Thu, 19 May 2005

the remaining words
It’s not that she’s forgiven me. It’s that I’m becoming irrelevant to her, fading out of her life, so that it no longer seems worth the effort to hold a grudge. She calls out of habit, when no one else is around and her boy is gone, and she no longer asks what I’ve been up to, as she knows I am up to nothing, my life having hit a point where every day is like white noise, hiding from the world, pretending to do the work. She loves me now in an abstract sense, as I have shared enough of her life that I become a kind of living conduit to a severely edited highlight reel of her past, content to be her audience as she was once content to be my everything.

All my friends are older now, and in love with other people. I can’t really hurt them anymore, not in the ways I once could, when we were younger and so close we seemed to share organs, so close we took the same breaths. All the new ideas that felt so weird in the mouth when I tried to explain them in late-night phone rants are unwrapped, components exposed, so that now I work toward subtraction, removing what is not me. I don’t devour libraries anymore; I read the same few books over and over, and the same with music, and the same with almost everything else. I couldn’t surprise her if I tried, and I have, and have failed. I was so alien to her, once, so full of dark places and stray threads, and now she has a simplified surrogate of me in the bottom of her brain. “That’s like something he’d say.”

I have nothing left to tell her but I love you, and I love you is never the answer to a meaningful question.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #