I procrastinate by distracting myself with different things to do, as if I will magically gather up enough strength to do the things I’m supposed to do, and as if the impending doom at the back of my mind isn’t draining every ounce of energy off me.
Every time the clock is ticking, I feel incredibly lonely, and in fact, I’m just helpless and my mind desperately needs somewhere else to go to, other than the task at hand and it latches onto you, this vague memory of you and my illusionary idea of you, fading into one.
I hang onto the thought of you, I always do, because you were the only experience with love I’ve ever had, because I thought it was real. It was real, wasn’t it? I’ve never had an actual person love and cherish me the way you did (albeit probably not in the best way) and then discard and abandon me the way you did (in the worst way possible). You made me wonder, time and time again, if it was real, as if I met a time-traveler, or a reptile-person, or an alien, and no one could confirm it was true (it was like their cover-up against my testimony, which was the only testimony), and no one believed my encounter, which has stayed with me as a secret I could never bring up, unless someone at the table brought it up, but not because they knew this incident of my past, but because they heard it from the news, about another person involved, as if I wasn’t the one deeply affected by this incident. And most of the time, the matter just got swept under the table, as if I wasn’t allowed to delve deep into it, because I wasn’t supposed to, because I, like everyone else, should’ve already moved on a long time ago.
And I did, I did move on and I never thought I would still be writing about you right here, right now. I’m genuinely surprised, and a little bit disgusted by this cringey ongoing passage about you, a man I don’t think I love anymore, being the me I am now. I’m not sure how I feel about you anymore, sometimes I still feel things (maybe?), sometimes I just feel numb and confused (?), sometimes I feel like I want to feel things about you but apparently I don’t, I don’t anymore. I think about you because I want to think about the future. I want to imagine what my future partner would be like, but why do I have to think about you? Why do I have to think about old love to conjure up some ideas for new love? It doesn’t have to be, right? But I guess it’s just a helpless instinct for human to resort to past experience for some new direction in order to navigate in life. I guess it’s just the way it is because old habits really die screaming.
(p.s. I’m just marveling at the fact that taylor’s songwriting has once again subconsciously affected me and made me spill out some fragments of this prose like the part about the incident and the conspired cover-up and the way old habits die screaming. I didn’t realize I was affected by these notions and metaphors until I was writing about it.
In fact, I haven’t written such a personal piece in a long time and I’m thrilled by the prospect of possibly writing more by unraveling my thoughts and in the meantime discovering myself even more. I wish I would read more and write more.
And I’ve realized once again that sharing your writing could be such a vulnerable thing to do, like opening your wounds and putting yourself in jeopardy of judgement from others, so how taylor was able to share her long-kept secrets with the world is beyond belief. I know she’s been doing this for a long time but still the amount of courage it took and the amount of trust she placed in us and the world for understanding, for understanding her as she is, as a living and learning human being.)
