Standing
This isn't a love letter, but it's not a prose - it's simply a record of a late autumn walk. Wind burning into my skin, cheeks flushed, leaves crunching - a love letter from my senses to my nervous system, perhaps, but not to you.
Twenty-three years old, walking in circles around my soulless place of employment, I feel my life is over. Not as in I want to die - I desperately want to live - but more as in I don't feel as though I AM living and, worse, I can see no way in the foreseeable future to start to. It's as if I have suddenly been divested of all ability to fight back against the fates that seem to govern my life.
And, while restoring sanity, the sight of snow on not-so-distant mountaintops reminds me that, while lulling most people into emotional or mental or even physical hibernation, winter quickens my blood and awakens me with its chill in a way that no blazing summer sun ever could. It is here, outside this homogenized building right next to a housing complex composed of those ticky-tacky boxes I so dread, that I remember who I am, who I want to be, and who I think you are when I am completely honest with myself - because being honest with myself allows me also to admit that, while always absent and usually at least marginally apathetic, you are always with me in memory if never again in person, and that also shapes both who I am and who I wish I was. It is as if your influence has worked its way into my bones, slowly but surely creeping into me the way the wind does as I walk.
And I shiver, wondering momentarily why I never cover up enough against the cold, until it comes to me - it isn't that I don't feel the cold, as some think, or even that it doesn't bother me - I just would rather be bothered than desensitized the way I am inside the heated, sanitized building I work in. The icy breeze whips through hair I am still not accustomed to being long, briefly giving me a romanticized picture of myself as a lone figure of beauty standing tall against the elements instead of the small, shivering girl-woman anyone else would see if they thought I was worth a look.
You see, I never was that woman I always hoped I would be - the kind a man like you would find irresistible in her intelligence and uniqueness, the kind you would see as that image of romance standing atop a wind-whipped hill with flowing hair on a cold autumn morning. I always half imagined you might look at me and see beauty somewhere, beauty enough that you were secretly resisting the urge to take me in your arms in some private moment and hold me the way I always wanted you to, perhaps even kiss me with an ounce of feeling as though I MATTERED to you - because that's all I ever wanted, was to matter to you.
And this sinking hurt inside of me as I walk these circles in these mountains is caused in part because of the realization that I never did matter. You only heard me because I was always talking, only held me because you knew I'd never stop throwing myself at you, and never noticed when the endlessly prattling voice and ever reaching arms were gone, silenced by distance and neglect. And I know that it's not your fault - it was caused by my lack of those qualities, by the fact that I was never the woman I wished I was, only the girl you wished would go away.
But, then, what did I expect of myself? I had always hoped it was more than just that I would someday have the courage to move to somewhere cold and mountainous just because I despise heat and flat, endless land, and then proceed to take a pointless job just to admire the landscape complacently and make a wage instead of a living.
And I don't know which idea is more of an illusion - the intrepid wanderer on the hillside, the small girl huddling against the wind, or you loving either enough to notice the courage of one or the loneliness of the other.
Beauty always struck a note of melancholy in me, and it delivers as usual with the sun rising over white-capped peaks as grey clouds converge over all. Perhaps that's why summer never appealed to me - there is no melancholy in a clear blue sky with a bright sun, and to me there is no beauty without a sobriety, no splendor without taking your breath away, whether with a frigid wind or simply a single ray of pink amidst gathering clouds. Complexity mixed with simplicity. Sorrowing in the midst of delight.
But that single ray of pink is a more reddish hue now, a crimson streak in the middle of the midnight and grey sky, and I see it like I see many things in my life - sanguinary. I cannot even see a simple autumn sunrise without seeing blood, any more than I can see a tree with leaves dying in a burst of flame, or any painful event in my life. There is no touch of red that is not blood, bleeding out pain or disappointment or some other perversion of whatever I expected out of the world.
It would be easy to take this the wrong way, but please don't - I find the world an experience in duality, fulfilling as well as disappointing, shocking in its contrast of unadulterated majesty and inexcusable brutality, which is perhaps why they are inexorably intertwined in my mind, and why life seems to be an exercise in reconciling myself to sharp differences. Blood simply seems to be the connecting thread to me, and that is perhaps why I simply stand and withstand some things other people wouldn't, for love or longing or the hell of it, until I end up hunched over, bleeding tears over whatever pain has become too much to withstand.
Few people know me well enough to catch this morbid tendency, but it is readily apparent in my every gesture and word, especially dealing with you. Somewhere deep inside of me a decision was made that if I somehow just transfused you with enough of mine you would maybe experience and even understand some of my joy, pain, anger, awe, and overall overwhelmed sense of living.
Instead I ended up bleeding all over myself until you finally clucked your tongue in disappointment and stepped over my broken form, promptly forgetting it ever happened, and now here I am, white as a sheet, alone, without the strength to even withstand a simple blast of wind on a hillside. I don't know whether I should apologize to you or myself for this mess.
Because it always was an apology - even before you. As a child I buried myself in books, as an adolescent I sliced my arms to watch the blood flow and shrouded myself in mourning black, and as an adult I accepted mediocrity as a simpering refusal to do all I can because I am so very sorry that I don't seem to fit in to the world in general. Even falling in love with you was the consummate apology for my idealism - rather than love someone who noticed me, who thought I deserved to be loved, I found the person least likely to ever love me in return because somewhere along the line I learned that I should apologize for deserving, or wanting, to be loved. Somewhere I learned that it is acceptable to bleed out with no hope of anything to staunch the flow.
Sometimes I want to blame you, the same way I could blame the wind for making me cold, but that wouldn't restore my lost vigor or make me any less sorry - it would just add a bitterness to the wound that isn't needed. I've thought before that you ask too much of me, but you never expected my life's blood - in fact, never actually expected anything at all. You would challenge me without anticipating any return at all, and everything I gave was nothing you asked. Whether you are guilty of dogging me with the soft bigotry of no expectations or I am guilty of being too willing to pour myself into an unwilling channel I still stand here, still cold, still sorry, still bleeding.
It's hard to stand and watch a sunrise and be sorry for my existence, though, and I realize as the rays warm my cherry-red cheeks that I'm not so sure that I'm sorry anymore. Maybe that's why I'm standing outside watching the sun rise over snowy peaks as the wind whips through my hair instead of cringing into a coffee mug and hating my life, and maybe I am refusing to bleed anymore rather than simply giving up for lack of blood. I wish I knew for sure, but this bridge between who I am and who I want to be seems much easier to cross when I'm on a late autumn walk, and not despite your absence but, rather, because of it, and this is why this has in fact turned out to be a love letter, but to my senses, to my heart, to the autumn with its crisp promise of winter, even to the mountaintops and the crimson rays of sunlight, but not to you anymore .
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