good mourning, moratorium ii
But you can’t enjoy anything.
Can you?
Regret never allows.
In this attempt to bid farewell to one thing, you have forgotten to welcome another.
And so,
the time has come for some re-evaluation,
hasn’t it?
That regret is rearing its
snot-nosed,
ugly head
again,
isn’t it?
Then there’s this list
of all those hopes,
your dreams:
what
they
are
and
how
catastrophically
you have failed them,
because in the end it is you failing them and not the other way around.
Let’s be clear.
You’ve taken, what, four years away in refuge from this Podunk little town. Isn’t that enough? Presidents change in that much time. Lives are loved and lost in usually less.
God
needed six days
to do His whole creation
thing.
Jesus,
think what he could have done
with four fucking years.
So, it isn’t too much of a leap of faith to expect life to have kept on without you,
for things to have shifted,
altering, the ripple-effect.
Why then do you find everything more or less exactly where you left it as though this entire place has been on pause while you were gone?
The lives of people you’ve grown up with, were raised by, worked for, learned from, laughed with, loved, and hated have simply ceased to exist in your absence.
Expectation versus reality.
And, well, nothing’s changed.
Sure, a few houses have been remodeled, some individuals have less hair and some have more, some have gained weight while others lost it,
but fundamentally
nothing has changed.
The clothes you wore in high school still hang in your closet. Your backpack has not moved from the spot on the rug on which you dropped it on your last day of classes.
Parents still eye children with those same fake, nervous smiles.
Strangely, there is no dust on any of it or any of them.
You’re not the same person,
so why should
they
be?
All you keep thinking is,
“It seems like just yesterday -- ”
and each time the absurdity of this entire situation prevents you from finishing the thought.
Perhaps this regret gives way to a second chance.
Maybe everyday is a opportunity to vanquish those mistakes of old.
Are there not some things which cannot be undone or mended or completely forgotten in the wake of time?
Then there comes the realization,
an answer
in the form
of a question:
If everyone acts like they did and nothing’s really changed,
are you then,
by association now,
the same as
you once were?
Are you unchanged?
Just as quickly as this moment comes, maybe you notice some more recent scars seem to be faded more than they used to, maybe you breathe a little easier and start to feel young again, maybe the clock starts to turn back to a simpler, more innocent time,
and maybe
this whole thing is starting to
drive you crazy.
Newer memories are slipping, because everything’s been getting so fuzzy lately.
Was all you’ve done, everything you’ve become for nothing?
Was your regret misdirected?
Is it not growing up, never growing up, which you really fear?
And it’s killing you
just the same.
This regret
with a different name.
You had your chance at escape and took it, but now for some reason which you’re having an increasingly difficult time remembering,
you came back and staying means a slow and painful death sentence at your own hands.
It’s like ink in your mouth
and it stains
in all the same ways.
That woman, middle-aged and unaware of her own imprisonment, sitting across from you at a bar,
asks,
“What’s a boy to do?”
Do you rebel and leave? Abandon regret and chase some intangible dream.
Can you, even?
Since that’s the obvious choice, the one everyone expects you to make, do you then rebel and stay?
Abandon regret and learn to see the things right in front of you.
The things ahead.
Decisions, decisions.
Expectation versus reality.
The fate of your parents and their parents.
Are you mature enough to make the difficult choice, the selfless choice, the stupid choice, the utterly and completely idiotic one?
My God,
can you be any more
melodramatic?
It’s really that simple.
Start a fire and walk away.