Occasionally something will spark up in me a deep nostalgia for a swath of the past I mostly don’t notice the lack of, and I’ll want to hold it, keep it, or relive it so badly, but it slips through my fingers and out of my mind.
I like who I am today, overall. Wiser, more stable, more deeply satisfied in so many ways. The edges have smoothed off of me, more and more, like a stone in the sea. I am so much more at peace within myself.
But, this little whisper of the past, I can try to describe it:
It’s dark, candlelit. It’s a little drunk, often. It’s constantly at war with itself, restless, discontent, seated in the undisciplined drama and impulsivity young people mistake for romance. The feelings - like the alcohol in the bloodstream, are sadomasochistic, and take themselves too seriously. There is biting and being bitten, and dissociating. There’s a faint smell of vanilla, under the whiskey and sweet vermouth, and smoke from a wick lately extinguished. It’s a little too cold outside. The people around are too self impressed, and don’t really notice one another because they’re too busy trying to be impressive.
The pretty words people say matter more than their substance. In this time, the value of a conversation is measured in its likeness to a chess battle, an exchange of wits like a duel. It’s terribly sexy, but not very satisfying, or climactic. The sex, much like the banter, was mostly a power play rather than an exercise is relaxed pleasure. The best interactions were always the momentarily raised eyebrows exchanged between locked gazes across the top of someone else’s conversational front. Things were desirable when they were illegal, not allowed, or thought to be dangerous. Everyone played at being dangerous in order to be desirable, while mostly not being much more than selfish or mean. Absolutely everything was pretension, of the most fashionable type.
Look, it wasn’t healthy, it wasn’t good, I’m pretty sure it was cowardly and the entire scene was alcoholic, but some of the banter, the fashion, the seduction, I think I could invite back into my life a little bit. The casual and electrifying edge that comes with bitingly competitive, desperately vital, hungry interactions with the world. It was engaging, recreationally stressful, kept me absorbed with mistaking little things for important ones.
