He pouts. And shuffles around on my step. I don't want to go, he says. His cap is perched at an odd angle on top of his head, he's a walking ad for some beer company I've never heard of but I think he looks sad, and cute, and scruffy and handsome like he always has. But I tell him he looks homeless.
I let him hold the cat. It's interesting how we humans are so quick to say I love you to animals, but to other people, we hold back as long as we can. At least I know I do. I have almost as many problems saying it as I do hearing it. He pets the cat and the wind blows spray from the icy drizzle and it hits my face, and cuts through this coat and I am cold, and barefoot. I realize then that it's four in the morning and I'm outside in the rain in December. The things you do for the ones...well, you know.
He wants to come in. I tell him I don't trust him, but he smiles and says you don't trust yourself and he's so right. I don't trust myself. So he stands there, and I make him tell me he misses me. That's an easy thing to say. I'm not sure why we always want other people to tell us the things we already know. He should be thankful that with me, he never has to say a word. I remember that it got old. More than that. It tore me up. Why was I was so happy? and yet, I feel that absence and I'm really not sure why...because things are really good. Maybe I do need to be needed.
Somehow we're back in the same conversation we've had for months. Because its not harmless, I say. I know, he says. It's not for me either. We can't be lovers and we can't be friends, and we're not enemies, its grey area but I don't mind. It's smoke, its there in the air we breathe. And I can't get it out of my head, the way he looked at me. Like sometimes I wore him down, with honesty and he says he's being shitty and wants a place to land and I tell him to go find some bar maid to warm his bed. But it's like he's trying to see through me. I know he knocks on this door for a reason. Same old story I guess. He comes to hear what I always tell him. Like going home, like having your mum tell you how special you are, even when you get lost and become an adult and suddenly realize its not really true, you're actually sort of evil and sometimes you really suck.
And it dawns on me that we'll never be safe here. I think that's part of why I have to go. I have to leave some of this behind, like I always do. I always move somewhere else and hope I can become a different person. I've been told it doesn't work like that though. Always me, lost in a memory.
I look around, hazy window with the world ripping by. I think I'm leaving a little bit of my soul behind, in a trail like fireflies that burn bright through the dark until they snuff out. It's a buzz and you always show up and its so easy, to stop fighting sometimes and just live. Maybe its the beer but I let go. I just let my resolve fall, and maybe you like that, its good because I fight you, but you win sometimes too. I climb on your back and you walk me all the way home. And it's familiar; and its good.
Sometimes a man must awake to find really, he has no one.
It's never over.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Giu0vGllUE
