I want to believe in beautiful things. I want to hold the sky to my heart and feel it reach into me. I want these things to be true.
There was a good run of two or three months back there somewhere. Everyday life seemed to drift along, one day into the next, and the waters were quiet as we drifted over them. Seamlessly. No wake behind us. Normally, I would have approached that lack of disruption as a sign that it was a matter of time before everything came undone again. But that wasn't the case this time. I embraced an attitude of detached positivity. Maybe this was what other people felt as life went along. A placid surface to feelings.
I wanted so much for it to be true that I accepted that it might. It was the first time.
And even now, looking back through a lens of weeks that has shaken me, has shaken my home, I still think it might be true. Maybe that is a place I can go back to someday, and it will take me back. Just not now. Not today.
--
There are so many layers here that I don't know where to start unraveling them for inspection. There is a death, which was sudden and tragic and so so young that my brain still won't accept it as a part of any reality I could live in. It stabbed me right in the fucking heart, and right in my home, and I think it's going to take a long time before I can think about that person without little pieces of my heart flaking off and falling away. But that is death, and there is a somber comfort in knowing how that process is supposed to work. How closure is something that can only come from within. I know there is no exact script for this circumstance, but then what would life be if there was any part of it that could fall in a perfect line like that.
There is also the greater but related existential crisis of what anything means anymore when the world I've created for myself flexes and ripples around me so much. The constructs that I've used to identify myself seem to be shifting, and there is no comfort for me to find even in my own skin anymore. This is more of an abstract fear, because it comes from knowing that I do not know myself, at least not fully. But who does? Who doesn't walk about with a giant question mark suspended over them, praying for some small piece of truth to fall out and into them. How much of an impossibility that seems. I spend time thinking about this until I am exhausted, and I didn't really have a lot of energy to spare.
And then there is an even greater layer, one that I'm most afraid of. I need to think more about what I want, and how I feel, and what I can do for myself that would make me happy. I told myself this would be the year that I actually ask those questions, or at least build tools for being able to appraise that in a real way. While I think I am working toward that, I also think that I hide away. It's so easy to hide, and off I go, leaving all of the work that I promised myself I would do. I might have aimed too high, but what a target. What a beautiful target.
--
I'm getting lunch tomorrow with someone that I hold very dear. Someone that I haven't really had the chance to talk with directly in some time.
I worry that this person sees me, but only sees the ripples. Only sees the confusion and the lack of confidence, and the disorientation. I worry that this person believes that I lack the ability to find my way out of these circumstances, or that I create these circumstances so that they can follow me around like some sick cloud. I want to convince her that this is not the case, but I'm not sure that this theory is wrong. I do often seem to be swimming in some kind of sea, and there do always seem to be waves. How much of that is directly my doing?
Maybe I don't know how to be stable. Maybe I don't know how to glide along without a wake. Maybe I don't have the tools, or I was never taught how to do it as a child. Or maybe I do know how, but instead prefer to settle into the fog, into the wake, and let it bounce me around.
Maybe I'm just a person, and this is what people do.
Maybe I'm not lost, and the waves come for me anyway.
It feels like there should be an answer in here somewhere if I was smarter. If I was better than I am.
Maybe that is where the waves come from.