Epilogue, again

Found this a while back in my notes. It’s pretty old, and I was clearly much younger (or was I?) I found it entertaining.

…

No, I can’t talk to you. You can’t just drop in with your infrequent ‘hi’s. You and your ambition are made of sterner stuff, but I have long since realized that I am Antony’s Caesar. And I am dead. Life slips away from me for a millisecond every time you pop into my mind, and I can’t spend my days sighing. You are an herb of nostalgic regret, and I am trying to weed out the last remnants of your voice from my head, so that they don’t crop up all over my brain, and hurt me. Your ‘hi’ is fertilizer to these cut-up, miserable, bastard roots.

I can’t talk to you. But I know I shall bow down to the excited teenager in me, who shall gush and play in words and bathe in your tele-presence, and pine like a poem that doesn’t rhyme in your absence –  when you decide your work is greater than me.

I can’t talk to you. Please try to understand. I’m not as strong as you are. Change has made me feeble, and my own attempts at being a rock of strength have weakened me. I tremble like a reed, subordinate to the wind, when you come a-calling.

I can’t talk to you. You are becoming a passion. A goal without an end, in defiance of Aristotle’s confused manifesto. You are crossing over from the mental to the physical world of wants, and I cannot have the former – the latter I cannot even dream of without nettle-like desire pinching me. You are the personification of the yellow masochistic streak in me.

I can’t talk to you. Yes, I admit it. My rational construct – the ivory tower from which I make sense of the world within and without me – is crumbling. My friends these days are maudlin love songs and wet-papery poems written by unknown internet poets who shall die without a name, and the mud creatures of my mind, who haunt me in the depths of the night. The darkness used to kiss my window panes; it invades my bed these days. And my poetry. What am I supposed to do, when my finest works are created under the grace of your ghost?

I can’t talk to you. I like who I am when I talk to you. I’m sorry that I am the way I am, and the way I was. I’m sorry that I imposed my attempts at rationality on you – I should have known they would fall under the onslaught of a declined invitation to talk.

I can’t talk to you. I’m trying to justify this madness, place it in a brace of thought-out concepts. I wanted us to be unrestricted friends. But you were intuitively cleverer than me, weren’t you? Your gut knew Hume, knew that the mind is a fallacy.

I can’t talk to you. Don’t talk to me. Cut us both free, why don’t you? You have reason to hate me, so why don’t you, completely? Or would you rather torture me by throwing me occasional bones of casual affection?

I can’t talk to you. I have laundry to do and dishes to wash and food to cook and I have to socialize and clean myself and think a million things. My timetable does not have time for you. Please go away. I love you. Please. Please.

…

Hi.