11.25.20
CIVIL.WARS
Goodnight, good-morning. Good day to disassociate.
someone asked me if it was “pleasant”.
Yes. Of course it’s pleasant.
Cumulative sleep deprivation gives you only knives to eat the world-oyster. Dissimulated and camouflaged, I’m a tourist in my body, a stranger in my mind. Witnessing myself on auto-pilot and realizing this aircraft features wit at no extra cost.
No, I’m not absent minded. In fact, it’s the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else. It’s the compartmentalization of somatic experiences, consciousness, and identity. That same compartmentalization that disallows me for taking credit for diplomacy.
See, when I turn the other cheek, it is because my tongue is tired of being held between my teeth. Air sign, sure, but a fixed sign none-the-less, and you squeezed all the air out of your lungs with the last of your drunk slurs.
You don’t get to come back from that bar. Fix yourself a drink about it.
Don’t forget I had a basinful of you. At your best, and your worst, I choose to remember both. So yeah, I resent your name on my calendar. These times have taught me the weight of impact measured in social interactions carry viral loads. I fill time slots with presence and purpose more and more.
Your unwillingness to see me outside of you, is both proof of your blindingly short self-awareness, and my penchant for believing a little too much. What use is it to bite my tongue instead of yours, after spending years talking to a sentient, self-righteous rock. Who’s the dummy in this one? The rock refusing to acknowledge the person? Or a person too dull to know rocks don’t have eyes, much less mouths or ears.
Don’t mistake this with hate. This is something…. closely resembling tolerance: a very lukewarm emotional stew of disgust, contempt, pity, and sympathy.
Tally that onto the list of things you’ll never know about me.
I will get coffee, I will smile, I will make you feel loved, missed, welcome. You will jiggle back home all pompous and priggish. I’ll come back to my secretes. The things you never read, or heard, or witnessed.
This isn’t about you.
This resentment isn’t even half about you. It’s resentment at doing things you don’t want to avoid awkward social faux-pas, it’s wanting to hold a lover among friends but knowing there’ll be scorn, it’s disillusionment, it’s apathy, it’s knowing my worth, my graces.
or maybe just sleep deprivation.