A Try For Lucky Twelve
We tried. Waiting, talking, eating, falling asleep, living together out of happiness, out of loneliness, out of warmth, out of hunger, out of sadness, tears and smiles and blood stain these sheets. Huddled after a rainstorm. Sitting at the computer as the other one sleeps. Sprawled on the bed during visiting hours. So many moments. Body littered with marks, I even might get a facial scar out of the bargain. But it didn't work, square peg, round hole. How obvious does the fundamental incompatability - not anything so trivial as hobbies or beliefs, but something ungraspable like Dao or hormones - have to be before you realise it does not work? And when we had exchanged gold for ashes, we learnt you were missing the words "in" and "with".
You do not choose who you love.
I never realised that one statement could be used in two so throughly different ways. I once said it, shaking like a diseased cat, carrying nothing but the clothes on my back and the shoes on my feet: I didn't even grab house keys, let alone anything else like a wallet, a jacket, even my mind. I was easily a day's walk from home and it was late at night. I said it, and she told me not to be so intense, and asked me when I'd like to see her again. I loved her, still do, and I wished I didn't. Good luck and timing wisked me back into the arms of friends.
Now, I have said it to someone else, for entirely different reasons. I never would have predicted that, or that it would fit so well. Amanda would be proud, the entire arc of this relationship was so beyond definition that whenever anyone would ask me about it, the best answer I could give was "yes ... and no". We never began even though we did, so we couldn't be ending even though we are.
Nevertheless, I'm glad we tried.
And you might come back, knocking on my window at three in the morning, talking like a roman sky. I'm comfortable with this, but I will live my life as if that moment will never come. Hope has never done me any good. I love life, and certainties, and reality. Wet earth, blood, sweat, love, toil, success, failure. Hope is for a time when humanity had none. The certainty of disease, the certainty of famine, the certainty of the death of your child. These things are what hope were required for, were designed for. These times are gone, I have never seen them, never even felt their passing. I have no need of it: delusions for the survival of a race burdened with the unfair brutality of their life. I am evolved, advanced, burdened with the new responsabilities of a society of wealth and affluence.
Should you appear at my window, I might even say no.
No one will complete me, I complete myself.