s & m man fish said what happened was beautiful in its own way. beautiful is becoming more and more achey and i know this isn't how it always was because i distinctly remember the first time i found beautiful achey, and i remember feeling surprised i cried, it felt so strange. i thought i was malfunctioning for a second. it was just because of this black and white film. i was up by myself at something like four in the morning, hugging a pillow on the couch and watching intently i dont remember the name of the film and i hardly remember the plot i remember a sandy pathway that disappeared with the tide and an old empty cathedral alone in the sea i remember someone trying so hard to reach someone else at the cathedral and missing them at the very last second, he or she was standing on the shore looking so defeated i remember a woman dying and an old man kneeling by her bed and holding her hand and i remember her telling him that she learned to love him i was introduced to shades my first complexity, it was a little frightening i believe i fell in love with bittersweet in that moment it's funny, you'd think feeling just one thing would be stronger because of the purity than a mixture, but i guess it was like a chemical reaction, all the subtleties made it more intense than anything i'd felt before i can remember vividly every time i've felt that since then when my parents threatened to divorce each other for the first time i felt it again--the anger and self pity and sadness twisted in my gut like a knife. as terrible as it was and as badly as i wanted it to end, i couldn't help but let it grip me. the third time was when i felt betrayed by my mother because she couldn't understand me--that time the feeling seeped into my palms making them numb it settled in for permanent residence when i turned nineteen. i remember feeling like god left. i remember that i couldn't feel anything and it was driving me crazy. i couldn't feel anything until i saw blood on me-- and when i saw blood, this was the feeling that took over, and it hasn't really. it's not unique to me i know-- it's a kind of sadness around the eyes that you can recognize in so many people i've stopped indulging it but i still feel close to the people that do indulge--it's still fascinating but i've developed a life instinct then there are the others--who do different things to escape it. some are succesful, some arent, for some reason though i respond differently to the things that are supposed to help you forget as cliched as this is going to sound, the strongest time i felt it was when i lit up the numbness reached my arms and my mouth, it swam in my ribcage faster and faster closing in my bones together down into my gut, it hurt to be looked at, it hurt to be touched and it was gorgeous i believe alcohol is possibly even more intense, but i tend to lose consciousness and i never seem to be able to remember sometimes i think that's the only thing we truly have in common, a mutual delight in my pain |