Set fire to water

Have you ever realized, in what seems like all at once, that you don’t have the slightest clue about how to be happy? I tell you now, it propels a heavy rage that, in me is somehow still sort of numbed out. It’s not easy finding cracks behind the cracks you knew were there that lead you to see that you are far more shattered than you could have even placed. It aches. I don’t know when my heart started crying and I don’t know when it lost that ability to do so… I only know that I ache.

I met this guy and he was…so many things. So many things I thought were good. So many things I always wanted to find in someone, aside from my good friend Kyle, who is gay. I couldn’t count the number of times we discussed how exquisite my life would be if I found someone that was just like him but straight. What we didn’t talk about was me finding someone like him that didn’t want me…

Devastation.

I have gained the ability, over the years, to manipulate my feels fairly easily if I can catch it soon enough in. I keep trying to stop thinking, stop feeling, stop wondering and worrying and I can’t seem to get there. My mind still races in circles and ends up at him. My mind races in triangles trying to figure out what was wrong with me this time. My mind races through square tracks wondering what happened and where he went. My mind dives through these octagons of self doubt and internal loathing. If you were to lay these shapes over and over and over again, on paper, at the same speed and with the same intensity that my mind does repetitively like this, you would soon see what used to be this lovely idea in my mind soiled with the ink of the lines crossing each other until there is nothing left but this…void. This space that is never quiet but saying nothing new. Just that it was me that he didn’t want and that it makes it clear that nothing has changed. Crying drown by screaming that’s drown by tears and so on. All the while, in this space, my face smiles. Smiles big and laughs often because this Jekyll and Hyde routine is exhaustingly who I’d like to say I have become but I am fairly certain it is who I have always been. Blackened laughter and bruised dreams. Loveless longing and an aching beat. Just once, I’d like to remember, if I ever did know, that the beautiful things in this world are for people like me too. Just once I’d like to stand on top of my world and set fire to water and know that one moment of that moment was actually, really, wholly, unsuperficially and unscathingly something made of…magic. No rabbits out of hats or flowers from a sleeve. I want that magic feeling like love. Real, unbridled, purely decadent love. That makes you new, for even just a moment. It makes you exist.

Christmas is almost here, and for some reason everything about this season makes me want to feel alive in all the ways that I am dead. The lights and decorations and weather and food and fragrances make it seem like it is the right time to love someone. In the cold, in the snow, in the early moonlight. Somehow, this year, it’s about him. How obnoxious. Of him to have done that to me and for me to be that way. How obnoxious am I... It’s grotesque. Those feelings though, that I usually have such a tight reign on, ran wild for a moment too long because of this or that and now I can’t seem to gain control. Hopefully though, it will subside soon. It’s my last Christmas in Texas, for a while at least. It’s my last Christmas with my best friend in the US. It’s my last Christmas with my other best friend in the same town. It’s the last time that I will wake up on that magical morning and know that they are all so close. These Christmas angels of mine, that make every day something beautiful. These friends of mine will all be so far away this time next year. I know this is coming and I want to cherish every moment that’s left here. He’s tarnishing that with stressful, sadened thoughts, and this makes me furious. How dare he. How dare he set fire to me and leave it to run wild, burning everything that was starting to feel alive again after all this time. How dare he turn me to ashes like that. How fucking dare he…

I spent last week in New York. It was everything I wanted it to be. Busy and cold and beautiful and dirty and made me feel squeaky clean. I live in a small place where people are stupid and spoiled and hard hearted and judgmental and close minded and mean. If you walk alone you are avoided. If you eat alone it happens amongst countless prying eyes. In New York, it was just living. Walking among hundreds of people I felt crowded and still had the comfort of feeling alone. It was magnificent. I can’t wait to get to Chicago. I’m just not made for Texas. I have known that all along but the trip up North made it that much more obvious. It made it that much more real, that places like that do exists and that in just a few short months I will be living in a place where I can be busy and lonely. It's made for me. 

I had jury duty this morning. I have ALWAYS wanted jury duty. I want to be on a murder trial so bad. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think this happens often, but this morning, my very fist jury duty, was CANCELED. They just didn’t need jurors. What the fuck? Who does this happen to? If I documented my wildly bad luck people would think it’s false. It’s like there is something out there… a bitch friend of mother nature… that waits to pounce on each moments she can. Waits for these moments that could be grand or even just unnoticed and makes them something terrible. I don’t really think a lot of it now. I laugh when people ask “Who does that happen to?” because I ask it approximately 75 times a week… Who does this shit happen to? I know it happens to me but does it happens to others or is it something special that I don’t know about just for me? It’s ridiculous. However, I try and be happy with the repayment of some of these moments with excellent rock star parking spaces, pretty much everywhere I go, and really excellent clothing deals. It's something I have, that far exceeds others, so I guess it’s not all bad.

I ordered Eat Pray Love, book and DVD, and I can’t wait. This movie, is the movie, that changed my life. It’s the biggest reason I was open to meeting the pyromaniac that fucked me up. It’s also the reason that I am more comfortable with myself and who I am and the biggest reason I was finally able to convince myself to make the move to Chicago. It made me feel like someone, somewhere, wrote a story – just for me. While other people can see it they don’t know what it was saying because it was written just for me. For me to see and be changed in so many ways that I went home happy to be crying and crying because I was happy. It made me breathe in and find something beautiful about the air. It made me see myself like I want someone else to see me. It made me feel like… Christmas morning.

Years ago, I read something that changed me more than anything I think I have ever read. It was a note from a girl to a boy that read “I love you like Christmas morning”. I knew, at that moment, that I would never be the same. I knew that this line was something that I must feel before it’s love. Real, love. The love that is going to make me new. Give up half of my bed. Share a bathroom. Give up HALF MY CLOSET. Give up my alone time. This love, the one that is my Christmas morning, is different. It’s not built from romance or lust or similarities. It’s a love built of sheer…magic. The feeling like I know nothing can hurt me as long as he’s around. The feeling that no one will see me, breathe me, love me, need me the way that he does. The way that every time I hear his heart beat or feel him cry or make him laugh that I will be made better, stronger, more beautiful because I truly believe Audrey Hepburn… “Happy girls are the prettiest girls”. It doesn’t matter that I look like this and hate it. It doesn’t matter that I cry at this and want to change it. It doesn’t matter that I think like this and don’t understand it. It matters that when, if ever, I love someone like that, how I look and what I think will be something beautiful to someone that makes life magical. What is life with out a little magic. I want to love someone. I don’t know if I can. I certainly don’t know if someone could ever love me. Especially like Christmas morning. I guess that’s my fear… that I will never be someone’s pixie dust. I will never be what completes someone’s masterpiece or makes them feel like every time my heart beats or tears fall or laughter rings that my existence is something…magical. Part of me, that continues to escape all the fires, hope for a love like that…

Can I feel enough, be enough, love enough to find a way to set fire to water...