What is this feeling

This feeling I’m feeling

I’m longing for a time when I did not feel the feelings I feel now

I constantly feel them and I do not have the words to put a boundary around the tendrils wildly flailing in my brain. I live the same day with the same feelings and I look for the words to make sense of it, what neurons are being activated so, surely there is a pattern to the mad fluctuations I call my emotions.

I keep getting caught in the money trap, the idea that my worth is what I’m worth, never mind the debt or my skill sets, I live.

I’m scared to put words to this emotion because it has gnawed at my insides so unpleasantly, and I am almost numb to the ringing in my chest, a sharp cry that has turned into dull scratching along the length of my back. My whole body is tight and I can’t lie down. I cry at night and trust tomorrow’s vitamins bring me some strength and relief. I fight unfettered at the unchanging circumstances I struggle to accept, denying my will to change something so very much so in my control I fear the change that would come if the words I felt dared slip from my tongue to her delicate heart.

Some sort of mixture of guilt, pity, apathy, and love, the color turns grey visualized in my mind’s eye the fumes of festering pain so long neglected within the pit of my chest I dare not test its depth nor send light to its bowels nor excavate the remains of the grief she has poured into me.

Perhaps I resent the lengths I accept her neglect in the name of love, and we both have the wrong idea. With my other partner I know it to be true in its ease, the investment of her attentiveness and the astonishing might of her infatuation against the negativity spurred from long ingested toxins.

If a zombie bit your arm, would you cut it off to save yourself? Do you love your arm despite its bite, the wave of undeath creeping through your veins into your chest? I wonder if I can talk my way out of it, if there is salvation to be had for us through hot breath, she knows I am scared of her. She knows the serpents tongue with which she lashed out at me with, and I know to keep her dancing to a gentle tune.

Is this something to be sustained? There is something exploitative happening, I feel empty when I see her and I convince myself she will fill me. I characterize myself a bloodsucker in the face of a vampire, and through tears we would hold each other as I lay dying. She cannot stop herself, and I cannot save her.

I can’t form the words to say to her, I stiffen in her presence and am in awe of her gait, and perhaps my shock leaves me too vulnerable to speak. The thought of saying how I feel to her, the flurry of possibilities that could arise, I am not prepared to engage in the emotional repair we would need to endure to return stronger in each others’ arms. I am not prepared to cut off her supply, untapped access to my time I give in grace. Or penance.

Is this shame? She has seen me victim to violence I care not to describe and left me, not a woman she said. How could I accept this and return to her, she calls me in desperation: the abuse of a late lover lost in their addiction to one another and cocaine. I pick up, I listen, I believe. I return to her what she never afforded me and she needs more, and more. Do I support her in self destruction if we do naught but be in each others’ presence? I think I am loving her by inviting her to a space of accountability, growth, patience, truth. She is busy getting fucked by strange connections. Am I jealous?

In truth, no, I couldn’t care less. She cared so much when I even hinted that I have other ongoing romantic interests that fulfill me in ways she could not imagine. I cannot say what is worse, the silence with which she ignored me or the dehumanizing insults with which she would return to me with, before expecting me to forgive and forget, which I have and do and tire of yet continue.

I attach this lack of material wealth, this desperate fight for survival that is untied to collective liberation because it is the rat race for her love, the climbing of this endless ladder that vacates the soul for the thirsty yet provides no end or refreshment along the way. Just more avarice as a drama unfolds, who can uphold the most whiteness, the most masculinity, the most ownership of this pussy. I despise these notions and pity how lost she is in these cycles. I have seen her enter and lose so much through relationship and the thought that she would lose me as well pains me deeply. And I wonder how many sleepless nights I would have not suffered had I not tolerated her. Had I remained steadfast in my principles as I had for every other, there is something I have not identified.

I think I have an attachment to others’ perception of me, this perfect love I thought we had found yet she toils not for us as I do her, and we are both aware and deny it to one another. This is how straight people get married, and why so many divorce or beat and mistreat their partners. I know this is wrong.

There is the sorrow I expect from cutting the limb poisoned, then the grief I must tackle in the reality of her absence, of the relationships I jeopardized and left behind for the sake of her wanton possession of my heart which I believe to be love. Could the relationships I had with people I truly loved and whom I felt truly loved me lasted without this forsaken attachment? How many must die before I let her go for the sake of life. For all the life I know I can have without her, to honor the life I could have had with an inkling of the wisdom I’ve gained. Is it even worth it? What a stupid question I ask in my youth, I will truly come to resent the person I was in the past in the present, and perhaps the future will hold understanding for my misgivings.