Wounded Warriors Wounding One Another

I never meant to hurt you.  I never meant to break your heart.  But somewhere along the way of my own heartbreak, intentions ceased to be.  There was just me, taking comfort in you.

You are warm, sweet, kind, and somehow still fun and interesting.  I never had to pretend to be enjoying myself.  You were trying so hard to not fall for me, and I saw that.  You wanted real, you wanted depth.  But I am spent.

You were so upset to discover I still talk to her, still love her.  You left and I understand.  I stood in uncharacteristic silence as you packed your things and left.  No one wants to be a consolation prize.  

Still, even knowing how it hurt you, I couldn't apologize.  How do you say sorry for loving?  For missing someone so dearly that, despite rejection, every couple days you feel compelled to talk to them?  For laying your heart on the line, even when you knew it would be crushed?  If anything, you should understand that.  We are both weary and weathered, and lost in a storm of need and emotion.

You wanted to turn this respite we found into something real.  In so many ways, we are similar, yet not in that.  After hurt and heartache, you spring back to your feet.  Tears in your eyes, but eager to find the love you've been missing.  I, however, leave my heart behind.  I venture forth, the same man, but lacking my soul.  Bit by bit, I'll salvage what remains, but dare not fall for me in this state, for I am a shell.  And I told you.  I told you not to fall in love with me.

I wish there were a way for me to satisfy you in the state I am.  But you will suffer no imitation.  And I?  If I were really wishing, love would not have failed me, and you would never have known me enough for me to wound you.

Seagull

    Are we all lost boys?  Does everyone else sit here and cry out “why?”  Why did I have to grow up?  Why could I not stay a boy, and spend my life dreaming of adventure and pirates?  My heart is too weak and naive for the world and the life I have.

    Heartbreak doesn’t make us better.  I convinced myself it did, that the scars I carried made me more beautiful, that my pain would temper me like heated steel.  But my agony has only ever led to compromise, to a desperate struggle to feel anything else.  And all paths lead back to despair.  Sometimes I’m forced here, and other times, a prison of my own creation.  

    Everyone gives you advice, tells you how to live, how to be, how to fix it.  All those people who don’t understand.  Who have not only not lived your pain, and are not you.  How arrogant to think your solution mine.  I feel insignificant in your eyes as you try to fix me.  You make me feel so much more broken.

    No one can truly know another.  We hold things back from the world.  We hide our darkest and saddest thoughts.  We have shames we never let see the light of day.  How can we not feel lonely?  Show my darkness, you say?  You can handle it, you say?  That vanity again.  I can’t handle it, and it lives in me.

    When I love, I am wounded.  And when I don’t, I wound others.  Yes, the world is beautiful.  But it is so vicious and vile.  It will tear you up, blind you, and leave you for dead.  It’ll teach you to be like it.  But I’m too tired to be vicious anymore.  

Free Form

    I am a dream.  I am a nightmare.  I am the energy that surges up in you when you lie awake at night and plan to be better tomorrow.  I am the cold loneliness you feel when you are lost to the despair in your mind each day.

    “I know what you need, and I hope beyond hope I am the one to give it to you.”  What was that?  A cruel lie?  Or a tragic truth, a surrender of love and desire, lost in this madness we call life?  Or even still, perhaps it just seemed like a sweet thing to say?  Say it now cause it sounds good, no idea how much someone might cling to it, how it could eviscerate one’s soul, once it has all come out, now that we’re all alone again.

    Or not alone.  Never alone.  Never with enough time or clarity to really know where we are headed, or why.  Rats on wheels in clear cages, watching other rats spinning and pretending we don’t all know what is happening.  Easier to lie to myself than anyone else.  Easier to pretend this game is what I want to play than to try to break free.

    But hopeless is as hopeless does.  The Cooler King tried again and again, and I have yet to have the courage to try once.  Inside is too small, but outside is terror inducing in its enormity.  And that seems it.  In the cave or out.  All the fantasies in the world dissolve in the face of cowardice.

    My dreams lie where ability and motivation never meet.