The Aftermath of Carelessness

Soundtrack
I sat in my room weeks ago. I did something I rarely do. I stopped to think and asked if I could settle down. I searched my emotions and thoughts, coming up empty handed and uncertain as always.

I looked at a photo of her and I taken shortly after we'd first met. An innocent time. A time of hope. A time before all the hurt and the pain. A time so pure. This is not waxing poetic, but statement of fact. If I had forseen the hurt I would cause her....I would never have crossed the room and asked her to dance that first time. But as it was, I was drawn to her by wordless whispers and a fragile innocence that left me breathless and anxious.
As it is....in the photo my face is slightly younger, the hint of the passage of time one would know by comparing the photo to my facade now.....my mistakes and the dark passenger sitting silently behind my eyes then as now.

She became the fingers on the chords of fibers in my being.

My mind snapped to the road in front of me. A road I could barely see due to tears. She had seen tears in my eyes but I had left before breaking down and pounding on my steering wheel until my hands hurt from rage and futility.
We had said our goodbyes. This time it was for good. I knew this from the cold, concrete, leaden feeling in the core of my being. This wasn't a bluff. This wasn't an attempt. She had accepted that love could not overcome my dark passenger. Her dream of me was dead.

"Even if you could settle down....I don't know that you're someone I would want to even be with."
--

You read a lot of blogging about alpha this, beta that. You've read it here and you've likely read it elsewhere. I've written a lot about leading a life of your own volition, of thrill seeking and lust for dark nights spent in the brink. I'd be lying if I claimed that doubt doesn't creep in from time to time.

I'd be lying if I said there weren't odd mornings when my eyes open and I question the house of cards I've built as tears come to my eyes and the stone faced idol of doubt gnaws at my vagabond lifestyle making mockery and satire of my decisions. As it is, I'm left with the dampness of her tears on my shirt and the feel of her hand in mine haunting me as I drink a beer before sleeping with my ghosts.
-With Greatest Affection
--

Fitzgerald wrote it far more exquisitely than I ever could.....from The Great Gatsby:
"He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . .

. . . One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other....
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever."