A friend says he’s not the only one who gets this way, who gets angry when he sees evidence that somebody did something that will hurt him; I try to hide my gratitude when he tells me that he also finds himself thinking, is this all they can do to hurt me? Well, I can hurt myself a lot worse and I will, just to prove that they aren’t as good as me in this arena, and that if I wanted to, all that would be left in front of me is a puddle. But even if forced into a corner I would choose to hurt me, not them. Never them! I choose to treat them with the care of an infant but this is how they repay me, the only way I know how to react is to take the ante up further, put the knife where I will bleed out the fastest. Then maybe they will know how it feels to be hurt even if Oshiro says that I am not teaching anybody anything, that they won’t feel anything. When my friend tells me that he finds himself thinking this too there is a moment of lightness amidst all these threats that we condone ourselves with. We giggle like children, seeing the idiocy at what’s at stake as the weight slowly melts, and also feeling understanding for our own behavior from somebody else, something we don’t find very often from other people. Why? Because we are not other people and we will never be other people and still I try. I think he finds more peace in not trying, but me, dammit if I don’t get them to admit I was right.
Maybe the guy that has the whole world at his fingertips in terms of hurting me won’t be able to sympathize, maybe he won’t understand, maybe he will use words like insane again because that is what feels comfortable and nice. But they won’t be able to close their eyes. No, they won’t. I feel so relieved that I am not the only person that goes down this competitive line of thinking, and ironically, the person who got me going down this bad road, is the one who always tells me how silly I am for going on it. They are the one who reaches their hand out and dusts me off and calls me names. But mostly I sit out here and they don’t come outside. And definitely not anymore. If I think of the total picture, I am not making things better by trying to create anything. But these are emotions. I couldn’t hold back when I felt like that just as much as he couldn’t hold back from erasing those things that hurt me. He can’t blame me for feeling hurt and I can’t blame him for hurting me because we were both just doing things people do. I just wish…. I just wish I was with him. But then my friends go on their rap about how he isn’t good enough for me but I want to shut them up for if I had never listened to my friends I wouldn’t have broken up with him in the first place because getting nothing is better from him than getting less than nothing but than I see through that too, because that is crap too because the truth is that he does leave women three months into the relationship no matter how special they are and nothing I did was going to change that so I need to move on too, it’s just I’ve chained myself to this tree to show him that I am not going to leave with a fight that I really did care, that i care more than anybody will ever care, and nobody can win in this war of who cares the most about him, that he will have to saw this tree down to get me to stop. Even if I go to New York and the deal goes through and I become famous I still won’t stop with the metal handcuffs and the tree. So he can move on all he wants to but no matter how many things he does to push me away I still can’t cut the cord. I just found the cord again. It had been lost for so many months, how can I let it go again?
Take Another Look 