It has come to pass, as the man in the darkness couldn't help himself this time around. Sadness? Cold fingers have shaken his hand again and again. Why have I sealed this deal in this fashion?
I understand so very little of J's ability to see exactly why my reaction to her loss of self-control was so harsh and brutal. I managed to damn myself with a single deadly word: hate. My months of patient wading through the rivers of both distance and time resulting in what? It was the overhanging boughs of expectation that caused all this confusion. I built a fragile house of cards, here in the darkness, in the months prior to an actual meeting. I reeled out a lifeline that was far too thin and weak to support the emotional weight I wanted to suspend from it. Perhaps if I had cast away all my past mistakes, fears, and doubts I could have presented a better package for her. Is it these things that have made me who I am, this “cat who walks by himself”? I need more time to open my heart wide enough to accommodate the love of another. Until then, I am damned to continue along this tightrope, trapped in a cycle of loss and fresh attempts. Where is the success I so desperately long for? Where is my redemption?
I suppose it is rather ignorant to think that redemption is something given rather than earned. I try to do what is real and true, but the shadowed faces in my past taunt and laugh at my attempts at virtue. “Play their game,” they moan, “you only stand to suffer!” Oh, foul conundrum! These small victories that only add up to a large defeat. Am I meant to believe that certain things were simply not meant to be? Do I shatter the principles of fate? Even when I feel a small amount of control, I still know that the chaos that underlies all my actions heaves and shifts, eventually moving me to suit its even greater demands. Am I paying or playing? I can't even see eye-to-eye with someone so like myself, yet perhaps the faults I found in J were nothing more than the thing I wanted for myself: a wild and uncontrolled passion. I can still feel that pulse she imparted, warring with the iron rod of responsibility I have recently imposed on myself. Herein lies the basis of a struggle that carries on even to this day. The almost sexual desire to evenly mix chaos and order and create an anvil upon which I can forge the sword of my psyche. I wonder now if this imagined struggle is even worthwhile.
So where do I go from here? Do I struggle to love or remain in abandonment as I have for so long? I'm afraid that all that has transpired in my efforts to shine a light of happiness into J's heart has done more harm than good. I see now that my “quest” to happify J was ridiculous. She didn't need anything from me to make her happy. It was the external pressures of her adolescent life that were causing her grief. The exposure to my cynicism was background noise and her reaction was natural. So, if it is fate, or the mathematical output of a simple equation, then I got what was coming to me. Did I shine with a black light? Perhaps. Until the party, and the “drinking games”, I was fine with everything. Then the old systems I had loved for so long and the new systems that wanted nothing to do with the past went to war within my emotional fortress. The tenuous relationship with J that had only been a day old began to fall apart.
The beauty of youth, how far have I stepped from its simple bliss? I have become more like granite, another rock to clamber over—or roll off a mountain—and I find myself on a difficult climb. I wonder if the summit is worth it. Always of the self, self, self. Where was I when the lessons about others were being taught? Perhaps those lessons are buried in my subconscious somewhere, waiting for me to release them and put them into practice.
Some simple facts about this relationship:
Is there some regret in all this? Should I not have driven myself home more quickly? Perhaps held back on the sexual contact? The self-willing prostitution of my soul could have become something greater than that which I wished for. But I fine no regret, at least not on any level deeper than the surface. I came, I saw, I took what I thought I was owed and returned home. At the time I felt broken, used, and betrayed. But I sacrificed my integrity to feel all those expensive doubts and fears. I wallowed in my own ideas of love and loss, ideas that no one shared but me. Perhaps that was the final justice for my scheme: all that time spent agonizing over a relationship that did not and never would have worked. Idealism: the lesson that matters most from this insignificant speck in my existence is just that. Something I didn't see until just now. I must not waste time on details to the point that such idleness distracts from the vision of the completed project. Young lust, too, is an exercise in the procreative tactic. Without the pressures to get fucked, perhaps the human species itself would cease to exist! Then in my time, with all my buried notions about what these relationships should be, and the adolescent angst and nervosa that come with them, causes anxiety in later life. I guess the ultimate point I am trying to make in all this is that the feeling of importance that the present attaches to experience may not be as vital to the future's lessons.