now and then, when the anvil feels especially heavy, i review it all to remind myself that choices made are, in the end, for the best. but i look over the massive work and effort and i can’t help it… i have to ask – what the hell happened to you?
somewhere around 1996, you just… imploded. something happened. i have no idea what it was. i likely will never know. but whatever it was, it set you down. hard. and you have never quite managed to get back on your feet.
i found you at the beginning of 2006. that’s ten years. ten. years. and you were still spiralling when i found you. cringing from anything and everything that could possibly help you, stubbornly insistent upon self-destruction. the last i heard of you, less than three weeks ago, you were looking to return to proximity of someone you have many times admitted was not healthy for you.
i admit, it boggles me. but i suppose this is because i choose life and learning whereas you seem somehow doggedly determined to choose avoidance, ignorance, and yes, death.
it’s funny, in a sad way… i met someone tonight who was so much like you. and in meeting them, heard you, remembered you, realised just how sick and lost you really are…
it made me sad, because i can see now what i couldn’t see even weeks ago… you don’t want to change, you don’t want help, you slash at everyone who offers it in any manner of lasting way and you limp to people who enable your worst parts and help you continue to avoid your best ones… and you blame and shut out those who insist on calling it what it is and trying to push/pull/kick you past them.
i remember you told me it has been a long time since you felt your best. and i remember you told me you wanted me to see you at your best. i wonder if you remember what i said to you… or if you ever really understood just what i was saying.
i said to you that i had always seen you at your best, because i wasn’t looking at you as you are in this moment, but as i knew you wanted to be.
but, sadly, there is a difference between wanting to be and choosing to be. the former is words and the latter, action. an area in which you have issues and baggage that no one can unpack but you… and you refuse.
but i think about how hurt you were by my scoffing at your community-building efforts and i know why you hurt for it… you did not want to think you had lost what was once a core competency. you haven’t lost it. you have forgotten how to work with it. perhaps by choice. perhaps simply via getting distracted and lost in pride and selfishness. hard to say. i suppose it doesn’t really matter what the reasons are… it remains, you’re lost and from all that is apparent, you wish to stay lost.
heavy, heavy thing, to see it so clearly. i continue to hope the universe will bring to you what is needed to snap you out of it. and i continue to hope you will not be so stubborn and prideful that the universe will have to break you utterly to get you to pay attention.
i cannot be the endlessly tolerant and patient person i was for months on end for you anymore. that kind of effort requires some manner of replenishment and you just never had the ability to give it. i see that now.
i see as well just how lopsided and dysfunctional it was to continue reaching and trying to help you when it is not a thing i could do, and since it is something you refuse to do, it was not possible at all.
i do hope there is someone out there who you will permit to help you until you can help yourself. and i do hope the snake you turn to in this moment is less poisonous than both you and i know them to be. and i hope someday you find your way back to the person who could be happy with whatever is.
whatever it was that happened to you, whatever it was that made you unable, may it pass, may it fade. may you find the man i saw behind all the carelessness and cruelty of you. i know he lives in you. i hope you find him.