19092023

It’s been just about a year to date since I met her. I left that night feeling so sure of… something. I didn’t know what it was back then — I don’t know what it was now — but I never could’ve imagined any of it would go the way it did, any moment of it. I think I felt a happiness I have never felt before in my life. People keep on telling me, Ana herself, the worst of them all, that I’ll feel it again, with someone else: but they’re wrong, and they know they’re wrong, but they have to live their lives believing otherwise, because otherwise it would dislodge them from their perfect continuities, the ongoingness of their lives, their gathered, undisrupted selves — It feels like it’s been so much longer than that. It feels like these wounds are ancient, from before I existed. That’s the most bitter part of it all: there’s so little left that the memory of pain has failed to devour that I can barely remember anything now that hasn’t been maimed by the agony of the present. It’s sickening to think that life has just moved on, utterly indifferent to the lot of it. I think that’s why I felt so compelled to die in those moments: not to end my own pain or to inflict more upon her, at the end of it, but because I was so afraid of the end of it, the decay into meaninglessness of it, that it felt more preferable to die in that moment and freeze it in the amber of tragedy than to let it be wasted by an ongoingness so thoroughly and cruelly indifferent to the fragility of such things as to be indistinguishable in effect from rot itself. That’s what it feels like. All the moments after, too: the months I spent trying to hold on to something that was already long lost at that point, thinking I could outwill its decay, only to degrade it even more, to even further rob the whole debacle of what little remaining pretence of dignity we could muster. It ruined everything. I ruined everything. I miss her terribly, and I’m powerless to do anything about it, because I am powerless to do anything about anything. Even if she were to suddenly re-appear I fear it wouldn’t change a single thing. I don’t remember what she looked like. I hate her ability to remain uncompromised. Her terrible ongoingness. I would do anything to leave a stain across that. If, for even just a moment, I could hurl my body upon the tracks and register as an unexpected jolt: I don’t remember anything about her at all except the pain she inflicted upon me. My heart’s become rotten. One of these days, I keep on telling myself. It’s been a bit longer than “a bit”. I wish I could blot the entirety of this past year from my life. This is gonna sting. It’s all gonna catch up to me, one by one. I have become filled with vile, bitter feelings. I don’t know anything about anything. I have become sick with longing. I don’t know anything at all.