up into a little ball and not move ever again.  How did I end up so different.  So out of sync with the world?  Deep down I know the answer.  It's the path I chose.  I remember vaguely asking these same questions of myself over fifteen years ago.  Debating if I was walking the right path.  I somehow knew this was the inevitable outcome.  I've passed road markers along the way telling me just that.  But I haven't ever veered or turned around.  Now it's too late.  Much too late.  My bony body with the life sucked out of it like a plastic bag clinging to the contents inside.  My sunken chest and worried eyes.  The only brief respite being the dreams I've been having lately...teasing me, like a movie of what could have been.  What could have been?  Never.  Fooling myself is all I'm doing.  Rubbing my own nose in it.  Torturing myself and waking up with the clear knowledge that it was just a dream.  A horrible, beautiful dream.  A cruel tease.  I still see the signs.  I know in my heart I'm not wrong.  And that's what makes it even harder to swallow.  That I can see and feel all this and not be able to do anything about it.  Like a man stuck in his hospital bed, staring out onto the world around him with no way to move or change the outcomes.  Watching everything get farther and farther away.

The future?  Everything I do is a lie.  A cover.  A mask.  It's only when I'm at home, alone with the birds chirping through my window that I even have the slightest bit of courage to be myself.  Whatever that is.  Tuned in to an empty frequency.  Listening for any sound through the white noise that will direct me somewhere safe.