Category: Writing

First of all, anxieties that burn until they suddenly disappear unresolved, why do they do that? Only to return home like a swarming cloud, awoken from their sleep to sting and swell on you like mouth ulcers, painfully brushed with every internal movement of logic. If they’re helpful let them stay so I can shoot their source dead, and if they’re not let them loose to fuck off and dissipate from neural pulses into static electricity. But like every wall I’ve ever sat across from face-to-face, it’s not that simple. The only truly simple truth I’ve ever learnt first-hand is that complication is sewn in the fabric of anything that has ever moved, and that’s everything, ever. It’s death, I think. You have to think about your own consistently delayed death to survive for any amount of time, but you have to forget about it too, as an aching, unresolvable worry, to ever really live. And so that’s why I have the psychological apparatus to feel utterly and existentially spooked by the record of my accumulated decision making until the horror loses its voice and hushes and I just forget to keep up the worry and I go off to make a few more decisions.

Secondly, I want to be on my own. I want to be alone but my brain is playing cards, in a secret back room it thinks I don’t know about, but of course I do, but if this game has to happen then honestly it needs to remain out of sight. This is a controversial exploration, and I can’t stop this personification of my brain (as if it’s separate from me, which it’s not) from travelling into this dangerous territory. It is a delicate system and a delicate game and I want to be alone, but the stakes let no question rest and I don’t know all the rules and I never could and the players could be bluffing, but I’d tell because I can see into their heads because they are me, but I’ve looked and I still can’t tell because they don’t even know themselves. I have done the equations and refined the calculations until the emotional science remains stable enough for a verdict, and I know what the answer is in as much as anyone can know anything is true in any science; That is that you can never know anything, you can only give your best estimate based on repeatable evidence. And that’s all I hang onto in this chemical storm. 

I want to be alone, I have weighed it up. But there’s still weight on the other side too, and because of that the decision was awful to balance. The other side is not empty, a part of me lives there, still in this relationship, unready to leave with the rest of me. And so I have these visions of a thing I don’t want at all. A thing it is dangerous to even speak of, painful to hear the pronunciation. Categorically the wrong thing, the thing none of me wants. And yet the visions appear. The auroras of meshing physical forms of two conflicting sides of me. My internal atmosphere screaming for harmony, mixing dissonant ideologies to find the few straggling, disjointed parts that will emulsify with each other, creating an ideal drastically unrepresentative of either side it is made of parts from. I don’t want to be with another, in fact, a desire like that is the one thing that could most devastatingly blast this all to hell. Both sides in conflict agree on this. And yet, in trying to break up the fight happening deep inside me, some busy-bodied solutionizer element of my subconscious is combining the want to be out of this relationship (from my winning ‘leave’ side) with the want to be with someone (from my losing ‘stay’ side), rendering both angles meaningless by stripping them of their context and jamming them together crudely like action-figures to kiss and make-up into something condemnable. It’s all wrong and I want it out of my head. Its comfort isn’t real and it’s so volatile a thought that it’s a serious liability to mention even here, just to get it out of me. It’s deadly and futile and I want the nonsensical path to it eased from my brain. I want to be alone.