circuitous

What I want to discuss now is something I can’t discuss with you. It’s not possible for me to explain what I have to say or what I’m thinking about. Everything I’m going to share, I won’t.
At the beginning we set certain patterns. I did this, you did that. We paved those paths from our past. That’s a lot of alliteration. Paved paths past. P-fooey.
We were who we wanted to be and became who we are while we lost ourselves.
If we started with a + b = c and ended with a + b = zed, what do we do? Will replacing a or b bring back c? Do we need c? Certainly zed is out of the question. For me zedzeronothingnone, I will not tolerate zed. Will you?
How childish and spoiled. Me. Without proper attention I wander and find paths and forests and dark caves with dripping stalactites and waiting stalagmites.
Need. Want. Need. Need. Need. The edge.
The storm smashes everything without touching me or you or us. We dissolve slowly. Crawling and begging and scraping my knees, searching.
Lay that stone there, and that stone there. They’ll lock tight, like the arch’s keystone. We have that. That. We promised and we have that. Family.
The moss is growing on the fallen tree and underneath that moist rotting wood turns to soil. Rich. The smell of cool, the smell of coolness and water and life. I love to grab a handful of the crumbling soil earth wood, let the bugs scatter, then pulverize it to powder. Moist and shallow, only specks left on my fingers. Dust.
I can’t go on like this.
Of course I can. Go on like this. I do. I will. Am. Are. Will. Willing.
Impatience was a word I chose in “choose four words to describe yourself.” Impatient. Passionate. Loving. Strong. Me, in four words.
Starring on the main stage, all lights are on me. Suddenly it’s dark. Silent.
Recently I read some writing by a crazy person. Perhaps his voice has seeped in. When I read people too long I start sounding like them. I sounded like a different him over there, and sometimes I sound like that him over here. Do I sound like her? Do I take on her voice? Sometimes. Those voices are not so distinct, so catching or fetching or compelling. Perhaps another reading of The Yellow Wallpaper has come due.
What I want to say, I can not say. I’ve said it again and again. Over and again. The words come out over here and over there and sometimes I hear them but usually I don’t. I’m saying them but I don’t want to hear. I’m not avoiding properly sufficiently the verb “to be,” though that was one of the greatest writing advice bits I’ve ever received. To be is a killer. Stories and thoughts and language all suffer when to be smatters it all like bird shit on the windshield.
But I believe we can have everything. It all. We can have it all. Can. Can. Can.
And the cost? Getting it all giving it all means losing it all.
No.
When he stops shining that light on me and the darkness strands me with the truth and there’s nothing I can do to hide, that’s when Something Else Happens.
Inside the girl is crying, why did you leave me? Why did you go? How could you be here and be here and be here and lavish me with all this attention and then disappear and pull away and leave me leave me leave me?
Of course, the girl is wrong. Wrong or right makes no difference to the girl. The girl only wants you back.
You aren’t gone, you haven’t left. He did. He left. He left and no one cared and no one helped and all I wanted was to feel so special again.
And that’s why therapists have couches.