Happy birthday, to me. Nearly a month later, to be sure, but happy birthday all the same. You're thirty now. It's not really any different from any of your twenty=something birthdays. Why today? You have to admit, it's remarkable, hallmarkable even, if we dare go there, for that it's been, oh, *counts on fingers* seven, maybe eight years? since that first, wretched moment where you said the irrevocable yes, taking it back even before taking the breath to say yes, saying 'oh no' aloud in the moment, destroying it as kali in the same moment changing the moment. The rest? All denouement. You knew how it would end, somehow. You got out of it, got away with it again. Whether you intended it to play out as a bad soap, because you never watched any, followed any, lived any, and had only a vague idea of how the drama arc worked, or you were just emotionally lazy, is besides the point. Then and now, seven years is and was a long time. Not that there haven't been other offers, and you're better off, here a couple days away from being evicted, dating a guy who is at once better than and less emotionally available than anyone else, who can rip you apart inside more than twice a day with your mutual routine of overly casual farewells, whom you can't read, you've never been able to read, unknowingly undermining your faith in yourself to instantly read someone in the instant of meeting and hold steadfast in that gleaning for however long you know that person, not knowing where you stand, what and how he thinks of you, if he thinks of you, and nearly forcing yourself to be fine with it. All you've ever known is, are, boys who get retarded about you. You pull them in with the first fuck, and then, well, you don't know where the passionate avowals come from, the near-idolatry, your egomania eats it up, but you're certainly thrown off now. Your not-so-secret masochism loves it, and you hate-hate-hate it. You can't decide if his friends that you don't like disgust you or just make you doubt his taste, especially because his friends you do like, you love. You worry that disliking this disparity in his choices makes you too judgmental. You second-guess things. Does he really just like people for who they really are, and i'm missing something because i felt that person was a shitbag for eternity in that instance of collision, or is he overly accepting or has another agenda or fucked-up criterion/a for liking people? And you get frustrated because you don't know how to figure out which is what about whom, you still can't tell how he feels about you, incapable as you are of being a girl and demanding a 'talk,' but you always need to know where you stand in relation to everything, context is your master, and then you get angrier until you push it back over the line at the horizon, the one where you start crying because you're mad. You never cry when you're sad, even at a wake. You cry always, and then especially, because you're angry. Angry at them for fucking up and dying, leaving you here to still have to be alive and love and hate and fight and fuck up and just keep fucking trying with no hope, no goal, no reason in sight, angry because of all the things you should have told them when they were alive, that you love them and they're beautiful and wonderful and flawed and everything and nothing, and now they've said fuck it, gone on way past just your best friend moving away to get an edification and education, you don't even have anyone besides your other bystanders to ask what just happened or where they went, and no one knows. You can't tell this, the most collective of human experience, to anyone, and you can't tell them when you've got your crew out mapping the trench of despair. You're the captain; you can't show weakness; you have to fight to cover it up, and you fight, to cover it up. A witch of a bitch, while you feel you're dying inside and just want help. Your tear ducts are engorged like the little man in the boat gets, making your face lumpy, and you can't cry because you always felt you had to fight, to defend yourself, to stop the lies from hurting you. Why would she fucking say you were acting when you were crying because she cut you inside, trod your tiny, grubby soul underfoot, like nobody else ever could? How can you trust someone when, besides learning how to read, your earliest memory is of her leaving you, driving away when you so desperately tried to get your shit together and be ready, just to teach you a lesson? You don't even believe she could understand now what she did at that moment. How can you ever trust someone who can deny and believe her denial she ever hurt you and all you can remember is her hurt, and never, ever a moment of kindness, because she thought it ought to be another life lesson? And now? How can you trust anyone, someone you want and hope to see you at your most vulnerable, who doesn't let you hurt them first? And then, how can you respect them, to know that you were able to destroy them first, before they could ever hurt you? The two can't be reconciled. Not for the kind of relationship you fantasize about. It's just another thing you can't ever have, or deserve.
Again, you shut it out. It's the way shit works for you. There's other things you have to take care of. You'll never feel you've lived up to what you ought to be responsible for, what you saw coming, but you'll be damned if you don't fucking try, and you've learned to let alcohol push away the rest of what needs to be done. You'll die if you don't, and you'll die if you do. It'll just hurt less in the end, after the consequences. You've learned that too. That, and it does and doesn't matter what you do. What you do just affects how good you feel about it later. The pile never gets smaller. It just changes composition, and age has just let you ignore the stench.
