strike that

the only way i want it

I know the names of trees, dumbass. I know the names of trees, and I can pack for anything in fifteen minutes, and I’m the best person to have around when you’re sick, hands down. I will never shoot down your plans. I’ll stay up when you can’t sleep. And you are undecided?

I have friends who have had choices made for them, big ones that no one was ready to make, and they’ve stepped up and owned them, and they are no older nor better equipped than we are, but here we are doing this bullshit thing, all pleasure no hassle as if that could last, all holding out like it’s out of our hands.

And I know that I am not always easy, that I assign too much meaning to small things and leave tissues on the table and am contrary, but really? Really you still need to think about this? My sense of urgency is maybe a mystery to you, and I don’t know where it comes from – too much early exposure to poetry about rosebuds and roman candles, I suppose. In any case I feel it, most moments at least, and you call it gravity, the weight of the world, perhaps confusing it with an urgency to name this something it’s not, to pretend some concrete commitment. But my urgency is the opposite, not an expectation for later but a preoccupation with now. When we are together I want to be there completely, I want to reel with the fullness of it, I want it to knock me over. But you stay upright with a vengeance.

Choosing is overrated, and I say this as an authority, I say this as someone whose favorite poem is called Both Ways. But at some point some choices are worth the aggravation of making them, are worth the loss of the thing you didn’t choose. And that point, for us, has come and gone three times over now at least, and I just want to alert you, Officially, that when this overdue choice is made for you in short order, you are not allowed to play the victim. You are not allowed to blame the universe, or me, for not getting what you wanted. Or for getting exactly what you wanted, and having to deal with it.

And you said before that you feel like you always disappoint me, that you feel it in a thousand small ways, every day; but there it is, just that one thing, over and over: that I want to be worth it to you, and somehow, inexplicably, unmistakably, I’m not.

posted by tortaluga @ 1:03 AM