I’m honestly a lil unsure about talking about this, especially on this blog but I need to get it out of my system and journaling has never done shit for me. It’s either out in the vast public or it stays inside my brain firmly locked away. Chosing the former because maybe someone relates to some degree.
Izzy has become so weirdly important to me in a very short time. I wasn’t this into guns n roses until quite recently, there were only a bunch of songs I had listened to prior to this year and I definitely never had a place in this fandon before. I’m glad to have found my way into this fandom now, though.
I think one of the admittedly embarrassingly many reasons why I’ve taken such a liking to Izzy is because of his situation with Axl, because of Izzy leaving gnr. Because I relate to that situation in some fucked up way and specifically learning more about Izzy and the choices he made for himself, to find definitive peace, made me settle on not. EVER. Going back. To the person I still love most in this world.
This isn’t a situation where I’ve been friends with someone for over a decade, not even half a decade, not even a year. The start of that relationship was as random and volatile as it could’ve possibly been.
I’m not going to deny that I brought my own fair share of toxicity into the relationship so I don’t mean to write myself as the complete victim here but to a level, I was a victim to that other person’s toxicity.
I met this person in, I think January, this year, here, on this blog. Bonding over similar interests we hit it off very fast with very little thought behind it and we quickly ended up flirting pretty heavily and as I am, I started falling for them very quickly.
It started becoming kind of an push and pull game after the first months went by flying and made me swoon even harder. It slowly started being exhausting. Conversational topics ran more or less dry, the only topics left that seemed to matter to them were their own issues in life, their own pain, their own drama and grandeur, whilst I was left to cake my misery against the wall, be ignored, talked over, pushed aside subtly and sometimes not to subtly.
I notice a lot of Axl’s traits in that person, possibly an unmedicated bipolar disorder but I don’t mean to diagnose them where there’s been no official diagnosis. But putting up with a person like that is fucking hard. And it gets even harder when this person means the world to you. Nowadays I’m not sure whether I was in love with them or just loved them. It might’ve been the latter. And I still do love them, but I’m not letting that have any meaning anymore. It’ll pass, as everything does.
I spent the last few weeks, months even, of that weird friendship we had going on fighting myself to the bone because my head kept telling me to let it the fuck go, to choose my own peace and get a fucking grip. To stop acting on my feelings like a dumb bitch and do something reasonable for once. My heart told me that there’s no way I could leave them. I was the one person who had seen their soul and their pain and their heart after all. I was the one who would lose sleep over listening to their rants and jokes and stories.
I was the one who would take their love and their anger and their delight and their sadness for months and for the longest time it was just me and them and talking to them hadn’t taken the massive efforts it seems to take me to talk to other people, despite them being difficult, despite them saying a lot of shit that has hurt me deeply. And they knew me more intimately than anyone else, too.
It felt wrong to end that, to end something so holy, even for my own sake. It felt like I was fated to stay and just take it.
Not that long ago, they decided we should take a break after weeks of filled with nothing but spite and arguments that ruined us both further.
It was their decision to step back but it’s my decision to walk away and not turn back.
In life there might be this one person that feels like a light in the darkness. There will be a soul that attaches to yours in a deeply profound way that you can’t shake off, that touches you so deeply you feel them inside your bones, you feel them in your blood like some fucked up drug. And that light will guide you into a deeper darkness than ever, before slowly dimming until everything is pitch black and you lose sight of them, you lose sight of yourself. And when that moment comes, you don’t choose that person anymore. You get a fucking grip and you choose yourself.
Because even though you’ve gotten so used to them, even though pain has become your normal, because part of you has become addicted to the pain, the toxicity… they won’t be your forever. And as soon as you leave, you’ll feel lighter, and the thought of turning back won’t even cross your mind.
You find an opening. And you fuck off. And you get really good at fucking off, that’s the thing.
When something chews at you, when something fucks you up, you fuck off.
You don’t ponder it. You don’t think about it. You turn heel. And you walk away. Or run away. Or crawl away. You get away in whatever way possible for you. But you. Get. Away.
This is a pattern in my life. I fuck off when things get too much. When shit eats at me. Because I still got myself to live with, and if I let some stupid shit eat me away, I won’t even have myself left.
So the choice should be obvious. You don’t just survive it. You leave. You live. You find joy in something that won’t turn around and stab you with your naive trust.
Because some people out there really need to get their fucking shit together before you should waste your effort on trying. Don’t drag this part out. I should’ve left earlier myself.
That friend of mine was more into guns n roses than me at the time, I subconsciously started to listen to more gnr because of them. So their existence will stick with me in the least practical of ways but it’s nice in a way. To carry a piece of someone with you who had a such huge impact on your life.
Someone you planned a life away from all the bullshit with, someone you wanted to share a house in Arizona or New Mexico with, a house with a porch, with a nice view over a vast field, a wide loft bed to be shared, to hang out on, listen to music, have one too many drinks together, do stupid shit and share a smoke. Plans that are forgotten and discarded, old photos in some dusty box now.
They’re gone, but you can find pieces of that memory in every corner you dare to look in, in every song you play, and at the end of every cigarette you smoke.
Signed off, sincerely, by a person who isn’t taking anyone’s shit anymore, and admires Izzy Stradlin for having decided the same thing, despite the bittersweet pain that has to come with it, even if you pretend that it’s easy. But pain always mellows out, so we’ll all be fine, really.
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