In the video I said to not let it get you down, first list of reasons above. Take your memories and be at peace. Well, I brought up my “Jimbob”, that we all might have one. Sometimes it takes years later to recognize this after much thought and contemplation and the thoughts that never seem to leave our head of that person. Of how if it worked out, if it progressed, how if they were still in our life what might have come of it, etc. It’s a question we may never know, and sometimes, the universe puts them back in our path at the right time and right place where it might work. And sometimes not.
These have a brutal, gut wrenching agony in their memory. It’s not the villains and abusers that hurt us, these are the ones that, “got away”, that old saying. Sometimes there was never truly an end even when we thought there was, but in some circumstances they come back in and out of our lives, only for it to disintegrate again, sometimes there isn’t even a hard end, it just dissipates. And we wait for their return. Even if it’s years, they’ll pop into our heads and we think of how nice that would be, the yearning, so to speak, but then that realization of maybe they never will and it’s done, there my friends, comes the regret. We look for answers we’ve beaten to death a million times, a what happened, what can we do now, is there anything, and if we try to reach out once again will we look like a lovesick, crazy person?
Well as long as you’re not firing rocks at their windows, sitting outside their house at night and calling/messaging everyday, (that’s called stalking), you’re not crazy.
Because in my several months of thinking this was going through my head, and like a broken record, one that would play on and off for years. Maybe isolation brought it on hardcore. It was there for a very long time, even before I moved, a ping, and then slowly went from a dull roar to a pounding in my head I couldn’t ignore and it was as if it was eating me alive. So I’d think on it, and finally, setting my hard-ass attitude aside, in hopes of decreasing the pounding I decided to write about it and maybe lend some thoughts to the many others I know who have been going through the same things. I see it in posts, in the spiritual feeds I follow and in others I come into contact with. In times of silence the mind goes into overdrive and takes us to the corners of our brains where we shoved the shit. And in that down time, it comes raging out.
I also mentioned in that video that if you feel it’s time to heal to let yourself go back. So, I took my own advice and let it consume me. So I went down the reflection path. Now as I said and let me make this clear, I’ve seen multitudes of these posts, I’m not ripping any of them off, it’s just timing and now, to give some solace to my own past which has bled into my future over all of these years, following me like a ghost, I decided to take my fortress down and speak on it. Something I rarely do, if ever.
Talking about feelings, mainly ones like this, I’m not big on. There’s a weird thing in my head that holds me back. Almost as if it’s a weakness. Which I know is bullshit and my own fucked up mind. Relationships I keep quiet, they’re not something I feel the need to blast everywhere. Granted I did with the last one, but I think I was trying to trick myself into making it ok. That the choice I made was it, this is what it was supposed to be, my usual M.O. over the years. Which means it’s bullshit. But I tried a change. A “normal life”, settling down like they show the norm as and going about life in a very tame manner. Now this piece isn’t about that most recent asshole. That was a con job. I felt I needed a change, I was told all of the things I wanted to hear and then, the bottom fell out as soon as I got here. Turns out the idiot was a manipulating psychopath and flat broke. I was once again the arm candy and bank account that was being/attempted to be mentally broken down to keep up the desired pay out and shut up. I eventually became satisfied through calm manipulation and letting them know I saw through it, and put it into motion for them to decide to leave. Which they did.
In that time my mind would drift back to the one. The one after much contemplation was truly, the only person I’d ever loved and I’d been bullshitting myself for almost 8 or so years. Then I got busy picking up the pieces of my life and reassembling them to going back to being me. And once the clean up was done, the pounding started back. Sadness, a smile as a reminder of old times, heartache and the question of if there was something else I could have done to salvage it. The answer was no. So what could I do? I could keep my memories and that old saying of, “it’s better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all”, entered my mind. Did it help pacify my regret, yes in a way, but did it help missing the person, no. Oddly enough, or maybe not so odd, it brought it more to the surface. An exploration of what love is, which I am no expert, and was that it, what it was?
And yes, Dear Reader, it was. There’s a character from one of my all time favorite movies since I was young, Edward Scissorhands. I could always relate to the character. That I didn’t belong in normal society, and the solitude, the loneliness of knowing I was to be alone, has always resonated with me. To be in isolation in the top of the large mansion, alone and thinking. I’ve been shit at relationships. Not fully opening up, or picking out assholes. I have a knack for that, and in all of my years of using, well, those are all shit.
I met this individual clean. I hadn’t even been straight for two years. I had a lot of monsters and demons I was fighting, but around them, they disappeared. I didn’t feel like the Devil incarnate. They brought out my inner-self I had been hiding for so long. They dismantled what I believed was a made up thing to trick people into false happiness and something to look for, and let me tell you, you never find it when you’re looking. Still facing my own shit and in the middle of writing my second book I was definitely not looking, and they appeared.
I didn’t have the usual, holy hell this is great, this person is rad, lets jump straight in, like we do when there is something new. I was nervous. A different sort of butterflies in my stomach. It was if I was meeting someone special, someone very different than all the others and it wasn’t the usual lust or bullshit giddy feeling when we leap and fuck and go all in like the rest. In my past I though that was love. It’s just lust and something new. We get excited about new shit. And then the rose-colored glasses come off and we go, oh, shit. And that’s the end of it or we stick it out. For me, I always just ended it and tried to not to fall for the trap.
Before this person I was alone for quite a while. My Edward decor in my home to keep me company and my dog, figuring that was enough. And then they found me.
I’d meet them in person in a month or so; we lived in different states, and talked about what we’d do that day we’d meet. I remember taking the train to the destination, palms sweaty, scared shitless and listening to an old Smiths record. The song, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”, came on and in my gut, I knew that was them, not knowing how or why and thinking it was absurd. And there were those words in a place I would discover that day. I tried to figure out if it was a coincidence or if my gut, in all of its strangeness, was right. It was all too uncanny.
I nervously awaited their arrival and in the moment of seeing them it was that stop and then into their arms, as if I’d always known them, this was the feeling I’d never had. We spent many hours talking, the day going into the night. The end wasn’t perfect, it turned in a direction I didn’t expect. There was a pushback in a sense I didn’t understand. Normally me, being me, I would have chalked it up to whatever and been done with it, but I wasn’t. I didn’t know where the tone change came from, but somewhere. This would continue on for probably almost a year, a series of moments, nothing solid, the back and forth, push and pull. Until I slowly disappeared. I realized that at any sign of feeling, they would retreat. It killed me, but I’d return, hoping it would change, yet it would only escalate the more time we spent together. Usually towards the end.
I though this person might like me, sometimes, I though that yes, I did love him, a foreign concept but this was so different and no matter how difficult, I’d always come back. Even after disappearing, it would resurface, start just a little, and stop, those moments.
This would go on for a while. Now while in this time it made me think there was something wrong with me, maybe I wasn’t his type, maybe he didn’t care for me as I did him, (we never talked about it), or I wasn’t good enough. I wondered that if being my true self, no fortress, scared him. In a way it did, but not in the way I thought. He was protecting himself as I formerly did. I knew this after time and realized my presence was only hurting the person, so again, after the last time, the last recoil of planning on seeing them and it being scrapped, I stopped. I gave up. I wanted him to be happy and always hoped he would find someone who would truly make him happy and comfortable with himself and not bring out the recoil and unsettling feelings I tended to bring out, which would come out when I would be open, and things would be perfect. So while it gutted me. I disappeared for a long while. But that’s what love is, no matter the cost, even if you have to take yourself out, you want them to be happy, even if it kills you.
In between these moments we’d be in different relationships, much more serious than our series of time spent over the years, I’d tell him I was happy for him, it was always what I ever wanted for him, and I in turn would fling myself into bullshit ones. One soon after my first disappearance into the throws of a total asshole who again, used me for money and looks but pretended to care. That was the one other time I got duped. I guess I just wanted to feel something, and like I was enough and not hurt anymore. After that exploded, much like this last one I stayed solo for a very long time. We had reconnected a few times after that, and when moving back to New York, that’s when it came to a halt. I’d send a few messages, get a truly nice response and then after moving back to Seattle, there was nothing. But I was still haunted. Like there was a ghost in the shadows, not malevolent but always there.
I killed time and filled voids with idiots, flings, telling them the snake story. The one where the woman picks up a snake that is dying, nurses it back to health and brings it into her home. When the woman lay ill, the snake bit her, in her dying moments she asked the snake why it had bit her, the response, “you knew I was a snake when you brought me in.” This was my warning, that I wasn’t looking for a relationship, just someone to kill time with once and a while and get laid. It wouldn’t go any further than that. I wasn’t interested. I was back in my fortress, but in every person, every type of relationship after him there was the comparison. After the blow up in Seattle with the first asshole ex I got duped by, I knew I was filling a void in all of the wrong ways and the snake story began. I was filling voids to forget. And in that time, I’d drop whoever I was seeing if they came around, my one.
Then again, after NYC, and moving back to Seattle, is when it all went dark. At that point I was angry. The song, “Pictures of You”, by The Cure became their song and I was just fucking pissed. But not enough to slam the door and send a shitty message, while I was so fucking angry and broken, I still loved them and those thoughts of what if and memories would pop into my brain. And it would stop eventually. The anger.
The snake story continued on, later morphing into a lie when I’d try, telling new ones I didn’t tell them the snake story so it meant something. This was all bullshit. There would be times that I didn’t think of him, our moments in time, and when the comparison would only slightly pop up, and I’d push it out.
And then this last nightmare… where I thought trying the polar opposite of what my life had always been like would be it. I swallowed the bullshit and made the leap. Maybe settling down would do it and they seemed fine. But they were the rose-colored glasses feelings, not the nervous feeling I’d once had many years ago.
I almost didn’t get on the plane to look at apartments before I’d move in a month. I knew what I was doing, same bullshit, but maybe I could be happy, at the time there was nothing bad, and then he came into my head. I’d have to finally let that go to make it work.
I sat in the airport. I almost missed my flight. I had to run to catch the plane. I told a few friends, one said to try, one said to not. Devil’s Advocate. And I’m a risk taker, so I hauled ass with my luggage and boarded the plane, thinking this guy was the one and I was just being crazy. Oh, the beautiful lies we tell ourselves.
The rest is what I wrote previously in this post about my moving here, how not long after the move it all blew up in my face. But in that I gained my truest and best friend out of it, so the move, the bullshit, was all worth it. But the pounding of the past increased. The fuck... where you just stare and think. The sadness, the longing, the feeling absolutely insane, that I was delusional and something was wrong with me; that this person I hadn’t seen in years, I was still thinking of and missed dearly.
It was then I truly realized what love was. It’s that never ending candle burning, one we can’t snuff out, the feelings that don’t fade, we miss them, we fear for the loss of the memories and the hard door slam. I always left it cracked. I was no longer going to fill voids and try to change. I had found it once, experienced it, and living with those memories, even when they were painful in the loss, were enough for me. That there was no other that would compare. And that, and that alone, being alone with my memories, those moments, were all I needed. And once in a while, the hope, wish I guess, that they’d come back, like they would sometimes in my dreams, would surface.
I would realize at 37 that my connection to the character Edward Scissorhands, always adorning my house with art from the film, was truly me, and I could be alone in my tower, moving forward in life, but alone. Still, typing that puts a knot in my stomach, that they’ll never come back, there won’t be another chance, but I let it settle. I look up at my wall of collections of Edward and make peace with it, as much as I can, but never putting that light out. The candle in the attic window still burns and always will. After it not fading after this much time, I know it will always be there. I guess in a way it’s comforting. This will be my companion. There will be no more snake stories, no more filling voids.
I remember his piercing eyes that would penetrate through to my very core, as if he could peer into my soul and see everything. Nothing was a hidden and I always found solace in that, he could see me... Granted I’ve forgotten what he feels like, which is painful, but distance does that. We’re only left with distant memories but ones we hold onto as sacred objects, guard them and never let them go.
Looking back maybe I could have said more, told him how I felt, but that would have only caused a further retreat. I know I did the only thing I could and my disappearing acts were done in love, in hopes they would find peace and happiness in my absence. And did this person ever love me? I have no idea. I just know that they are the only person I ever did. I stopped trying to wonder about it many times, yet I still do, but love me or not, I feel fortunate to have loved and continue to harbor that light that will never go out.
For those of you reading this, I’m not saying to do as I did, all situations are different, mainly it’s how to make peace in the loss, and the beauty of love, the fortunate experience that truly is rare, whether it lasts or not. To not kill it, to not put the candle out, and if you can make the leap to try again, do it. If it is true love, no matter how much water you dump on it, how far you bury it in the dirt, it will never go out. I’ve tried to snuff mine out in moments of anger and sadness, trying to only think of the things that hurt me, but it didn’t work. The light was still there.
So if you have that light, in all of the multitude of emotions it carries, good, heartbreaking and that knowing they’ll always be in your heart and soul, cherish it and know that you found true love, an experience, that in that rarity, we are fortunate. Love is pain as many have said. And it is a dark, yet beautiful pain, one I wouldn’t give up for anything. And in my many months of reflection, finding my years of debating on just being alone and knowing I can never alter those moments in time, fill that void; that I don’t need anyone else. In my solace with my memories, whether they are physically with me or not, I have them as my companion in those memories.
In closing, to show my own masochistic side, in the beginning I wrote a letter to him, telling him how I felt. To give to him to read on his own. I was terrified of me turning back to see no trace of him, so I never gave it to him. I let fear overtake me.
Many years ago in anger I tore it up after it living in one of the back corners of my desk for all of that time. I would have liked to go back and read it now, but that, my friends, is history. Maybe I’ll write another one, but due to my own fear, one that most undoubtedly holds me back, if I do, will continue to live once again, in the back corner of my desk. Again, hiding in fear. If asked, I would tell them now, yet terrified for their response. It could be that new transformation. But I have yet to do so on my own, to push to that extent. So for now, I’ll never know.
But for those of you brave enough, you don’t have to hide in fear as I do. I know that even if I got a fuck you, are you crazy, while it would gut me, later on I could still recognize it for what it was, that I once found true love and even in full, potential rejection know that I had that experience, and one that forever changed me. That if the door closes, I have my candle; the light that never goes out will always be there.
Until next time…