story – sofsea

we are coffeehouse cynics/too righteous, too rigid to believe

Something short and strange inspired by this song

We fill ourselves up with money, with hatred, with materialistic dreams of grandeur and disposable people. We fill ourselves up with things others have lost, and things which cannot be found. We hide ourselves away inside of this idea of happiness, this sacred, golden beauty, this force-fed aspiration for greatness. It is not greatness, this monstrous dream. It is not greatness. It is a disgusting, grotesque poison. We want to fill ourselves up with the poison of self-hatred, of unforgiving stupidity.

I miss you, did you know that? I miss the ravenous, needy way you drank your coffee, black, dark roast, as if it was going to fix the emptiness that had caved into itself, inside of you. I miss your childish delight, your wide, crooked grin, the one that has haunted my dreams for the past few months. I miss your goodness, because good god, you had a ridiculous amount of it. You just forgot how to find it. I do not place blame on you, for that shortsighted insecurity, for that unprecedented ability you had to forget every good thing about you.

There you go, there it is, that truth you always wanted from me. I am so sorry I never had the decency, the generosity, to willingly give it to you. I wish, more than anything, that I had not been as so obliviously selfish as I was. What a greedy, egregious fool I was, to ever be anything but less than devoted to making you feel okay again. You were everything, the world, the universe, the whole damned galaxy somehow meshed into this dissonant, but inconceivably beautiful, mess of a human being. You tired angel. I love you. I hope you do see that now. I love you and I wish I could have given into that.

I wish I could have said it.

We were fools. We were idiotic, restless children, bones nearly trembling with emptiness, with this exhausted eagerness to see, to live, to prosper and to embrace each other, but we never did. We went too far, we lost our vision in this blinding, blinding darkness. I am so sorry. We were screwed from the beginning, though. Don’t you see that? What other possibility was there, other than this hellish, crumbling palace we built for ourselves, than to come crashing to the ground?

I found your tee shirt, the other day, resting plaintively at the bottom of my closet. Good god, love, you should’ve seen how I trembled, how I collapsed onto my carpet and sobbed, endlessly, bitterly, into that fucking tee shirt. That tee shirt is you, really. Coffee stained, faded cream, and this strange scent of cinnamon and cigarette smoke. You perfect, damn perfect, human.

God. How did we lose this, my love? How did we lose ourselves in this neverending darkness? How did we not see the end of it? There must be an opening at the end of the tunnel. There has to be.

You must have seen it, did you not? Have you finally found that incomprehensible surge of light? Have you found yourself, finally, in death? Have you found what you were searching for?

God knows I haven’t, but goodness, I hope you have.

this is a short story of mine that I wrote for English class last year, centered around the very broad theme of “catharsis”. it makes little sense and is quite vague but please tell me what you think, and ask what’d you like. please do not steal or post anywhere else as I worked very hard on this last year. thank you.

4:42 AM.

My head is hurting and my feet are sore. It’s too dark out to feel the pain, though. It’s much too early to feel anything. I am not supposed to be here, of course not, but I could not sleep and I could not stay put inside of my small, claustrophobic, room. I had to let myself out. I had to.

I am standing at the exact spot where the waves break against the sand, the fine divide between the rugged darkness of the sea and the soft motionless existence of the earth. I used to love that- the metaphor of the break between oblivion and life. I suppose I still do, but in a much different way. I slide off my sandals, tossing them somewhere behind me, dismissing the common necessity of footwear for a time of lesser importance than this.

The night air is dipping down, settling around me, a charcoal tip smudging against the papery sand. I am silent but my mind is certainly not. All I can think of is how this came to be. How did this happen? How did the person that I used to so willingly be become the person that I now so unexpectedly am? Everything is aching inside of me as I slip my toes into the coldness of the water. The temperature is almost unbearable, but all I can think about is the girl that once was. And the memory hurts far more than the death chill.

A slippery smile crosses my lips as I close my eyes, breathing in all of the night and all parts of the wide, unbreakable universe. Breathing in what was and what would’ve been. It is peaceful, surprisingly enough. It is peaceful.

That day when the tears stained my cheeks like cracks in a sidewalk, the outer darkness that surrounded me threatening to choke me to death. The weight of her troubles was passed subconsciously unto me. And I know that she never meant to make me carry her heartache, but I did. I did for too long, and too deeply. Her demons were never meant to be mine, but somehow, they laid eggs inside of my heart and have grown there since.

When the person closest to you breaks, you do not imagine how deeply it will injure you. It does, though. It breaks you in places you did not know even existed until now. You do choose your friends, but you do not choose their heartbreaks. You do not choose their insecurities, or their many, many flaws, or their instinctive hatred that has been relentlessly instilled in them since birth. You do not choose their humanity. You only choose what they allow you first to see. And, after that, all you can ever hope to do is to try to hold onto the person you once believed existed. After a while, though, that weight grows tiresome. That weight pulls you into someone else’s darkness. One that was never supposed to pass into yours.

Is it better, I think, solemnly, to feel complete indifference to everything, to feel absolutely nothing but to thus never feel pain? Or is it better to feel all of everything at once? It is the unspoken and unanswerable question. But I think, now, I have finally somehow answered it. I have felt it all: the grief of your own soul lost, but stitched back together by brand-new needles. The maelstrom of a thousand devastations cleaning your spirit and washing away the disbelief into an understanding for what life really is. It is a ridiculously painful thing, but a necessary cleansing. After all of the vehement madness I have so exhaustedly pushed myself into, I now can say that it is better, to have felt it all, for the strange feeling will lead to understanding. The feeling will burn inside of you until you have absolutely no choice but to allow the fire to grow. There is no other choice, and there never was.

The girl who once was, isn’t anymore. The young, inquisitive girl who believed in saccharine goodness and in the bright, shiny parts of the world, who believed in unconditional kindness, isn’t anymore. That girl, however hopeful, however fervently inspired she was, is inexorably gone. That girl is long dead, not buried, but burnt. And I am suddenly, overwhelmingly, okay with that. It is no longer a terrible epiphany, but a momentous one. I left pieces of myself in every person that I used to love, and now, those pieces are forever broken, but all I must do is find new ones. All I must do is let go of the remains of the past and instead dare to pass into the new world of myself. There are parts of me where the sun will never shine, and this is no longer a disgrace, but an understanding. There is no requirement for perpetual sunlight, not when you are capable of controlling your darkness. Not when you’re at home in your brokenness.

I still miss you, I do. I will never stop missing you. But the water is growing colder and the waves are getting bigger and I need to go back to bed. I love you, as always, but I will never see you again. And I have to live with that, for now.

I turn my back to the sea. I search for my shoes in the pale dawn.

They are long gone.