I had an evening awhile back with someone that really cemented my self-worth back into my being and I don’t think I’ve had a chance to tell them that. I don’t know how I properly could without explaining the tortuous process of how I lost myself in the first place and it’s not my place to do so. The groundwork isn’t there for my unleashing of torrential emotional explanation. We’re not lovers and we’re not going to be. It’s enough that I have it back, my assumption of self. It’s enough that I know I still have what I used to, that I can be full again.
I’ve been trying to think of the positive. My life is taking off again. I’m stepping back into being a person of dancing shoes and social understanding. I need to leave my house more, facetime in the cold of winter. I have reasons now, I’ve been collecting invitations and friends again to meet in flesh. There’s books to return and people to stomp the stores with. I need to play catch-up with a few friends. Tell them I’m going back to California, to live just outside of L.A. for a month. Tell them everything. How I want to meet people there this time. Meet people and keep them. Drown myself in the ocean of humanity. How I’m planning on running away with the circus. Drafting myself into a pyromania outfit of dancers and sparking machines, explosions of sound, grace, and coloured smoke. I want to tell them about my boy, my darling Alastair, whom I’ve never had time to know and how it hasn’t mattered. How the rapport thing is clicking back into my life. How he’s clever and sweet. More intelligent than I am, but likes my random lessons on biology and social science. How he gets self-conscious when I point a camera at him and makes me laugh. How important that is. How I’m full of joy and soul again. I want to spill all of this on people, sprinkle it on them like a baptism of friendship, but I don’t know if I can.
It feels selfish, but his week I’ve been crying myself to sleep a little. A song will come on my playlist and suddenly I realize there’s this weight hanging upon me. It’s hard to carry, it’s shapeless and I don’t know what to do with it. I miss someone. I found a letter when going through my in-box the other day and it caught in my throat. I couldn’t believe the date on it. It was from so long ago. The last thing they’d sent me. Searching for a picture, I found I’d clicked on their name. The date was from too long ago. I miss them more than I ever thought I would. It was something I hadn’t been thinking about, something that was important but I’d been laying aside. I can’t sleep now. They’re in my head. Granted there are worse things, but this is slightly more persistent than feverdreams with murderous intent. By slightly, I mean my blood is singing with it like the note has been found to make it vibrate and it carries their name. I miss them and it’s heavy. It feels like a death in the family, but I know they could pick up the phone.
I’m young and I hate it. I’m foolish and female and it hurts, but don’t tell anyone.
It’s a secret.