It was a tall, wide evening spent sitting ever alone staring at my external mind, just like most days. The damn thing was busy displaying some random Youtube video on one screen with a video editing program on the other, and i was unfocused on either, adrift in thinking about them...
the them being the nebulous group of friends I had been seeing more frequently throughout much of the last year, huddling together with them at the Trescony St house avoiding the tension of the pandemic by suckling down a continuous stream of inebriants. they were all somewhere that i was not, here with no one to witness my wandering mind taking me deeper and deeper down the path towards longing and unrequited loves (both real and imagined).
"I can't take this anymore," I exhaled as my thoughts circled around the pool of loneliness that decorated the yard within.
I am imagining this being read aloud in their voices as I write, a distractingly farfetched yet romantic notion. Even as I write about our distance, they are right here with me.
In rare form, I bolted up to put on shoes and warmth and head out the door on foot into this lazy suburb of Santa Cruz. My obesity can be both the cause and result of my general laziness and yet here I was, heart beating and steps quickening down the street in an effort to clear my head.
The sky had lost its colors, drunk away by the infinite blackness beyond the façade of daylight. I was lost in my mind as its waves crashed and boiled against the confusion of this aching heart.
As the brain chemicals started to realign and lighten from this mild exertion, I spoke into my phone:
"I am bathing in contradiction. My dance with the concept of rejection seems constant and bitter, but I so often push others away either because they make me uncomfortable, or in search of insulating myself from rejection. It's getting harder and harder to even tell what my truth is. What do I want? what is feasible for me as i move along? Over time my emotions have dulled and lost saturation, leaving in their midst the cold, dark, hollow pit of blackness. Misunderstandings. Despair... and of course this damn anxiety that dogs me so."