Continental Drift

It's been a mean year. Transitional, persistent, cruel and tedious. The skin on my body stretches, widens, then relents. I look for answers in other bodies, trace my fingers along the outlines of other figures only to find myself yet again, a stranger, hardly content, fumbling. Contact becomes a social tactic to maintain appearances. I smile and nod because I should, it's expected. There are brief glimpses of normality that dissipate into the sun rise.

I have no one to blame. I am hardly cautious. I stumble forward into the Unknown: the black hole that occurs where optimism and expectation meet, a persistent tourist. A spectator. All my life I have been Other, running counter, opposite, at angles, at a planetary misalignment. Nothing has ever been quite right, symmetrical, stationary. My existence hinges on the foreign. I grow more perverse as I age, the extremist. My opinions gaining slow but steady momentum into a singular spectrum. My body too growing and evolving. I cycle forward into the coming era unhappy, but all the wiser. Maybe.

In my mind I am grandiose, staged, a product. But I know in person I am a hapless fool with a curated facade. Weak, impotent, particularly annoyingly worthless - a human with an unremarkable carbon footprint sucking up oxygen and water. what privilege to feel disdain for. What a burden it is to feel so alive.



It took me a while but I went. As I sat across from him, this man with his white hair and speckled skin, I felt a shift in my composure. I stuttered through my narrative and watched him as he took notes. When something was particularly interesting, he furrowed his brow and uncrossed his leg to stop me. Later, when reviewing the assessment he would trace the lines shooting up on the paper to explain the words on the scale: "anger", "resentment", "depression" and express a tinge of concern when he would lament, "we need to work on these". Three appointments deep. Not enough time to go through years of cataloging disappointment. What was the point I wondered? The diagnosis was validation. Proof.

I am addicted to the Unfortunate. I don't believe in repentance, anymore.

"We create problems to resolve them." I ponder over the text from M. It's true. Craving the turbulence of conflict, adjusting to the dynamic of pain as it cycles through and back, as it becomes the only constant. What a weary thing I've become, hardened. Old. Unwilling. Maladjusted to human life.

I wonder what it will take. What's it going to take to finally break me?