It has to end. It has to end. It has to end.

I was blunt, I was cruel, and I was right. I was straightforward, I was consistent, and I was right. I was hurtful, I was hurt, and I was right.

It can't go on like this. This loneliness that can only be tempered by one person, that stings ever more harshly when surrounded by a sea of people that are not the right one. This torture that is a problem without resolution, this sick melancholy which is addiction to melancholy.

It has to end.

I don't like who I am in his absence, what I do to those who represent a lack of him. And anyway, it's not safe anymore-- that was part of the appeal initially, was it not? I am scared by intimacy, but so drawn to it despite that I go and press up against it, caged, like an animal in a zoo. Some fierce predator that I long so long to touch that I stretch my fingers through the chain link fence, but would dare not approach in the open savannah.

Poetic bullshit. Where's Casey to slap me silly?

It's not safe anymore, with the building of the desperation. With Mr. L's approval. Having explored every other option except those with are entirely taboo. It's not safe anymore, and, because of that, it will become safer-- I will lack response to it. I will pull back, into myself, fingers intact.

Or will I?

It has to end. It has to end. It has to end, before I can find out.

I will pull back into myself and be safe, be intact, be worthless. I will pull back into myself and waste the rest of my life being safe. I will pull back into myself until the ennui makes me crazy again, until I fall back into the same patterns and find some other cage, some other large, powerful beast who will ignite my imagination from a distance, who will make my fingers ache, and the pattern of the Zoo, it goes wildly in circles like the rides they have there: merry-go-round, ferris wheel, roller coaster.

Round and round. Up and down. Over and over, ad nauseum, quite literally.

"Something here will eventually have to explode."

Am I talking myself into or out of something? It's hard to tell anymore.

If I can manage a paradigm shift by the next time I see him, I might get out with my awful little life in tact. Maybe I will have gotten out without breaking anyone's heart. Maybe I won't have.


I don't know what I want. I don't know how to get it. I know I can't follow Mr. L's advice. I know I can't keep trading hours of misery for a few scattered minutes of...a different kind of misery, the kind that would be like joy if it could sit still for a minute, if it could relax. A relief tempered by the knowledge that the pain comes on again, and soon.

I can't trade all of these hours for those minutes, and I can't trade the rest of my life to turn those minutes into hours. It has to end. It has to end.



Tell me what I want. Be here, to change my mind. Tell me that getting rid of you doesn't actually make my life easier or better, it just lets me fall into these same patterns again. Tell me that even if Mr. L wasn't right, maybe he was pointing me in the right direction. Tell me to spend just a little bit longer with you. Take a lesson from me, and don't let me leave.

Except that you can't do that from where you are.


On with it.