Emotional Hangover
Got home last night after dropping you off and cried. No heart to heart, literally or metaphorically. Jackets too thick to feel you through them, gripping at sleeves and thinking of all the things we couldn’t say because it was too loud - the words themselves a racket in our chests and the jazz around us unfolding in a way that I felt was syncopated to my own irregular heart beat. You wished it was something more classic.
I wrote a long message to you and said you didn’t need to respond but I just wanted to make sure you got it - or didn’t. Right now, in the morning, I hope you didn’t because all of the things came pouring out of me. Sober, sitting on the toilet, peeling my socks off and texting you about the profound sadness I’ve been feeling after seeing you. The dissatisfaction. The not enough-ness bringing itself out to be filled as much as it can be - spilling itself over. The irony of that not lost on me - while so many other things are, like why my hope is so strong even in its threadbare state. Or why you want to hold my hand but not sit on the same bench as me.
Circling down the drain, repeating the same patterns day after day. Titrating the loss, stepping back from it all slowly which just feels like a prolonging and I took in too many of our dreams together last night. At a bar we’d been talking about going to back when we were together - why now? Just to cross it off the bucket list? Makes me think of resurrecting myself in my death just to come back for playground swings in the rain. Why? Because I said could. Because we can do whatever we want, because it is still available.
11PM, sober, crying on the toilet with no socks on, texting you a soliloquy as the waves wash over me, parked in a spot I know I shouldn’t, woke up to a ticket but I still managed to take out my garbage and compost. I moved my car anyway - I just wore bad shoes last night, not safe for the ice hoping you would hold my arm from the door to the car.
I think I keep telling you how I feel not because I want you to know it but because I want it to change you. I want you to see it and go “yes, I finally understand! I will be brave too!” but I know brave for you right now is so different. I just don’t want to have compassion for you anymore, not in the way I used to. I don’t know any other way yet. Mostly I’m just trying to have it for myself. Mostly I’m just trying to feel through to the edges of emotion until their waves bring me to a different shore.
I woke up sick to my stomach - probably hungry but also devastated. Devastated at my own willfulness to forget, to project, to redirect, to coerce myself. I looked at the clock last night and it was 23:23 before I fell asleep, an angel number that says something like good things in love are coming but only after a break-up. How exactly did the universe know I needed a different hope? And how foolish is the universe to think that I can attach myself to a hope without a body? Without a name? Without a face?
I should have known that having butterflies to see you after knowing you for a year wasn’t cute, I’m not in spring within myself. There is a moth infestation, trying to awaken my wisdom. YOU ARE SCARED it is screaming at me. This doesn’t feel right. This isn’t where you want to be, this isn’t what you need at all. So much energy into pushing down those thoughts.
Scared, sad, sorry. No socks on. Sitting. Sending.
Woke up with heavy eyes and a headache and no milk for coffee.